"The ALA ... said in 2022 it had seen the highest number of reports of calls to remove or restrict books since it began compiling data more than 20 years ago." They had to expand their annual list of most-banned titles, too. - The Guardian
With 2023 marking 400 years since the publication of Shakespeare’s First Folio, it is exciting to see how the Bard’s plays spoke to significant developments in the 16th-century mathematical world. - The Conversation
The book world is salivating. "Imagine the post-modernist-Austenite novel that would have been! Imagine the Mantel treatment being given to poor Charlotte Lucas, not-quite-good-enough-and-not-rich-enough and doomed to serve as vessel for the world’s most boring man." - LitHub
It's always the libraries. "Three national and state libraries, including the National Scientific Medical Library of Ukraine, as well as some 25 university libraries, have been severely damaged or destroyed, the most shocking statistics relate to public libraries."- The Atlantic
Just, like, wow. That is extremely cool. And: "'It’s people like you who give us hope, because you’re the next generation and you’re who’s going to be most affected it,' Blume told the teenager." - Variety
"Most of Buho's books are secondhand or donated, costing around $10 to keep them accessible. Literacy rates in the region are some of the lowest in the country, and Hernandez sees his store is something that can only help." - NPR
"I had a crisis of faith in the early days of the pandemic. I thought: books don’t do anything, maybe I should go and become a nurse? And then I realised that I was turning to poetry." - The Guardian (UK)
Tobias Wolff reflects on his unfilled notebooks and wonders, "At what point do the tools of writing go from functional objects in their own right to signifiers that give the trappings of being a writer without ever having to sit down and write?" - LitHub
It was not exactly easy, but Brian Maracle "has figured out this improbable, but linguistically extremely smart, method of delivering this radically different language to adults." - The New York Times
From July to December 2022, PEN found 1,477 cases of books being removed, up from 1,149 during the previous six months. Since the organization began tracking bans in July 2021, it has counted more than 4,000 instances of book removals. - The New York Times
Since 2000, the use of English words has shot up by 773% according to data from Italy’s Treccani dictionary. There are now around 9,000 English words printed in the latest edition. - The New European
"Ernest Moret, a French foreign rights manager with Editions La Fabrique was stopped as he attempted to enter the UK at St. Pancras train station under the pretense that he may have 'engaged in terrorist acts.' The acts? Protesting efforts by the French government to raise the retirement age." - Literary Hub
"Going forward, BuzzFeed will concentrate its news efforts in a single profitable news organization — HuffPost, which it acquired from Verizon in 2020, per (CEO Jonah) Peretti's memo. The company's flagship BuzzFeed.com site will remain in place." - Variety
Public libraries—once as popular with libertarian autodidacts as leftists—have become targets of the Republican Party. Local-library systems, and local librarians, are being vilified nationwide as peddlers of Marxism and child pornography. - The New Yorker
"The American Prison Writing Archive … plans to increase the number of (its) digitized first-person accounts to more than 10,000, start a book series, launch exhibitions and create a kind of digital umbrella linking to kindred open-access efforts like the PEN America Prison and Justice Writing program." - The New York Times
