It is perhaps true that blurbs are rarely the deciding factor. Most likely a potential reader has heard word of mouth recommendations, read reviews, or simply seen the cover all over the place before they even pick up the book to see the blurbs. But that’s actually the point. - Countercraft
The academic insistence on using bibliographic citation techniques developed for the printing press feels increasingly eccentric now that reading materials and essays exist in a digital (and therefore interconnected) form. The norms concerning what counts as a credible source, or a legitimate quotation or paraphrase, have been under pressure for some time. - London Review of Books
Developers have a little thing about looking at source script - "the digital equivalent of popping open the hood to see what’s underneath." - Make Zine
Well, not just sometimes. "The practice provides a valuable form of understimulation, an inoculation against an illness-inducing reality." - Los Angeles Review of Books
"Some writers worry a pandemic plot might drive away readers who want to escape our grim reality, but ignoring it might feel jarringly unrealistic. Others wonder if it’s too soon to recreate the atmosphere of a tragedy that’s still killing thousands of people every day." - The New York Times
"When you inherit someone else's cookbook, there are stories contained within it beyond the author's words; there are stained pages, dog-eared recipes and notes in the margins that point to family dinners, special occasions and, occasionally, a disastrous night thanks to an unedited recipe." - Salon
Events can overtake the imagination - and then after some decades, it's time to re-imagine experience and reaction. Basically, "this is how life is; people have ideas, but they also have deep inner doubts about those ideas." - The Guardian (UK)
Witness a folk remedy popular in the 19th century: "If the heart of a corpse contained blood, it was believed that it showed it was living off the blood and tissue of living family members—that the corpse was preying on the living." - LitHub
A wildlife tracking method, specifically: "Mike Kestemont, computational text researcher at the University of Antwerp, and his colleagues used the 'unseen species' model, which uses a statistical approach to estimate how many species are missing from a field count." - LitHub
Books reach Americans in multiple ways these days, not only as e-books. They might arrive as audio books, in serialized form through online services, and so on. Likewise, book clubs have remained and even increased their popularity. Yet no matter how we see it, the act of reading is in decline. - LitHub
"Slate had a whole editorial style that was based around provocative — some would say trolly — articles and up-is-down theses. … Everyone understood what made a pitch a Slatepitch." These days, writes Slate alum Matthew Yglesias, the site has lost its unique character — but so has most online journalism. - Slow Boring
Chinese scholars and activists developed new means of analysing and ordering the written language to equip it for, among other things, literacy campaigns, library classification systems, typewriting and computing. - Literary Review
"With more than 200 million speakers, Swahili, which originated in East Africa, is one of the world's 10 most widely spoken languages and, as Priya Sippy writes, there is a renewed push for it to become the continent's lingua franca." - BBC
The newspaper is removing words from the game's master list of possible word choices (mostly dirty words and obscure ones). Consequently, one day this week, people playing on the old Wordle page and on the Times page got different solutions to the puzzle. Social media was all abuzz. - Cnet
