At heart, they just expose our funny, brilliant, quirky humanness. We love riddles because they show how we’re “rationalization machines. We are great at finding patterns where none exist.” And if we don’t find the pattern? That’s our humanness, too. - Washington Post
Suddenly, Kobabe was at the center of a nationwide battle over which books belong in schools — and who gets to make that decision. The debate, raging in school board meetings and town halls, is dividing communities around the country and pushing libraries to the front lines of a simmering culture war. - The New York Times
"One of the things that always frightens me about DVD box sets is when it says how many minutes there are to watch. It’s a good thing our shelves don’t have that functionality, because it would add up to more than our lifetimes." - The Observer (UK)
The tool also "spits out a bunch of fun facts, like: Bisbee, AZ, is home to the highest percentage of mystery novels. Bloomington, IN, is apparently where the romance happens." - LitHub
The beloved children's (and adult) author on all kinds of books, and the challenges of rereading the Enid Blyton books he loved as a child. "Whatever I loved isn’t there when I go back as an adult." - The Guardian (UK)
And vice versa. Yet it's not so common. "The best science fiction and fantasy and the best historical fiction, it’s not just a period costume drama, it’s also something that resonates with the modern world—with our world—and comments on it somehow." - Wired
Tannenbaum’s GoFundMe didn’t just meet its target – staggeringly, it actually doubled its $60,000 goal in just two days of operations, instantly changing The Bookstore from a business that had long operated in the red to one that was flush with cash reserves. - The Guardian
That's what the University of Leeds is calling its project to digitize its huge collection of field recordings of vernacular speech in regional England in the 1950s and '60s — and to update that collection with the way people speak around the country today. - The Guardian
Mayank Kejriwal and fellow researcher Akarsh Nagaraj used data from 3,000 books that are part of the Gutenberg Project, across genres including adventure, science fiction, mystery and romance. - The Guardian
Oh, it goes way beyond Wordle (which, luckily, only lets us play once a day) and crosswords. A.J. Jacobs looks at the New York Times Spelling Bee, anagrams, "flats," and the particular psycho-chemical buttons they press. - Literary Hub
"Leonard Goodman, a Chicago attorney and member of the billionaire Crown family, ... had demanded more representation on a nonprofit board set up to take over the publication. The demand was likely to kill plans for the nonprofit's takeover of the money-losing Reader." - Chicago Sun-Times
"What is happening in this country in terms of banning books in schools is unparalleled in its frequency, intensity, and success," said Jonathan Friedman, director of PEN America's Free Expression and Education program and lead author of the report. - Business Insider
"The Surrendered Wife's popularity highlights how an insular religious group with carefully preserved boundaries can in fact be quite porous to outside influence — particularly to views popular on the American Christian right. ... (Because) the idea of female surrender as a virtue is a foreign import." - MSN (The Atlantic)
In the prewar period, university professors were apt to make vague aesthetic judgments about a book’s “beauty” or “soul” before lobbing in a few comments about the author’s mother or the publishing practices of the time. Richards’s students, by contrast, were asked to exclude all such background blather. - The Guardian
Natural history can certainly accommodate a profusion of perspectives – indeed, it will always benefit from greater diversity in how we look and think. But I wonder if there are unhelpful dichotomies in play, where we pit ‘knowledge’ against lived experience, against emotional engagement... - Aeon
