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The Saturday Evening Post Is Now 200 Years Old — And It’s Still Here

Most of us assumed the dear old mag had shut down forever. In fact, it was only closed from 1969-71, before being relaunched as a quarterly; it's now bimonthly and was overhauled in 2013. Here's an overview of the Post's two centuries. - Columbia Journalism Review

Alice Sebold’s “Lucky” Pulled By Publisher And Film Version Canceled Following Anthony Broadwater’s Exoneration

The 1999 memoir, which launched Sebold's career, recounts the rape and beating she suffered at age 18 and Broadwater's subsequent trial and conviction for the crime. Scribner and Sebold will consider how to revise the book before re-releasing it. - Forbes

How The Arab Spring Changed Arab Literature

Tied to both the 2011 revolution and, to a lesser extent, the 1952 military coup that reshaped Egyptian society, the works reflect the ways in which those upheavals affected the imaginative lens through which people relate to themselves and each other. - LitHub

When Newspapers Die, What Happens To Their Archives?

There's no established procedure, alas, so the fate of the archives depends on the particular location and owner. (We're looking at you, News Corp.) But there are some defunct newspapers whose archives have been saved, an excellent example being Denver's Rocky Mountain News. - Tedium

Merriam-Webster’s Word Of The Year For 2021 Is Something People Have Been Fighting About

"Vaccine" was the choice because of repeated spikes in traffic: searches of the word this year are up 601% from 2020 and 1,048% over 2019. Also, because of the new mRNA vaccines, the word's definition was expanded. (The runner-up Word of the Year was "insurrection.") - CNN

Crowdfunders Raised $50 Million In Crypto To Buy A Copy Of The Constitution. Now, A Problem…

Returning that much money has been a tricky process, though. Backers have to manually request refunds, so even a week later, tens of millions of dollars are still sitting in ConstitutionDAO’s pockets. - The Verge

Duolingo’s Weird Sentences Show Us How Our Brains Work

It's all about "reward prediction errors" and "the sweet spot between rote and nonsensical." Once you've learned the Swedish for "a clean reindeer" or the Yiddish for "a zebra in a pyramid," you're less likely to forget them. - Slate

Good Thing Library Fines Are Out Of Style

A sequel to Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm was checked out in 1910 and returned, anonymously, to the Garden City library near Boise, Idaho. - NBC

NPR’s Books Rec App Changes Its Name, Keeps Its Attitude

NPR's beloved books editor Petra Mayer died a few weeks ago, and so "Books We Love" is named and created "in the spirit of Petra that we don't do best . We do the greatest books for you, whatever you want to read." - NPR

Are We Truly Ready For The First Pandemic Novels?

It's not over yet, so perhaps not. "In the hospitals, there has been something like a wartime atmosphere of disaster, but for so many of us, lockdown was a period of waiting. The challenge for writers is to create narrative out of people staying at home." - The Guardian (UK)

The Republicans Who Want To Erase LGBTQ Literature And Authors

They've got a lot in common with Chinese censors, says Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon and Far from the Tree. "I had written my book to help people, and now it was being held up as derelict and unpatriotic." - The New York Times

Man Convicted Of Raping Author Alice Sebold Is Exonerated

The author of The Lovely Bones wrote about her rape in her 1999 memoir, Lucky, which was in the process of being made into a movie - but the original producer's own research led to Anthony Broadwater's exoneration. - Los Angeles Times (AP)

One Way To Enjoy The Harry Potter Universe Again

A Harry Potter universe free of J.K. Rowling's anti-trans commentary! A universe where the fanfiction pairing "Wolfstar" is real. It's 500,000 words long, even longer than several of the books together. Perfect for the winter months, perhaps? - Slate

US Libraries See Surge In Demands To Ban Books

“Social media is amplifying local challenges and they’re going viral, but we’ve also been observing a number of organisations activating local members to go to school board meetings and challenge books. We’re seeing what appears to be a campaign to remove books.” - The Guardian

The Spanglification Of Languages

It is becoming clear that the mixed nature of Spanglish represents a general phenomenon. Among people born in and growing up in neighborhoods like Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach — where it’s common to hear Russian and Ukrainian spoken — lots of English words are mixed in. - The New York Times

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