"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
A controversy over Spain's entry to this year's Eurovision Song Contest — the Spanish jurors rejected the audience's and international jurors' choice, which was in Galician, in favor of a song in Castilian Spanish — is a reminder that there are plenty of legitimate languages without national flags and borders. - The Economist
Niamh Campbell: "In all the best erotic writing I've read – not a lot really, but the most accurate and enviably sexy examples have stayed with me – a certain pleasant darkness is revealed. Not the darkness of ordinary misogyny, but of idiot pleasure or exquisite tenderness." - The Guardian
"Navigating the fast-changing digital media landscape has left Slate struggling to define its identity. … Slate once stood out as a home for contrarian takes and intellectual debate, but that distinction has faded in recent years. Questions about its mission have increased after several high-level departures." - The New York Times
If you're tired of the same old lists, the editors of The Rumpus will definitely surprise you with an eclectic list ranging from memoir to mystery to essay to short story that can go far beyond February's short confines. - The Rumpus
Possibly! "This clear-out of the Little Queer Library comes at a time when Waltham Public Schools have placed two LGBTQ books under review, Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe and This Book is Gay by Juno Dawson." The LGL owners have vowed to restock. - LitHub
