The occasion is a moment to ask how a novel that mourns addiction and venerates humility and patience became a glib cultural punch line, routinely subjected to the word “performative” in its most damning sense. - The New Yorker
Greg Ketter became a social media phenomenon over the weekend, when MS Now aired a video of him pacing half a block away from where Alex J. Pretti had been murdered by agents an hour earlier, cursing the 50-100 armed ICE agents keeping the crowd back. - Publishers Weekly
“Constellations – also jokingly dubbed ‘Not Writers’ Week’ – is being put on by “a loose coalition” of writers and publishers and the support of not-for-profit Writers SA, with dozens of free events to be staged from 28 February to 5 March.” - The Guardian
Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville, published in 1851. Let’s consider it. Is there another book at once so good and so bad, so thrilling and so boring, so authentic to the currents of the soul and so hideously contrived, so stunningly patrolled by dreamlike visions and so crushed by its own intellectual baggage? - The Atlantic
“Defendants in Crookshanks v. Elizabeth (Colo.) School District, who had appealed to the 10th Circuit after a federal judge ordered the district to restore 19 censored books, motioned to dismiss their own appeal on January 20. A three-judge panel had been scheduled to hear oral argument on January 23.” - Publishers Weekly
Within about a year, according to the filings, the company had spent tens of millions of dollars to acquire and slice the spines off millions of books, before scanning their pages to feed more knowledge into the AI models behind products such as its popular chatbot Claude. - Washington Post
Says Nick Papps, founding editor-in-chief of the Murdoch tabloid California Post, “We'll have the wit of the New York Post headlines, which is really important to it. … We want to be disruptors. We want to challenge status quos. We want to shake things up.” - TheWrap (MSN)
“Across America, publishers, libraries, and literary organizations are building a formidable litigation slate to ensure the availability of books in public and school libraries.” - Publishers Weekly
Lydia Kiesling reflects on how book coverage devolved into bloated, AI-adjacent list culture, tracing her own path through The Millions and the broader media collapse. - The Baffler
The source material is a guide from WikiProject AI Cleanup, a group of Wikipedia editors who have been hunting AI-generated articles since late 2023. - Ars Technica
Perhaps the greatest compliment to Wikipedia at 25 years old is the fact that, if the fascists can’t buy it, then they’re going to try to kill it. - Anil Dash
Writing by hand “allows the cognition of what we're working with to actually move through the visual processes, move through the physical processes of handwriting, and it allows us to have that time to think about the content that we're writing about.” - ABC (Australia)
At least according to Ali Smith, whose 2024 book Gliff is such a good, terrifying book about the surveillance state that you’ll think it’s nonfiction. (Her comfort read, should anyone be looking for such a thing for some reason, is Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book.) - The Guardian (UK)
“While performing the role of the straight heartthrob in public, Byron was concealing his more complex history—no matter the sacrifice to his feelings.” - Paris Review
