So many things about the magazine — in both content and design — are recognizable today that it's easy to forget that, when Harold Ross was trying to launch The New Yorker in the 1920s, none of it was there. - Gothamist
Envisioned as a 21st-century online successor to the United States' first anti-slavery newspaper, The Emancipator will operate as a not-for-profit and will focus initially on commentary, with plans to add audio-video, longform nonfiction, data visualization, and history annotation. - Nieman Lab
It was only with the emergence of an artistic movement, beginning around the mid-18th century, that probable language came to be regarded less as the building blocks of composition and more as the too-familiar, the outworn, the boring. - Aeon
The oldest surviving collection of riddles assembled in English is in the Exeter Book, copied around the turn of the first millennium CE. They were part of an extended English tradition of aenigmae and trick questions in both Anglo-Saxon and Latin. - The New York Times
Thorsten A. Integrity (né Shayne Bushfield) of the trivia site LearnedLeague explains what he has to consider: Is this too hard? Too easy? Is it interesting? Is it accurate? Are there other ways to answer this question? Which part should be the question and which the answer? - Slate
Ever since the prize was first mooted in the early 1990s, many have wondered whether the prize is necessary, patronising, or even fair. A common position amongst its detractors is that the prize is sexist and discriminatory. - The Conversation
"A large community of TikTok users have carved out a corner called 'BookTok'. BookTok influencers are predominantly teenagers and young women, … (and) when a book catches on among users (a common hashtag on BookTok videos is #TikTokMadeMeReadIt), the real-world results can be impressive." - Publishers Weekly
The phenomenon of self-publishing is often linked to online book production methods. However, there is a much richer history of self-publishing that goes further back than its digital counterpart. - The Conversation
A reborn FWP might enable us to confront five of the more pressing problems afflicting America today, a quintet we might think of as The Five Nobodies. - USA Today
Joseph Moncure March's The Wild Party "doesn't seem very far from our collective desire, in 2021, to lose ourselves in a throng of sympathetic strangers — but it's also in touch with the undertow that makes that impossible." - T — The New York Times Style Magazine
Poet Ghulam Mohammad Bhat: "In the last 30 years I have never seen this kind of suppression. ... There is silence everywhere, as if the silence is the best cure for our present crisis." - The New York Times
Writers flirting with the Substack idea would be better seen in footballing terms: they are probably going out on loan from their existing publishers, not transferring for good. - The Guardian
"Start with Pride And Prejudice and Dickens's A Tale Of Two Cities. Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. Think about Hardy. Think about Trollope. "On January 4 you will tell me what you have read and I will test you on it." - BBC
