“Yes — we have urged Christians, both locally and across the country, to search their libraries for books that promote sodomy, gender confusion and rebellion against God — and if found, to check them out and never return them as an act of civil disobedience." - News from the States
“Wintour ended weeks of fashion-world speculation Tuesday when she named Chloé Malle her successor as head of editorial content at Vogue. — Wintour, 75, remains chief content officer for Condé Nast and global editorial director of American Vogue and its 27 editions around the globe.” - AP
Lea Ypi: “In literature there is an experimentation with genres and with cultures and with languages, and so you get this sense of complexity. You have almost the exact opposite happening in the political realm.” - The Guardian (UK)
The truth is that "disability is not a choice, but a natural variation of existence. That disability is part of the natural world, and not an anomaly to be corrected. That incurable illnesses exist. That medicine is an inexact science.” - LitHub
"It is hard to think that the world once fondly referred to as one “of letters” does not half-deserve its dwindling readerships and shattered finances when a volume of new writing, from a writer who continues to command a vast, maybe exorbitant, level of attention, is listed at such an absurdly inflated price." - Prospect
Nine literary festivals parted ways with investment company Baillie Gifford last summer amid controversy over its involvement with fossil fuels and companies that operate in Israel, with the events industry having faced other major changes post-pandemic such as the rise of theatre-style tours. - The Bookseller
You may not recognize the term, but you use pragmatics all the time; we all do. John McWhorter explains what exactly they are, and he predicted that when AI programs started incorporating pragmatics properly, chatbots would start become convincing to human users. - The New York Times
The Deep South’s largest daily is going digital-only and will print its last hard-copy newspaper in December 31, ending a run which began in 1868. The closure comes despite the fact that the print version, with about 40,000 subscribers, is still profitable. - AP
“CliffsNotes for students who struggle to get through Brontë, Woolf, or Shakespeare seem laughably analog in the time of ChatGPT, but CliffsNotes offer genuine analysis and even scholarship. The difference between CliffsNotes and today’s computerized counterparts encapsulates the disintegration of knowledge, particularly of reading comprehension.” - Literary Hub
Unlike his contemporary and admirer T.S. Eliot, he didn’t see history as ending “with a whimper” but rather with a long, subsiding, pleasurable sigh of recollection. For Constantine Cavafy, when life and history came close to their ending, poetry began. - The New Republic
The 54-year-old paper, one of the US’s oldest alt-weeklies, made major layoffs and narrowly avoided shutting down in January. The Reader has now been acquired by Seattle-based Noisy Creek, which owns The Stranger as well as The Portland Mercury. - WTTW (Chicago)
Anthropic has reached a preliminary settlement in a class action lawsuit brought by a group of prominent authors, marking a major turn in of the most significant ongoing AI copyright lawsuits in history. - Wired
Jonathan Karp became CEO in 2020 and steered the publishing house through COVID, an antitrust case and a change in ownership. He’s moving on to launch the imprint Simon Six, which will release just six books a year. (In 2005, he started a similar imprint, Twelve — one book each month — at Hachette.) - AP
After a few Fridays, I noticed that one of the most inveterate nonreaders was not only listening, but also looking at his book, even mouthing along. - Washington Post