"A parent of a student at Bob Graham Education Center in Miami Lakes objected to the poem, for which they erroneously listed Oprah Winfrey as the author/publisher. … It 'is not educational and have (sic) indirectly hate messages,' the complaint said, adding that the poem would 'cause confusion and indoctrinate students.'" - CNN
"(The novel) imagines the 'first clinic of the past,' in which Alzheimer's patients can visit different time periods of their lives on different floors." As The Guardian's reviewer put it, "this funny yet frightening Bulgarian novel explores the weaponisation of nostalgia." - NPR
In what Maggie Tokuda-Hall described as a “Faustian bargain,” Scholastic made the offer contingent on removing mentions of the Japanese American incarceration that tied that history to a broader past during this “politically sensitive” moment. They also asked her to remove the word “racism.” - Seattle Times
"BBC Culture polled 177 books experts from 56 countries in order to find the greatest children's books ever. From Where the Wild Things Are to Haroun and the Sea of Stories, here's the top 100." - BBC
“Complexity neither disguised the shortcomings of poor essays, nor enhanced the appeal of high-quality essays.” In other words, George Orwell got it right: “Never use a long word where a short one will do.” - Big Think
"The U.S. Department of Education has found that a suburban Atlanta school district's decision to remove some books from its libraries may have created a hostile environment that violated federal laws against race and sex discrimination." - AP
Some of the laws impose severe penalties on librarians, who until now were exempted in almost every state from prosecution over obscene material — a carve-out meant to permit accurate lessons in topics such as sex education. - Washington Post
"One glance at Filipino social media and you will find a recurrent set of waves, twists and inverted heart shapes. They’re more than just symbols — they’re part of the 17-character writing system called Baybayin, which is making a comeback after hundreds of years." - NBC News
"Wanting to write ... made me unintelligible to my mother. I couldn’t explain how I would survive on a career in words, and she couldn’t fathom why I would squander the chance at prosperity my parents had contorted to give me." - The Atlantic
What I find most fascinating about the lawsuit, though, is the glimpse it offers into how national and state-level political dynamics empower the most fanatical members of a community to impose their will on everyone else. - The New York Times
Working with ChatGPT, an author inputs a prompt request and can choose from an infinite number of outputs. If you don’t like a paragraph ChatGPT wrote, you can edit your prompt and ask it for another one. These tools can guide anything from character names to plot points. - Wired
Joined by free-speech advocacy group PEN America and several authors and parents, Penguin Random House filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday against the Escambia County School District and its school board, alleging they were violating the 1st Amendment by scrubbing library shelves of books based on a political or ideological disagreement. - Los Angeles Times
To demonstrate how this improves the AI's performance, Anthropic loaded the entire text of The Great Gatsby (72,000 tokens) with one line modified from the original. The AI was tasked with spotting the difference, which it did in just 22 seconds, the company claimed in a press release. - Interesting Engineering
"Stories online will no longer include a traditional dateline that tells where a story was reported from. Instead, certain stories will have 'enhanced bylines' that tells readers more about how journalists did the reporting." - Nieman Lab
"PEN America, Penguin Random House, a group of authors, and a group of parents have filed a federal lawsuit against a Florida school district over the 'unconstitutional' removal of books from school libraries." - Publishers Weekly
