Stephen Marche: "The love story below is my attempt to develop an idealized love story out of all the love stories that I have admired. ... "Autotuned Love Story" certainly isn't mine. ... It's the love story of the machines interacting with all the love stories I have loved." - Literary Hub
More than half a dozen libraries and drag performers, from Saint John to Victoria, reported being inundated online and over the phone by homophobic slurs and, in some cases, threats of violence. - CBC
The English language evolves at such a pace that, for the OED lexicographers, the goalposts aren’t so much shifting as sprinting away from them. - New Statesman
Novelist Taymour Soomro: "It was important to me to write about queerness in Pakistan for so many reasons, including making visible experiences like my own in Pakistan, and challenging reductive narratives ... about Muslim barbarism and homophobia." - The Guardian (UK)
"The questions that make these biographies sing—what makes this group of people actually interesting, not just noteworthy? Why, of all the relationships in a life, were these so particularly influential?—take real searching to answer." - The Atlantic
How does a writer like Bette Howland fall into obscurity - and then get rediscovered? Thank the sale rack at Housing Works Bookstore in Brooklyn, for the latter part, anyway. As for the obscurity part? Surprise: Single motherhood isn't great for writers. - Washington Post
States like Kentucky, with conservative legislatures, are taking control over what books can be in public libraries as well. Doesn't sound fascist at all, nope. - NPR
The many languages spoken here, though mostly belonging to the Indo-European family, still more narrowly to the Dardic sub-family within the Indo-Aryan group, are so different from each other that the people of one linguistic community have to rely on a third language. - Aeon
In 1789, Erasmus Darwin — physician, pathologist, abolitionist, and botanist as well as poet — published a strange set of cantos under the title The Loves of the Plants, using mythical creatures and deities of antiquity to make then-new scientific concepts more accessible. And in one of his footnotes ... - Literary Hub
"(As) with the robust launch of online local newsrooms in the last two years, some alts are finding new ground in old traditions. Here are three doing similar things in very different ways." - Poynter
"The USP of the Whitbreads, which morphed into the Costas 14 years before they were abruptly scrapped this month, was that they didn't buy into ... literary snobbery. For 50 years, they spread a wide and egalitarian net across different genres." - The Guardian
The honoree is historian George Chauncey, best known for the multi-award-winning Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, now considered a landmark in its field. Chauncey was also a key figure in the long struggle for marriage equality. - The New York Times
"I can’t get a fraction of that today. You can say, Well, we choked the golden goose, but all those films made money. Then Hollywood changed. I don’t understand that world. Nobody understands that world. There’s no rules. - The New York Times
We Googled the first line, expecting it to be an existing Philip Larkin poem, but we couldn’t find it on the Internet. It was an original work, composed by the A.I. in less time than it takes a man to sneeze. - The New Yorker
