The digital froth of the 2010s—BuzzFeed, Upworthy, the ceaseless click-baiting and SEO-hunting—could be understood as a Bronze Age, and we are now after the fall, in a new era we can’t quite name yet. Literary prestige, for one, has never meant less. - Ross Elliot Barkan
Definitions, professional and amateur, are a click away, and most people don’t care or can’t tell whether what pops up in a search is expert research, crowdsourced jottings, scraped data, or zombie websites. - The Atlantic
In 2020, the magazine published a story by freelance journalist Ruth Shalit Barrett about wealthy parents pushing their children into niche sports to gain an edge in college admissions. After a media columnist spotted some factual issues, The Atlantic retracted the story entirely, and Barrett sued for defamation and reputational damage. - TheWrap (Yahoo!)
“The Library (of Congress) announced Monday that the 74-year-old Sze had been appointed to a one-year term, starting this fall. The author of 12 poetry collections and recipient last year of a lifetime achievement award from the library, he succeeds Ada Limón, who had served for three years.” - AP
For one thing, “the real challenge isn’t technology itself, but how technology has evolved to actively compete with the very cognitive processes that reading requires.” - LitHub
"Dictionary content is expensive. … The cost of lexicographers—people are expensive, and the output is low. It is very difficult to justify that just for the sake of completism. You will never have enough staff to keep up. People are too productive in the creation of language.” - The Atlantic
“After 50 years of publishing, Munsch told me, his ability to come up with new stories seems to have vanished. ... Plots used to just appear to him, all the time and almost fully formed, as if they were limitless. But now they don’t.” - The New York Times
Or actually: “Books about books, or bookstores, or people who work in bookstores, or in publishing, or in libraries, or anything book-adjacent.” - LitHub
Many more now have signed deals with the AI companies which commonly include the use of their content as reference points for user queries in tools like ChatGPT (with citation back to their websites currently promised) as well as giving them the use of the tech to build their own products. - Press Gazette
For example, between April and July, The New Yorker published over a dozen such pieces: essays about generative AI and the dangers it poses to literacy, education, and human cognition. Each had a searching, plaintive headline; each asks what AI-generated writing can or can’t do and how human writers can or can’t respond. - N+1
The researchers’ model allows for the generation of synthetic data to accurately model key degradation processes and overcome the scarcity of information contained in the cultural object. It also yields better results than traditional models, based on multispectral images, while enabling research with conventional digital images. - El Pais
Perhaps the biggest takeaway from this whole snafu—which alas seems likelier to be the beginning of a trend, rather than the end of one—is how a matrix of concerned readers, workers, fellow indies, and union reps can apply constructive pressure to a large organization and so keep them accountable to community values. - LitHub
Sometimes called “the Devil’s Bible,” it’s 3-feet-by-1⅔-feet and 165 pounds and contains the complete Bible, writings by historian Flavius Josephus and theologian Isidore of Seville, Cosmas of Prague’s history of Bohemia, a medical textbook, and lists of incantations and spells. And there are lots of freaky stories told about it. - Artnet
Six of the greatest works of modern literature were repeatedly and humiliatingly rejected by publishers and their distinguished advisors, who were blind to their merits. - The Critic
