The two women lived openly as a same-sex couple from 1807 to 1851 in Weybridge, VT, where they ran a successful tailoring business. Despite some local misgivings, they were largely accepted. Neighborhood children apprenticed with them, and Sylvia served as a deacon in the local Congregational Church. - ArtsFuse
"These books may have inspired more than their share of hot takes ... but the conversations around them allow us to question where we are and what our feminist ideals have become … (now that) so many of the problems that felt like they were somehow close to being solved … have become drastically worse." - Harper’s Bazaar
“The Star Tribune employs 495 people and cuts will be made across every department. The newsroom has just under 200 journalists and will decline to 175 while remaining one of the largest between the coasts. Just last year, 125 employees were laid off when the company ... closed its ... printing plant.” - The Minnesota Star Tribune
Nobody would patronize a best-seller–only shopping mall kiosk called We Bet We Have That Book You Want, even though best-sellers are most of what anyone buys. People want to walk into stores with lots of books which they have no interest in even looking at. - Republic of Letters
Membership in the ABA grew by more than 500 over the past year, to a total of 3,417 (at 3,783 locations), nearly triple what it was a decade ago and the highest level since the late 1990s. - AP News
Teaching people to read and building a world where they can do so are different problems. Throwing our phones in the lake can’t bring about that world, but designing the conditions for reading will. - The New York Times
Sarah Wynn-Williams, whose bestselling memoir, Careless People, details her years working at Facebook, was due to appear in conversation with the investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr and academic Tim Wu. Instead, Wynn-Williams sat on stage for the hour-long discussion without speaking or responding. She was unable even to nod or shake her head. - The Gaurdian
It’s not about the phones. Instead, as a society, we have to remove structural barriers - and build new libraries. "A democracy needs its people to read, and it is society’s job to make that possible.” - The New York Times
“You take yourself with you, right? The image becomes mirrored: Who you were and what you took from a book the first time is reflected in who you are and what you take from the book now.” - Reactor Mag
Lawrence Ferlinghetti explained, years ago, that “‘Howl’ knocked the sides out of things, just the way rock music in the '60s knocked the sides out of the old music world.” - NPR
“Williams is rarely spotted without a book in his hand. He’s now name-checked multiple Joan Didion titles in interviews, and was once photographed next to a copy of Knausgaard’s My Struggle. His personal motto comes from Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables.” And his selections sell very well. - LitHub
“Under the totalitarian Age-Appropriate Materials Act — a Tennessee law passed in 2022 that, along with an addendum passed two years later, has permitted the removal of hundreds of books from libraries throughout the state — the Knox County school district recently ordered the removal of Alex Haley’s novel.” - Salon
“If you work on a book for twenty years—whatever we mean by work—people really act like you’re very neurotic. Like there’s something wrong with you, or you’re doing something wrong—and it’s easy to internalize that.” - Paris Review
Sure, there are some other languages whose speakers have spelling contests, but there are plenty — Italian, Finnish, Malay, etc. — whose words are spelled exactly as they’re pronounced. But English? In what other language could “ough” be pronounced eight different ways, depending on the word? - The New York Times Magazine
The book-publishing industry had already been wrestling with the prospect of a flood of AI-authored texts in the fiction market, and now the Rosenbaum scandal was showing the way AI could blow a hole in the nonfiction sector, too. - New York Magazine
