A large survey of click stats from Upworthy.com (!) found that headlines with negative words had a higher clickthrough rate than those with positive words, that sad words were more effective than angry words, and that the general rate for any kind of headline is depressingly low. - Nieman Lab
His mother was dying, and, like everyone, he couldn't travel. But, he says, "given so much external suffering, as the Dalai Lama pointed out, it didn’t seem helpful to compound that by creating even more suffering, internally, through anxiety or rage." - Los Angeles Review Of Books
Librarians argue that a lawsuit filed by four major publishers, should it succeed, "would jeopardize the future development of digital libraries nationwide. The Internet Archive is the most significant specialized library to emerge in decades." - Inside Higher Ed
It's complex - see the Indigenous villains in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, but "Increasing use of non-English languages and subtitles demonstrates both a trend toward linguistic realism in Hollywood and also broader acceptance of linguistic diversity." - Raw Story
Not to mention luck at the library: "I found Krik? Krak!, a short story collection by Edwidge Danticat, in the Ealing Road Library and fell in love. This book raised me." - The Guardian (UK)
Mid-20th-century writing guides taught that this emphatic punctuation mark should be used sparingly -- not least because advertising and marketing overuse it. But ! filled a real void when it was invented in the 1340s, and it fills one now (which is why our text messages have so many). - MSN (The Washington Post)
"Amazon hasn't shared its exact reason for the change …, but one obvious explanation is that relatively few people are buying these subscriptions and it doesn't make financial sense to continue to support them." - Nieman Lab
What I (and everyone I know) is talking about now is a seismic shift in the preparedness, study skills, attention spans, and reading comprehension of the average college student, across the board. - 3 Quarks Daily
The typical Wikipedia editor is a man (fewer than 10 per cent are women) who works in a desk job which involves being online a lot (IT workers have always been over-represented), lives in a first-world country, and who has leftish politics. In other words, the typical Wikipedia editor is a Guardian reader. - The Critic
"According to the newly launched Prison Newspaper Directory by the Prison Journalism Project, there are 24 prison-based newspapers in 12 states. At least four of the papers were launched in the last year." - Nieman Lab
Sensitivity readers can become the implied “baddy” or “goody” (depending on where you stand) in such cases, their service seen as the reason that changes have been made. However, this view assumes that sensitivity readers have more power than they actually do. - The Guardian
"Danmei is romantic fiction about men or male beings – ghosts, foxes, even a mushroom – falling in love, written almost exclusively by and for straight women." Most danmei authors use pseudonyms – for example, Mo Xiang Tong Xiu ("fragrance of ink, odour of money") – because of the Communist Party's disapproval. - The Guardian
"Seed and garden catalogues sell a magical, boozy, Jack-and-the-beanstalk promise: the coming of spring, the rapture of bloom, the fleshy, wet, watermelon-and-lemon tang of summer. ... They make strangely compelling reading, like a village mystery or the back of a cereal box." - The New Yorker
As I puttered around the conference, I thought about the fact that although books don’t have feelings, the librarians forced to remove them from the shelves definitely do. America’s librarians are under enormous pressure, and they need to blow off some steam. - The Atlantic
