"Chain box stores were big businesses, sure, but they were also a crucial third space for casual hangouts and serendipitous run-ins that metro suburbs, smaller cities and rural places often lack." - Bloomberg CityLab
"On March 25, word started to spread on Twitter that a multitude of LGBTQ books — many of them by debut authors — were inexplicably missing from Target's website, despite a number of the titles having previously been listed for pre-order." - Publishers Weekly
It took a full-blown Twitter campaign to get the author's name, and the museum's name, and all of the museum's content, unbanned. You probably know what the problem was. - LitHub
Yes, Austen lovers, that shirt. "Jane Austen Undressed focuses largely on the undergarments that Austen heroines would have worn under their Regency dresses, but one of the main draws is bound to be the Firth shirt." Um, indeed. - The Guardian (UK)
Ali Smith: Take note of what happened when Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf's friendship addressed war - it changed everything for Woolf, her novel Jacob's Room, and her future. - The Guardian (UK)
A report by Dutch historians refuted The Betrayal of Anne Frank. "The book had claimed to identify the informant who alerted Nazi police to the Frank family’s hiding place, but the report’s authors said the conclusions were based on 'faulty assumptions' and 'careless use of sources.'" - The New York Times
"When I ask [legendary Odesa journalist Yevgeny Golubovsky how I can help, he replies, 'Ah, I need nothing, and when I ask again what I can do, he sends a quick message back: 'Putins come and go. We are putting together a literary magazine. Send us poems.'" - The Paris Review
"Several weeks in, it's clear many overestimated the Russian army's will and capability to fight and the Ukrainian army's will to resist an opponent superior in number, equipment and positioning." Two professors attribute this to the Russian and Ukrainian mindsets, as manifested in the countries' fairy tales. - The Conversation
Nancy Allen: "I write legal thrillers. Most of the books I've written center around a woman whose life or safety is in jeopardy, generally inspired by actual crimes committed in the Ozarks, where I live. And the reason I write these stories is simple. Women are in peril here." - CrimeReads
Think of all the speeches peppered with statements attributed to revered predecessors. Listeners are supposed to infer that the speaker has drawn upon a vast reservoir of material gathered from a lifetime of reading. But no: it was probably a quote pulled from such a compilation after two or three minutes of looking. - Los Angeles Review of Books
Whenever I see people in old movies say “Swell!” or the like, I always wonder what other kinds of things they said when we weren’t listening. There’s no reason to think they weren’t as linguistically fun as we are now. - The New York Times
Maia Kobabe: "I'm learning that a book being challenged or banned does not hurt the book and does not hurt the author. The book is selling better than ever. ... A book challenge is like a community attacking itself. The people who are hurt in a challenge are the marginalized readers." - Slate
Amanda Oliver, author of Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library, recounts some incidents from her years working in the DC library system, cautioning against the romanticization of public libraries and their equalizing role in society. - Electric Literature
In theory, the conference was still happening, but it wasn’t clear whether anyone would be in attendance, or what they’d be doing while there. Who, I wondered, risks death for the conference of a dying profession? - Washington Post
