In January of 2017, a group of skilled, acrobatic robbers began a series of daring break-ins — climbing walls, breaking through skylights and barriers, lowering themselves dozens of feet with ropes, never setting off alarms — to steal shipments of rare books worth millions from storage facilities around London. Here’s the story of how Scotland Yard, working with detectives in Germany and Italy and a pair of heroic law enforcement officials in Romania, solved the case. – Vanity Fair
Words
What If Elena Ferrante Is Really A Man?
Over the past few years, a series of stylometric analyses, employing both human brains and AI software, has found that the true identity of the famously pseudonymous and reclusive author is almost certainly that of writer Domenico Starnone. (The other prime candidate, identified by an investigative journalist in The New York Review of Books, is Starnone’s wife, translator Anita Raja.) Comparative literature scholar Elisa Sotgiu revisits those studies and how they came to their conclusion, and she considers to what extent the gender of the individual (or, perhaps, couple) behind Elena Ferrante is genuinely important. – Literary Hub
How (And When) Audiobooks Were Born
Fans have been predicting the audiobook’s ascendance ever since it became possible to record books. But when exactly was that? The audiobook’s origins can be traced back further than most people realize. – Cabinet Magazine
The Mysterious Glyphs Of Easter Island
The set of symbols known in the Rapa Nui language as rongorongo is the only indigenous system of writing known to have developed among Pacific Islanders. Only an elite minority of Rapa Nui people could ever read it, and they died out before mainland scholars could record their knowledge. What’s more, only 26 examples of rongorongo have survived. Is there any hope of ever deciphering this script? It would seem not, but the same was once said of Egyptian hieroglyphics … – Atlas Obscura
New Initiative Will Give Cash Aid To Independent Bookstores Hurt By Pandemic
“The Survive to Thrive grant program, created by Ingram Content Group chairman John Ingram, hopes to raise a total of $2 million by the end of May to support indie bookstores. The program will be administered by the Book Industry Charitable (Binc) Foundation. Initial donations include a $500,000 contribution from Ingram Charities and Ingram Content Group and significant gifts from Bookshop.org and four of the Big Five publishers.” – Publishers Weekly
The Poetry Problem — It’s All Around Us, But Poets Constantly Worry About Readers
“No wonder most people would rather read Instapoems, or listen to a spoken-word performance, than engage with traditional poetry: the barriers to entry are much lower. People who love traditional poetry might be tempted to say that such writing isn’t poetry at all. But the battle over nomenclature is a losing one. If millions of people think Rupi Kaur is a poet, comparing her to Wallace Stevens won’t convince them otherwise.” – New Criterion
Italians Bristle At The Suggestion Dante Was “Less Modern” Than Shakespeare
A German newspaper had made the claim and Italian readers and Italy’s leaders pushed back vociferously. – The Guardian
The New Yorker’s Unionized Staffers Vote To Authorize Strike
“Union workers at The New Yorker, Pitchfork and Ars Technica said Friday they had voted to authorize a strike as tensions over contract negotiations with Condé Nast, the owner of the publications, continued to escalate. … At The New Yorker, the unionized staff includes fact checkers and web producers but not staff writers, while most editors and writers at Pitchfork and Ars Technica are members.” – The New York Times
“Medium” Was A Hot New Publishing Experiment. Now It’s A Mess And Laying Off Staff
“Medium in all its complexity: a publishing platform used by the most powerful people in the world; an experiment in mixing highbrow and lowbrow in hopes a sustainable business would emerge; and a devotion to algorithmic recommendations over editorial curation that routinely caused the company confusion and embarrassment.” – The Verge
HarperCollins Buys The Trade Division Of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Narrowing Publishing’s Ownership Again
And, in this case, narrowing it to give more power to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. “The acquisition will help HarperCollins expand its catalog of backlist titles at a moment of growing consolidation in the book business. Houghton Mifflin publishes perennial sellers by well-known authors such as J.R.R. Tolkien, George Orwell, Philip Roth and Lois Lowry, as well as children’s classics and best-selling cookbooks and lifestyle guides.” – The New York Times
Scholastic Stops Distribution Of A Graphic Novel By The ‘Captain Underpants’ Author
That’s because, well, look at the image of the cover. Author Dav Pilkey said of The Adventures of Ook and Gluk, Kung Fu Cavemen From The Future, “It was brought to my attention that this book also contains harmful racial stereotypes and passively racist imagery. … I wanted to take this opportunity to publicly apologize for this. It was and is wrong and harmful to my Asian readers, friends, and family, and to all Asian people.” – The New York Times
How Will Machines Choose To Tell Stories?
Sure, Gmail offers to fill in text on your messages – but things are getting more complicated. “AI’s capacity for creativity—one of those supposedly sacrosanct human attributes—is becoming more and more of an existential sticking point as humans learn to live alongside intelligent machines.” – The Atlantic
Beverly Cleary Taught Kids Vital Life Lessons Through Ramona, The Grubby Little Pest
Ramona is messy, makes extremely normal kid mistakes, is impulsive, and always, always demands that her parents love her – not anyway, but as is. This might seem usual now, but “in 1950, when Ramona made her first appearance, they were not unremarkable; they were trailblazing. Cleary took every attribute that girls were then warned away from — bossiness, brashness, hot temper — and she tucked them all into one character. And then she made that character into an inspiration.” – Washington Post
With More Than 7000 Languages In The World, Google Translate Is Next To Useless
That is, for most of them, because Google Translate (and Bing) relies on written translations – which works well for French, Spanish, English, German, and other often-translated languages. “No such data mountain exists, however, for languages that may be widely spoken but not as prolifically translated” – languages such as Wolof, Luganda, Twi and Ewe, not to mention many indigenous languages in the Americas. Can “neural networks” be retrained to learn from smaller, and more spoken, samples? – BBC
Here Are The Winners Of This Year’s National Book Critics Circle Awards
The organization’s annual awards, which it typically gives out in the spring to works published the previous year, are unusual in that book critics, rather than authors or academics, select the winners. The awards are open to any book published in English in the United States. – The New York Times
We Need To Stop Treating Literature As Self-Improvement Projects
“We experience art as a repository of our humanity, a representation that tries to capture the meaning we seek in our lives. Treating art as a means to an end feels degrading, like reducing the worth of a service worker to the service she performs. The best self-improvement scheme I can think of is to prove ourselves better than that.” – Slate
Those Unknown Sappho Poems Discovered Back In 2014? There’s A Problem
Don’t worry: so far, there’s no evidence that they’re forgeries. But “the editors of a scholarly volume in which the circumstances of the discovery were detailed have formally retracted the chapter because the manuscript’s ‘provenance is tainted'” — which is to say, the story told to researchers by the current owner of the manuscripts of how he acquired them was evidently a lie. – The Guardian
Debates Are Roiling The Translation World — Who Gets To Translate?
Debates ensued about whether the choice of a translator should be only merit-based or whether identity should play a part. Another thread was about publisher practices and how translators are chosen. Some White translators who have spent their careers translating writers of color into other languages questioned their own pursuits. – Washington Post
How The Meanings Of Words Flip From Negative To Positive
“Today innovation is one of the most hallowed words in the contemporary lexicon. That onetime pariah term is now revered. Linguists call this process one of “semantic shift,” a significant change in a word’s meaning. Examples of such shifts are no further than Google News: cookie, cancel, gay, pod.” – The American Scholar
Literature Of Contagion: When Writers Tell Stories Of Plagues, How Do They End?
Edgar Allan Poe ended his short story with “Darkness and Decay and the Red Death [holding] illimitable dominion over all.” Others, from Daniel Defoe to Mary Shelley to Jack London, leave only a few survivors behind. José Saramago and Albert Camus handle things more subtly but perhaps more painfully. Jill Lepore gives us a look. – The New Yorker
Screens Versus Pages – How We Read Depends On What We Read On
Because we use screens for social purposes and for amusement, we all — adults and children — get used to absorbing online material, much of which was designed to be read quickly and casually, without much effort. And then we tend to use that same approach to on-screen reading with harder material that we need to learn from, to slow down with, to absorb more carefully. A result can be that we don’t give that material the right kind of attention. – The New York Times
Science Fiction Was Depicting Climate Change More Than A Century Ago
“For a few decades in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, authors from across ideologies and genres published stories that today would be called ‘cli-fi,’ or climate fiction.” Among those authors were no less than Mark Twain and Jules Verne (who wrote about industrialists intentionally heating the Arctic in order to mine coal). – JSTOR Daily
Paris Review Names New Editor (The Second Emily In A Row)
The magazine, co-founded and long run by the late George Plimpton, “has a new editor, only the sixth since being founded in 1953, but its third since 2017. Emily Stokes, currently a senior editor at The New Yorker, succeeds Emily Nemens, who announced earlier this month that she was leaving to work on a new book.” – AP
Blurb-Off
Book blurbs are ridiculous. And competitive, as it turns out. – The New Yorker
Scavenging For A Library From The Ruins Amidst Syria’s Civil War
“In a town under siege from Assad’s regime, a small group of revolutionaries found a new mission: to build a library from books rescued from the rubble. For those stranded in the city, books offered an imaginative escape from the horrors of war.” – The Guardian