If it passes, the county will move to waive fines and fees for overdue books and other materials for its system, which serves 3.4 million residents in unincorporated L.A. County and 49 incorporated cities. - Los Angeles Times
It's not just that they came from a culture more like ours than most medieval societies (no hereditary aristocracy, a genuine parliament). It's that, "from a modern perspective, this literary universe combines the best of epic poetry with the best of soap opera." - Literary Hub
The magazine has secured rights deals with film and TV production companies for more than 20 pieces from its archives so far — a sideline expected to earn $1 million this year. - Business Insider
From TikTok to Spotify to rap videos to new apps, youth from Mexico to Ecuador to Australia are coming up with new ways to express themselves in and spread the endangered tongues of their ancestors. - Global Voices
Lynit is a digital platform that helps authors visualise, plan and weave together the various elements - such as characters, plot arcs, themes and key events - that form a story. - BBC
When a writers' organization makes the same, or similar, racist mistakes year after year, can it reform? The RWA's recent choices aren't looking good. - NPR
When the century began, essays were considered box office poison; editors would sometimes disguise collections of the stuff by packaging them as theme-driven memoirs. All that has changed. Paris Review
Unread books now exist in three states for me: Actual books, piled horizontally on a five-foot-wide bookcase; books listed in a tab on my reading spreadsheet, some sorted by category or interest; and the many books I’ve tagged “to-read” in my library app. - Tor
Kristen Roupenian ("Cat Person") considers two superfans, Annie Wilkes in Misery and Harry in With a Friend Like Harry, who completely lose the distinction between the stories they love and the men who wrote them — and she draws a comparison with the abortion-rights debate. - The New Yorker
Researchers at University of Notre Dame are developing an artificial neural network to read complex ancient handwriting based on human perception to improve capabilities of deep learning transcription. - Tech Xplore
"When friendship exists in the background, it's unremarkable but generally uncomplicated. But when friendship becomes the plot, then the only story to tell is about how the friendship ended." B.D. McClay argues that there can be more options. - Lapham's Quarterly
Emily Oster looks at the phonics vs. whole-language debate (she has one word for you: "delumpification") and what studies show about how to entice (not persuade) children to read for pleasure. - Literary Hub
The sooner you accept that star stories are full of embellishments and omissions, invented quotes and one-sided recollections dictated to patient ghostwriters, the sooner you’ll come to appreciate them as the grand and eccentric performances that they are. - The New Yorker
Even in a society which tells itself the half-truth that it treasures ‘free speech’, there are, indeed must be, words that are beyond the pale – words that can still shock, thrill or shame. - Literary Review
