No surprise: "Social media ... rewards the specific combination of disclosure and straightforward takeaways, which can be summarized in an Instagram graphic and shared across platforms.” - The New York Times
The poet, who also translates classical Chinese poetry, said he doesn’t think of his appointment as political. "Each poet laureate undertakes a special project during their tenure, and Sze wants to focus on translation as a social practice.” - Albuquerque Journal
In June, the initiative shared nearly a million books from a Harvard Library collection with AI researchers, spanning more than 254 languages and dating as far back as the 1400s. Currently, the initiative is tackling newspaper collections and government documents from the Boston Public Library’s collection. - The Harvard Crimson
“Some 140 books by women — including titles like "Safety in the Chemical Laboratory" — were among 680 books found to be of ‘concern’ due to ‘anti-Sharia and Taliban policies.’ The universities were further told they were no longer allowed to teach 18 subjects, including human rights.” - BBC (Yahoo!)
“Libraries, and public libraries in particular, are often in financial crunches and depend on tax dollars to keep the lights on. They rarely have the resources to defend against lawsuits on their own.” Here are stories of three attorneys and the cases they fought. - Publishers Weekly
“This is who the Fifth Circuit is harassing: a mom of four with a Diet Coke in her hand, doing this while her kids are at school. This fight is everyone’s—it belongs to every individual American.” - Publishers Weekly
Before Lebanon’s long civil war, authors from all over the Arab world published in liberal Beirut the books they couldn’t release in their own countries. Now, decades of conflict in Lebanon have led to both government censorship and self-censorship, while bookstores and readers cope with prolonged political and financial crises. - New Lines Magazine
“Libraries are enduring book bans, mental health crises, drug overdoses, and more” — including accusations of peddling pedophilie porn — “as we try to provide resources and assistance far beyond our means, both fiscally and emotionally.” Yet, writes Katie Walsh, moments like this one with a young teen reader make up for it all. - Slate (Yahoo!)
The digital froth of the 2010s—BuzzFeed, Upworthy, the ceaseless click-baiting and SEO-hunting—could be understood as a Bronze Age, and we are now after the fall, in a new era we can’t quite name yet. Literary prestige, for one, has never meant less. - Ross Elliot Barkan
Definitions, professional and amateur, are a click away, and most people don’t care or can’t tell whether what pops up in a search is expert research, crowdsourced jottings, scraped data, or zombie websites. - The Atlantic
In 2020, the magazine published a story by freelance journalist Ruth Shalit Barrett about wealthy parents pushing their children into niche sports to gain an edge in college admissions. After a media columnist spotted some factual issues, The Atlantic retracted the story entirely, and Barrett sued for defamation and reputational damage. - TheWrap (Yahoo!)
“The Library (of Congress) announced Monday that the 74-year-old Sze had been appointed to a one-year term, starting this fall. The author of 12 poetry collections and recipient last year of a lifetime achievement award from the library, he succeeds Ada Limón, who had served for three years.” - AP
For one thing, “the real challenge isn’t technology itself, but how technology has evolved to actively compete with the very cognitive processes that reading requires.” - LitHub
"Dictionary content is expensive. … The cost of lexicographers—people are expensive, and the output is low. It is very difficult to justify that just for the sake of completism. You will never have enough staff to keep up. People are too productive in the creation of language.” - The Atlantic
“After 50 years of publishing, Munsch told me, his ability to come up with new stories seems to have vanished. ... Plots used to just appear to him, all the time and almost fully formed, as if they were limitless. But now they don’t.” - The New York Times
