Yambo Ouologuem insisted he had done nothing wrong in writing his 1968 novel Le Devoir de violence (Bound to Violence). But he refused to explain why and stalked away from Paris back home to Mali to stew in his fury. Were his borrowings actually a literary technique? - The New York Times
A string of job postings from high-profile training data companies, such as Scale AI and Appen, are recruiting poets, novelists, playwrights, or writers with a PhD or master’s degree. - Rest of World
"In the U.S., bringing a heritage language back into a family usually comes down to the efforts of individuals. The parents I spoke with who taught their children a heritage language that they themselves didn’t speak fluently had essentially organized their own lives around the effort." - MSN (The Atlantic)
Perhaps chopping prose into tokens is not how I would like to be read. But then, who am I to say what my work is good for, how it might benefit someone—even a near-trillion-dollar company? - The Atlantic
Fred Kaplan, defense columnist for Slate: "When pressed with an even mildly confounding question, the machine just makes stuff up. Which makes me wonder: how will it learn how to write good literature, useful technical manuals, entertaining joke books, or anything else that anyone might want to read?" - MSN (Slate)
Alex Reisner has put together a searchable database of the volumes that Mark Zuckerberg's tech colossus used, without permission, to train LLaMA, its generative AI program — the subject of three different copyright lawsuits (so far) by authors. - MSN (The Atlantic)
Much of the landscape of North America was new to the English, so many early word inventions applied to the natural world. Often these simply combined a noun with an adjective: backcountry, backwoods (and backwoodsman), back settlement, pine barrens, canebrake, salt lick, foothill, underbrush, bottomland, cold snap. - Lapham's Quarterly
In addition to rising costs, topics discussed at the daylong conference included the renewed postpandemic threat of work moving off-shore, sustainability concerns, the shift from offset to digital printing, and labor shortages. - Publishers Weekly
Writers have to ask themselves if they're "willing to sell their creative souls for the convenience of a hand clap ... to take the easy-lazy path that requires no deep investigation, no deep learning, where you drive up, place your order, and pick up a short story to go." - Salon
When the essay, called “Ghosts,” came out in The Believer in the summer of 2021, it quickly went viral. I started hearing from others who had lost loved ones and felt that the piece captured grief better than anything they’d ever read. - Wired
"Libraries will also operate with reduced opening hours. The service said the funding situation is presenting 'significant challenges', and that the board's decision to reduce operating hours was not taken lightly." - The Guardian
As the new school year begins, parents of public school students in Miami have become more engaged than ever in resisting the mandate of the DeSantis administration. - The Guardian
Susie Dent "is on a mission to revive English’s lost positives' – words such as 'feckful,' 'couth,' ruly' and 'full of gorm.' In modern English, they survive only in their negative forms, but once, we aspired to be ruthful (full of compassion) or ept." - The Guardian (UK)
