The best children's books aren't meant for teaching, and "aren’t advertisements for anything—not even the important things. They’re an advertisement for reading itself; for the entertainment value of the world itself." - The Paris Review
This time it's Sports Illustrated, which had been gutted but not completely demolished. The layoffs of what may be the entire staff "come after Sports Illustrated’s owner, Authentic Brands Group, revoked another company’s publishing license." - Los Angeles Times
"Prague doesn’t want to be put into anyone’s story; so many people have come and tried to make it part of this or that empire, and it hasn’t worked. ... I felt almost at my limit with how much and how rapidly I was inventing." - The Guardian (UK)
Rie Kudan "won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize this week for her sci-fi novel Tokyo-to Dojo-to (Tokyo Sympathy Tower), which centers around a high-rise prison tower and contains themes surrounding AI." The reaction to her news has not been positive. - Vice
Myriad factors influence variations among American accents and dialects, including waves of settlement in a region, geographic location and class differences. - Smithsonian
"A three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit — viewed by many as the most conservative court in the nation — ... upheld a lower court decision to block key provisions of HB 900, Texas’s controversial book rating law, finding that the law likely violated First Amendment protections against compelled speech." - Publishers Weekly
The philosopher Peter Carruthers, who has written a fair amount, and variously, about inner speech, has argued that inner speech may have specifically arisen in evolution to enable the rehearsal and evaluation of overt speech actions. - 3 Quarks Daily
One of the pseudonyms is believed to be E. H. Gould, including a story about her house in Concord, Massachusetts, and a ghost story along the lines of the Charles Dickens classic “A Christmas Carol.” - AP
Yes, the Central Intelligence Agency has a creative writing group for staffers; it's called Invisible Ink. Johannes Lichtman recounts his visit there, including his confusing, disorienting arrival at headquarters. - The Paris Review
On a scale of 1 to 100, all fell between 37 and 43, and most in a bulge between 39 and 42 (see chart 1). The highest-rated? Despite the supposed allure (at least among Anglophones) of French and Italian, it was Tok Pisin, an English creole spoken in Papua New Guinea. The lowest? Chechen. - The Economist
"When we talk about exclamation points, people often think we’re talking about tone. But what goes unsaid is that tone is the performance of niceness or seriousness. It is the work of matching sentence structure to gender norms, industry norms, workplace norms, and generational norms." - Culture Study
"The Escambia County School District, located in the Florida panhandle" (the county seat is Pensacola), "has removed several dictionaries from its library shelves over concerns that making the dictionaries available to students would violate Florida law." - Popular Information
There is a lot of money involved - the global comic book market is worth an estimated $15.5bn (£12.2bn) a year, while the animated industry is 25 times bigger, at $411bn. - BBC
