Unfortunately, for those of us who write about them, white-collar workplaces are not inherently high-drama. As an employee, this is ideal. For a nonfiction writer, it’s a challenge. - The New Yorker
Cash-rich paper mills have evidently adopted a new tactic: bribing editors and planting their own agents on editorial boards to ensure publication of their manuscripts. - Science
"I realized I had a choice as a writer: make the world bigger and more interesting and live in that world, and find a life’s work, or shrink everything down to your own crabbed and paltry self, hang on for years conning editors and publishers and yourself, and find your life’s a lie." - Yale Review
"For generations, through wars, crisis, and political upheaval, documentary poets have helped make sense of some of our most difficult moments – by expressing what might otherwise be impossible to say. So what are they writing about today?" (audio) - To the Best of Our Knowledge
In contrast to the prominent dictionaries that designated as their word of the year “rizz,” “hallucinate” and “authentic,” the American Dialect Society celebrates linguistic variation to an almost absurd degree.
"Eggers's The Eyes & the Impossible, the great adventure of a very fast dog, has received the John Newbery Medal for the year’s best children’s book. … The Randolph Caldecott Medal for outstanding illustration was given to Vashti Harrison’s Big, … (which) was a National Book Award finalist." - AP
As Ashley Elston "approaches the end of her first draft, pulls a six-foot sheet of brown butcher paper from a roll on a specially installed rod near her desk. This two-yard stretch then becomes a playing field." - The New York Times
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
