"In a postscript to the new book, Le dedico mi silencio (I Give You My Silence), the 87-year-old novelist writes: 'I think I’ve finished this book. I’d now like to write an essay on Sartre, my teacher as a young man. It will be the last thing I write.'" - The Guardian
These days, it is something of a fool’s errand to try to determine whether a text encountered online is written by a human or a chatbot. You might think a text sounds cheesy, canned, or off-the-shelf, but isn’t a lot of human writing just that? - Boston Review
"The Freedom of Expression Award invites applicants to write about one banned book that changed their life and why. The $10,000 (£8,168) prize will be awarded to a high-school student planning to attend university in 2024." - The Guardian
"The educational company, which both publishes and distributes books, waded into hot water last month after it confirmed that it was changing its policy for its middle school book fair offerings, … putting most of the titles dealing with race, gender and sexuality into their own collection." - NPR
In a “major milestone” for the library, which holds the world’s largest surviving collection of Chaucer, it is hoped the digital platform will enable new research into the 14th-century poet, courtier, soldier, diplomat, and MP who is most famous for his Middle English epic, The Canterbury Tales. - The Guardian
"In moments of doubt, I think of Gertrude Stein’s infamous line, “A rose is a rose is a rose.” Isn’t a word a word — still a word — regardless of who, or what, wrote it? … And how do we evaluate if a machine’s work is worth reading?" - Boston Review
Premium subscribers get 15 hours free a month and can top that off with discrete credit card payments if they want more. “We are seeing them doing that." - Deadline
A commercial book fair might not immediately seem a site of position-taking, but as we discovered when researching our book, The Frankfurt Book Fair and Bestseller Business (2020), the fair has political roots. - The Conversation
"92NY, one of the city’s leading cultural organizations, announced Monday that it was putting its prestigious literary reading series on pause, following an outcry over its decision to cancel an appearance last week by a prominent writer who had been critical of Israel." - The New York Times
The 1978 movie "was rated G but famously scared a lot of the unsuspecting kids who saw it. In fact, just in this past year, it was re-classified as PG." - NPR
Authors are suing to get their work, and characters, out of AI programs. "OpenAI, for its part, has contended that training an AI system falls under fair use protections." - Los Angeles Times
Right now, a few authors joining together to sue the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and Meta is a bit of a David-vs.-Goliath situation. Book publishers need to join this fight. Magazine publishers need to join this fight. - Washington Post
This week, the Iowa City Community School District released a list of 68 books that it removed from schools to comply with the law. Among the titles: “Ulysses” by James Joyce, “Nineteen Minutes” by Jodi Picoult, “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood and “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison. - Washington Post
