Since 2021, the Sunshine State has led the country in advancing the “parental rights” agenda. Contrary to its name, this agenda has used fuzzy, coded language to manufacture moral panic, and to deliver control over what students can read and learn. - PEN America
“Many of the grants were meant to partially reimburse nonprofit publishers for projects they’ve already paid for and completed, leaving them with surprise shortfalls. And while most expect to be able to cover the immediate deficits, they worry about what the move augurs for the future of the literary arts.” - Publishers Weekly
“Researchers from the University of Groningen combined AI and carbon dating to find that many of the scrolls are older than scholars previously estimated. Some, it seems, could date to the time of the biblical authors themselves, not centuries after.” - ARTnews
These are very substantial benefits, and it is true they are lost when we write using a keyboard or keypad. But on balance, far more is gained, which is why the past half century has seen nearly a complete transformation from pen strokes to keystrokes. - Brookings
It’s two problems in one. The detritus — diary entries, to-do lists, correspondence — in which researchers often discover key details rarely gets put on paper these days, and messaging apps often delete material automatically. And if those things are preserved, how do archivists sort through a 4-terabyte hard drive? - The Atlantic (MSN)
These novels, aimed at young men who will soon be targets of recruitment drives, often feature hyper-nationalist, crudely-drawn “accidental travel” plots, wherein the hero is transported to pivotal moments in Russia’s past, using 21st-century knowledge to alter history in Russia’s favor, wreaking revenge against foreigners who try to destroy the Motherland. - The Guardian
“The problem AI (has is) that it (can’t) make up its own jokes, the writer said. ‘It has no sense of humour – you don’t want to hear a joke told by ChatGPT. If there’s a moment when there’s a funny book written by ChatGPT I think we’re screwed.’” - The Guardian
“Disney Publishing’s most recent pivot came in 2020, when it sold 1,110 children’s titles to Hachette and decided to focus on acquiring global content that it can leverage across multiple platforms. In recent months, the group has made a number of significant changes,” among them a major licensing agreement with Penguin Random House. - Publishers Weekly
“Speaking whale would expand our sense of space and time into a planetary song. I imagine we’d think very differently about polluting the ocean soundscape so carelessly.” - The Guardian (UK)
Hanan Issa: “Growing up, she said she never saw writing as a viable career: ‘I'm working class, raised in a council house and to me, it wasn't considered an option.’” But in 2016, the Prime Minister said something so ignorant that boom. Poetry! - BBC
Hugh Ryan says the book club isn’t just about learning history, but “they had to get people connecting to one another. ‘We're bringing a history of revolution, but we're also trying to make community.’” - Wired
Artists that take inspiration from the headlines are often accused of “profiting” off these stories; whether that’s acceptable is a moral question, since as long as the work is fictionalized, artists are under no legal obligation to get permission from the source of their inspiration, let alone compensate them. - LitHub
“The original New York Trilogy owes a debt to the existential detective, a genre archetype whose cases carry themes of choice, isolation, meaninglessness; not just murder but mortality. … Questions of purpose surround the graphic New York Trilogy — unrelated to any existential searching.” - The Comics Journal
Sales in the genre have electrified the publishing industry, reaching nearly 20 million in 2023 when U.S. book sales overall dipped. While there is no hard data on readership, the audience for romance novels generally is over 80% female. - The Wall Street Journal
