The news hardly comes as a surprise, given the judge’s inclination to rule against the IMLS shutdown. The temporary restraining order was issued just days ahead of a mass layoff of nearly all IMLS employees that was slated to take effect on May 4. - ARTnews
Are male novelists actually in decline? Some metrics certainly say so: of all the writers to appear on the weekly Sunday Times bestseller lists for fiction hardbacks so far this year, just a third are men. - The Guardian
“As children write less and less by hand, we wanted to explore the impact of this on alphabetic and orthographic skills. In other words, we wanted to see whether the ability to learn letters and to assimilate and remember word structure develops differently through manual training or the use of keyboards." - PsyPost
Some say that what makes the difference between human and machine writing—and what taints the latter—is that machines do not think, or intend, or mean. Their compositions, allowing that they do compose, are therefore not minded or mindful, and it is this lack that gives them their taint, as properly it should. - The Lamp
“The Hsu-Tang Library of Classical Chinese Literature… was established (to provide) translations of literary works written in Chinese from the Zhou dynasty (circa 1046–256 BCE) to the end of the last empire, the Qing, in 1911, … (in) translations that are scholarly (without detracting) from the pleasure of reading.” - Los Angeles Review of Books
Due to the advent of online self-publishing platforms, what once required a team of professionals—editors, graphic designers, and formatting specialists—can now be done with just a few clicks. - The Future of Things
“There are two books they are leaving (in the teen section). There are some people not happy about that decision. They feel there is sexually explicit content in them. But our library board has reviewed that and didn’t feel that way.” - Alabama.com
Instead, the Wikimedia Foundation says it will use AI to build new features that “remove technical barriers,” allowing editors, moderators, and patrollers tools that allow them to accomplish what they need to do, without worrying about how to “technically achieve it.” - TechCrunch
Over the past two decades, the U.S. has seen a wave of books preoccupied with our working lives, many of them focused on white-collar office jobs. - The Atlantic
By some estimates, the total worldwide sales of the novel are now upward of thirty million copies. How did “Gatsby” grow so great, and why has it endured so long? - The New Yorker
Duolingo says that building one new course historically has taken “years,” but the company was able to build this new suite of courses more quickly “through advances in generative AI, shared content systems, and internal tooling.” - The Verge
“I’m as interested in an artificial voice as I am in an artificial author, which is to say not at all. … This is the thing: you think it won’t come for you – but it will. Luckily, I’ll be dead or retired by then.” - The Observer (UK)
“Only 40% of parents ... agreed that ‘reading books to my child is fun for me’, according to a survey conducted by Nielsen and HarperCollins. (There’s) a steep decline in ... parents reading aloud to young children, with 41% of 0-to-4-year-olds now being read to frequently, down from 64% in 2012.” - The Guardian
Iowa City is the place where contemporary English literature matters more than anywhere else on earth. The home of arguably the world’s most famous MFA program, Iowa City has authors’ plaques embedded in the sidewalk, over 100 literary readings per year, and roughly 1,000 writers in a community of 75,000. - Public Books
Says founder Jude Cook, “Excitement and energy around new and adventurous fiction is around female authors – and this is only right as a timely corrective. ... (Yet now) stories by new male authors are often overlooked, with a perception that the male voice is problematic.” - The Guardian
