WORDS

Does There Even Need To Be A Separate New York Times Magazine Anymore?

In ink-on-dead-trees print, sure. But a large majority of the newspaper’s readers consume the Times online or on an app, where the difference between the magazine’s articles and those of the regular newspaper is barely visible. - New York Magazine (MSN)

Fact-Checker Jasper Lo On His Illegal Firing From The New Yorker

“Why me? I wondered. I had finished my three-year term as the first vice chair of the New Yorker Union the week prior. Condé Nast had violated our collective bargaining agreement and broken labor law dozens of times, but it had never attempted something as reckless as illegally firing union leaders.” - The Nation

How Two Recent AI Publishing “Scandals” Will Changing The Books Industry

Stories like Shy Girl and The New York Times’ profile of AI romance author Coral Hart, who boasted of using AI to write and self-publish 200 hundred books across 21 pen names, demonstrate that theoretical disputes did not prepare us to be confronted with the reality of AI. - The Conversation

Book Science And The Art Of Preserving Old Books

Book scientists are working tirelessly with an array of technologies — including microscopes, multispectral imaging and artificial intelligence — to recover, understand and preserve many valuable ancient texts. - The Conversation

Trump’s Presidential “Library” Is A Grift

The design language is neither stately and trim in the Republican mode, nor bold and innovative, as preferred by Democrats. It is, instead, generically contemporary, a glass tower struggling for some kind of distinctive shape or symbolic form, like so many towers built in Dubai or China. - Washington Post

How Do We Police AI In Writing?

Although I don’t buy the claim that AI is “inevitable” in some theoretical sense, I also feel like the current incentives in media and publishing, as Max Read recently argued, make it highly unlikely it won’t be used by some writers at some stage of the writing process. - The Third Hemisphere

Is The Vice President Trying To Use His Book Titles To Squash The Books Of Bell Hooks?

No, you can’t “steal” a book title, but this is … hm, interesting. - LitHub

How That Guy Is Reshaping The English Language

“The president uses verbs to evade responsibility and even proclaim a new form of leadership. Perhaps surprisingly, this is true even when Mr. Trump is proudly, if also prematurely, declaiming military successes.” - The New York Times

HarperCollins Partners With AI Company For Animation

HarperCollins has announced a multi-year partnership with Toonstar, an “AI-powered” animation studio, to adapt a slate of the publisher’s titles into original YouTube series. - Publishers Weekly

A Crisis In Writing? Let’s Consider It Historically

For the first 40,000 years of its existence, it was simply an abstract symbolic system to process complex data; only in the last 3,000 years did mankind acquire the strange notion that these sign-systems might correspond to the grunts and gurgles they used for everyday communication. - Unherd

Norway’s Main Easter Pastime Is Going To A Rural Cabin And Reading Crime Novels

Ever since a publisher’s clever marketing trick in 1923, Norwegians have associated the period around Easter with crime fiction. The phenomenon is called påskekrim (Easter crime) and it’s ubiquitous. And since Norway is usually still cold this time of year, holing up and reading makes sense. - BBC

When Addiction And The War On Drugs Became Central Elements Of Crime Fiction

“Are they evil or are they sick? While novelists writing in the years of the War on Drugs were asking this question about serial killers, the general public was asking the same question about drug addicts.” - Literary Hub

Why You Should Break Up With Your Kindle

The Kindle ecosystem is perhaps the apotheosis of this shift. One Guardian reporter found Amazon had recorded every title, highlight and page turn on her Kindle app (40,000 entries over two years). The company’s dominance sets the terms for everyone in the marketplace. - Washington Post

NYT Fires Freelancer For Using AI In Review. But What Really Is The Issue Here?

As a literary critic and scholar, I believe the deeper question isn’t whether or not critics should do more to hide their use of AI – but the ethics of using it at all. - The Conversation

Tennessee Library Director Fired Over Refusal To Move Gender-Themed Books

She was fired for her refusal to remove more than 100 books that discuss gender identity or contain violence from the children’s shelves.  - The New York Times

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