Ling Ma won for her short story collection and Isaac Butler for his nonfiction work The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act. - Los Angeles Times
As book banning efforts intensify—along with assaults on women’s bodily autonomy and on the AP African American studies curriculum—old-school feminist bookstores and new intersectional feminist stores alike are drawing customers seeking safe spaces for buying books and gathering information. - Publishers Weekly
The court will consider whether the Open Library violated copyright law by letting users “check out” digitized copies of physical books, an assertion several major publishers made in their 2020 suit. - The Verge
The ubiquity and allure of screens surely play a large part in this—most American children have smartphones by the age of 11—as does learning loss during the pandemic. But this isn’t the whole story. - The Atlantic
"Beyond 'compelling' stylistic evidence, the sonnet, titled 'To the Deserving Author', is signed with the mysterious pseudonym Cygnus, after the mythical figure who was turned into a swan – evoking Jonson's very own tribute to Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon as the 'Sweet Swan of Avon'." - The Guardian
State Superintendent Ryan Walters has filed paperwork to cancel Summer Boismier's teaching certificate — despite the fact that she's now moved to New York and works for, yes, the Brooklyn Public Library. - Oklahoma Watch
"More than 1,200 challenges were compiled by the association in 2022, nearly double the then-record total from 2021 and by far the most since the American Library Association began keeping data 20 years ago." - AP
"The number of titles published in Ukraine was cut almost in half last year, dropping from 17,000 in 2021 to just under 9,000. … The war has been especially difficult on the printing sector, which is centered in Kharkiv and had a significant amount of infrastructure destroyed." - Publishers Weekly
The oasis town of Chinguetti in north-central Mauritania, a major trans-Saharan trading stop in centuries past, has 13 libraries housing more than 6,000 manuscripts. As desertification spreads ever onward, outside experts fear for the books, but their custodians are holding on. - MSN (The Washington Post)
A large survey of click stats from Upworthy.com (!) found that headlines with negative words had a higher clickthrough rate than those with positive words, that sad words were more effective than angry words, and that the general rate for any kind of headline is depressingly low. - Nieman Lab
His mother was dying, and, like everyone, he couldn't travel. But, he says, "given so much external suffering, as the Dalai Lama pointed out, it didn’t seem helpful to compound that by creating even more suffering, internally, through anxiety or rage." - Los Angeles Review Of Books
Librarians argue that a lawsuit filed by four major publishers, should it succeed, "would jeopardize the future development of digital libraries nationwide. The Internet Archive is the most significant specialized library to emerge in decades." - Inside Higher Ed
It's complex - see the Indigenous villains in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, but "Increasing use of non-English languages and subtitles demonstrates both a trend toward linguistic realism in Hollywood and also broader acceptance of linguistic diversity." - Raw Story
Not to mention luck at the library: "I found Krik? Krak!, a short story collection by Edwidge Danticat, in the Ealing Road Library and fell in love. This book raised me." - The Guardian (UK)
Mid-20th-century writing guides taught that this emphatic punctuation mark should be used sparingly -- not least because advertising and marketing overuse it. But ! filled a real void when it was invented in the 1340s, and it fills one now (which is why our text messages have so many). - MSN (The Washington Post)
