It's real: "The Eurovision book contest will culminate in an event at this year’s literary festival in June, where a panel will discuss the books selected to represent the 37 countries that take part in the music competition each year." - The Guardian (UK)
The anxiety about what kids are reading inevitably bleeds into fear about what else they’re doing—the trope of the sexy librarian, ever about to loosen her hair and initiate you into forbidden knowledge, exists for a reason. But books are obscene in another way. - The New Yorker
Roughly a French Louisiana equivalent of Gullah, the African-English hybrid of the South Carolina and Georgia Sea Islands, Kouri-Vini developed among the region's Black and mixed-race Creoles in the early 1700s. It faded away during the 20th century, but some present-day Creoles are working to bring it back to life. - BBC
Think of it as an ongoing planetary spam event, but unlike spam—for which we have more or less effective safeguards—there may prove to be no reliable way of flagging and filtering the next generation of machine-made text. “Don’t believe everything you read” may become “Don’t believe anything you read” when it’s online. - The Atlantic
Artist/software developer Josie Williams created four chatbots, each built on a dataset consisting solely of the works of a great African-American writer: James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Octavia E. Butler, and Zora Neale Hurston. A visitor interacts with the bot, whose responses are assembled from that author's own words. - Artnet
Morgan Library director of conservation Maria Fredericks: "The glove thing. It just won't die." Grolier Club director Eric Holzenberg: "Every time it comes up, I sigh deeply. And then I give my three-sentence explanation of why it's ****." And the explanation does make sense. - The New York Times
"(In Florida and) along other fronts of the culture war, bookmobiles are motoring around the country to bring banned books to all, especially in Texas, which has censored more books than any other state." - WBUR (Boston)
At its core updating Roald Dahl’s children’s books is really about the rights and control copyright grants to authors and copyright holders. Those rights are exercised to update children’s books more frequently than many of these critics may realise. - The Conversation
The conference in New Orleans was equal parts group therapy and war room, as nearly 2,000 librarians from throughout the country strategized on how to protect their patrons and themselves, and how to get the public to wake up to the urgency of the threat. - Washington Post
Blurbing has always had discontents. In 1936, George Orwell decried the use of blurbs in his essay “In Defense of the Novel.” He feared for the novel’s “lapse in prestige,” for which he partly blamed “hack reviews” and “the disgusting tripe that is written by the blurb-reviewers." - The Millions
Late in her life, virtually everything Hildegard had written was copied into a 33-pound illuminated manuscript — too heavy for Soviet soldiers to loot from a Dresden bank vault after World War II. But how to get it out of East Germany and back to the nuns at Hildegard's abbey? - Literary Hub
This re-engagement with Black authors of the past is being led by a fresh cohort of literary tastemakers: younger authors in search of ancestors; publishers eager to excavate Black literature, film and television executives in search of intellectual property; social media influencers on Bookstagram... - The New York Times
One author "said while he believes using sensitivity readers to rewrite classical literature like Dahl is problematic, employing them to work on in-progress manuscripts can be an important aspect of the writing process." - CBC
"The project impacted encompasses three 22-story office towers and 'The Helix,' a dystopian 'corporate conference center' and excellent place to die. So far, developers have only gotten as far as digging a parking garage." - LitHub
