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)
"Amazon hasn't shared its exact reason for the change …, but one obvious explanation is that relatively few people are buying these subscriptions and it doesn't make financial sense to continue to support them." - Nieman Lab
What I (and everyone I know) is talking about now is a seismic shift in the preparedness, study skills, attention spans, and reading comprehension of the average college student, across the board. - 3 Quarks Daily
The typical Wikipedia editor is a man (fewer than 10 per cent are women) who works in a desk job which involves being online a lot (IT workers have always been over-represented), lives in a first-world country, and who has leftish politics. In other words, the typical Wikipedia editor is a Guardian reader. - The Critic
"According to the newly launched Prison Newspaper Directory by the Prison Journalism Project, there are 24 prison-based newspapers in 12 states. At least four of the papers were launched in the last year." - Nieman Lab
Sensitivity readers can become the implied “baddy” or “goody” (depending on where you stand) in such cases, their service seen as the reason that changes have been made. However, this view assumes that sensitivity readers have more power than they actually do. - The Guardian
"Danmei is romantic fiction about men or male beings – ghosts, foxes, even a mushroom – falling in love, written almost exclusively by and for straight women." Most danmei authors use pseudonyms – for example, Mo Xiang Tong Xiu ("fragrance of ink, odour of money") – because of the Communist Party's disapproval. - The Guardian
"Seed and garden catalogues sell a magical, boozy, Jack-and-the-beanstalk promise: the coming of spring, the rapture of bloom, the fleshy, wet, watermelon-and-lemon tang of summer. ... They make strangely compelling reading, like a village mystery or the back of a cereal box." - The New Yorker
As I puttered around the conference, I thought about the fact that although books don’t have feelings, the librarians forced to remove them from the shelves definitely do. America’s librarians are under enormous pressure, and they need to blow off some steam. - The Atlantic
Many established poets published lockdown poems offering their own perspective on the power of poetry to make sense of the catastrophe. Slowly but surely whole collections inspired by the pandemic began to appear. - The Conversation
Tech companies including Apple and Google have been working on AI audiobook narration for a while now. In 2022, Google rolled out its services to publishers in six countries, including the US and Canada. Google's AI narrators have names like Archie, who sounds British, and Santiago, who speaks Spanish. - CNET
In court papers, former Simon & Schuster staffer Filippo Bernardini is quoted as saying, "I never leaked these manuscripts. I wanted to keep them closely to my chest and be one of the fewest to cherish them before anyone else, before they ended up in bookshops." - The Bookseller (UK)
