"Long before witty digital comics found a home on your Instagram feed, depicting things from the struggle with Grindr to birth-control access, there were 'Gay Comix' and 'Dykes to Watch Out For.'" - MSN (Washington Post)
"The idea that great novels disclose universal human truths, or contain a purely literary meaning that transcends national politics, wasn’t evenly distributed across the world. I had seen no signs of it in Kyiv." - The New Yorker
"Little Free Library's ... latest initiative, the Indigenous Library Program, which launches this spring, will provide book-sharing boxes for installation on tribal lands, as well as in other Indigenous communities throughout the U.S. and in Canada." - Publishers Weekly
States and districts nationwide have begun to constrain what librarians can order. At least 10 states have passed laws giving parents more power over which books appear in libraries or limiting students’ access to books, a Washington Post analysis found. - Washington Post
I decided to try a combination of tools to see if the AI-assisted work product would outperform my purely original work. Unsurprisingly, the work done in partnership with my AI-coworker outperformed work I did alone. - Shelly Palmer
Some Wikipedia contributors have a hard time trusting Wikimedia Foundation designers. No one on the paid design team was around 12 years ago when the last skin was made, and only some of them were involved with the wiki communities before they were hired. - Slate
The prize’s founder, Scott Griffin, had anticipated some controversy, if not this degree of fury. He maintains trustees made the right call. After twenty-two years, it was time to revisit the prize structure and the question whether Canadian poets still needed their own category. - The Walrus
The current generation of students has moved on from writing. Literally. Most students fail to see the relevance of writing in a world—their world—that is largely post-literate. They are at home in media not yet born when I began teaching, media that privilege images and sounds over written text. This does not spell the end of the world, but...
What draws hundreds of fans of writer Elin Hilderbrand to Nantucket in January? The chance to hang out in person with the author, of course, on the island she most often writes about. - The New York Times
Adébáyò's first novel, Stay With Me, "told a closely focused story about the impact of childlessness and sickle-cell disease on the life of a young couple ... but A Spell of Good Things deals with political corruption, social injustice and domestic violence." - The Guardian (UK)
That's one writer's resolution, anyway: "After a lifetime of climbing, I’m happy to stop and just enjoy the view. For so long, I, like others, have measured myself against what I had yet to achieve. It was a game no one could win." - The New York Times
The Wordle knockoff - though perhaps harder, since it has four five-letter words to guess at once, with only nine guesses - "now redirects to its own space on the Merriam-Webster website." - TechCrunch
That is to say, some libraries are still doing their darnedest to serve their communities - including creating a library on wheels, with mobile hot spots to serve the most rural residents. - NPR
"This is just so monumentally dumb, though not entirely surprising in a state run by theocrats who’ve already banned the catch-all bogeyman of 'Critical Race Theory,' along with a woman’s right to abortion, while at the same time letting unstable 18-year-olds buy assault rifles." - LitHub
Laura Miller: "At its best, (Spare) reads like one of those popular late-1990s novels about British singletons blundering their way out of solipsistic immaturity into self-awareness and true love: if not quite Bridget Jones's Diary, certainly High Fidelity or About a Boy." - Slate
