The game is rigged. It is rigged like capitalism is rigged. There is no puppet master, no conspiracy, only a field where advantages, to begin with, are distributed unequally. You can beat the long odds, but you have long odds to beat. - LA Review of Books
Sentence structure aside, so much of the challenge posed by James’s prose is that words often had different meanings around the turn of the century than they do now. This quiet evolution of language is a facet that can be damnably hard to notice day to day, yet its importance is hard to overstate. - The New York Times
That's certainly the worry professional audiobook readers have, and there's also the worry that someone's voice will be sampled without their consent. Yet, writes Laura Miller, "after listening to selections from more than 25 A.I.-narrated …, I'm convinced that the technology still has a long way to go." - Slate
"The Mesha Stele ... is a basalt stone slab that has provided historians and linguists with the largest source of the Moabite language to date. Researchers have only now been able to verify with a considerable degree of certainty that the stele contains explicit references to King David." - The Jerusalem Post
Paul Frommer, the linguist who created from scratch the language spoken by the inhabitants of the planet Pandora in the hit films, talks about constructing a usable and credible vocabulary and grammar and about how a community (of Earthlings) has developed around teaching and communicating in Na'vi. - Salon
Overall, 2022 was a good year for independent bookshops in the UK and Ireland, who saw their number climb to a 10-year high. According to the Booksellers Association (BA), there are now 1,072 independent bookshops in the UK and Ireland, up 45 on the tally of 1,027 for 2021. - The Guardian
"In Boston, there are reports of people pronouncing the letter 'r.' Down in Tennessee, people are noticing a lack of a Southern drawl. And Texans have long worried about losing their distinctive twang. Indeed, around the United States, communities are voicing a common anxiety: Are Americans losing their accents?" - Salon
Many of the now-well-known cave drawings of animals include dots, short lines, and crosses; archaeologists suspected that they had some meaning but couldn't work out what. The new hypothesis is that the marks are records of the age and behavior of the animals that were drawn. - Smithsonian Magazine
Filippo Bernardini pleaded guilty in U.S. federal court last Friday, admitting he "had engaged in an elaborate email-impersonation scheme aimed at duping others in the industry into sharing unpublished book manuscripts." - Vulture
After someone claiming to be the daughter of indie author Susan Meachen wrote that the author had died by suicide in 2020, her community split apart with finger-pointing - and also honored her with fundraisers. But, it turns out, her death was staged. - BBC
In Golden Gate Park, a park ranger placed a piece of furniture with instructions: "'Take a poem, leave a poem.' Since the nightstand’s debut there last month, amateur poets have filled it with more than 100 handwritten poems." - Washington Post
Will the AI program kill high school English? Well ... maybe. But "if ChatGPT can do the things we ask students to do in order to demonstrate learning, it seems possible to me that those things should’ve been questioned a long time ago." - Inside Higher Ed
""One explanation might lie in Mansfield’s keen sense of the absurd and the striking lack of anything deferential in her attitude – whether towards men or anyone powerful or rich or influential." - The Guardian (UK)
Apple has new AI narrators. They're not great. "Jackson sounds like a pretty standard—if maddening—customer service line voice. ... Madison, on the other hand, sounds a little like a female version of Aiden Gillen playing American on The Wire." - LitHub
