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WORDS

This Year’s Book Resolution Is To Stop Worrying About Books You’ll Never Read

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

Watch Out, New York Times, The Dictionary Just Bought Quordle

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

Good Book News From Florida

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

Emma Straub Swore Online While Protesting For Freedom, So She Was Disinvited From Texas School Talk

"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

A Book Critic Defends Prince Harry’s Memoir As Literature

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

Expanding The Definition Of Libraries

A makerspace in a small central New York village; a network of food pantries in Canada; recording studios with instruments in the Netherlands; resources carried to remote tribes in Kenya on the backs of camels. These are all libraries, all radically different, but all bound by a common mission. - Publishers Weekly

A Well-Known Tech Site Used AI Bots To Write Lots Of Features.  Now It’s Issuing Lots Of Corrections.

"It turns out the bots are no better at journalism — and perhaps worse — than their would-be human masters. On Tuesday, CNET began appending lengthy correction notices to some of its AI-generated articles after Futurism, another tech site, called out the stories for containing some 'very dumb errors.'" - MSN (The Washington Post)

What Happens When AI Bots Run Out Of Good Writing To Ingest?

A team of researchers led by Pablo Villalobos at Epoch AI recently predicted that programs such as the eerily impressive ChatGPT will run out of high-quality reading material by 2027. Without new text to train on, AI’s recent hot streak could come to a premature end. - The Atlantic

Why No One Will Win In The HarperCollins Strike

Some smaller independent publishers—mostly outside of New York City—are concerned that the public nature of the strike, with wage demands made public, is raising unrealistic financial expectations. - Publishers Weekly

AI Can Help Preserve Dying Languages. But What’s The Cost?

StoryWeaver can bring more languages into conversation with one another—but the tech is still new, and it depends on data that only speakers of underserved languages can provide. This raises concerns about how the labor of the native speakers powering A.I. tools will be valued. - Slate

Saving Indigenous Languages In Montana

The job is not easy. Depending on how you count, there are about a dozen Indigenous languages in our state, and every one of them has its own set of protocols about who can provide materials, and which parts of the languages and culture can be shared. - The Guardian

I’m An Author. My Book Is Being Published At HarperCollins. I’m Deeply Conflicted

I’ve loved my publishing experience with HarperCollins. Everyone I’ve worked with has been a smart adviser and a fierce advocate for a slightly weird first novel in a challenging marketplace. And yet, since November, part of me has worried about today, knowing how conflicted I’d feel. - Slate

Archaeologists Say They’ve Uncovered The World’s Oldest Runestone

"The flat, square block of brownish sandstone has carved scribbles, which … are up to 2,000 years old. … Older runes have been found on other items, but not on stone." - AP

Prose Style And What’s Good: Stripped And Spare Or Ornate?

Every great national prose, in just about any tongue, reaches its high meridian only by way of a prolonged and constant negotiation of just this tension between beauty and sublimity—between the decorative and the august, or between the splendid and the lucid. And this comes only at the end of long epochs of development. - The Lamp

Two Libraries In Colorado Close Due To Meth Contamination

Public library branches in Boulder and Englewood, a Denver suburb, were closed to the public for several days after tests found methamphetamine on surfaces and in air vents in the restrooms, apparently due to patrons smoking crystal. - The New York Times

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