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
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
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
"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)
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
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
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
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
