ArtsJournal: Arts, Culture, Ideas

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Jennifer Egan Loves Doing The Work To Promote Her Books

Why not, she says - there’s no reason not to work just as hard promoting your book as you did writing it. "The worst that can happen is you’ve spent a little energy on something that didn’t result in you being a bestseller." - Irish Times

Keeping Languages Alive Through Spelling Bees

For Alaskans whose people's languages are Yup'ik and Iñupiak, "the spelling bee gives students the opportunity to practice reading and writing a language they might only speak or hear." - Alaska Public Radio

How Do You Follow Up A Smash Hit First Novel?

You throw your second one in the (metaphorical) trash can, of course. - The Guardian (UK)

BookTok Is Driving A Rise In Book Purchasing At Stores And Shops Across The World

Sales rose 5% in the UK, for instance. BookTokkers, aka TikTok users, are "replicating the time-honoured sales method that bookshop staff have often employed – suggesting books to shoppers that they might like. And that’s one area that the pandemic hit hard." - The Guardian (UK)

“A Political Switzerland”: Is The New York Times Book Review’s “Books As News” Approach Still Tenable?

With Bookstagrammers and BookTokers nearly equal in influence, and with its carefully maintained approach of relative objectivity, "the Book Review may have the luxury of being the only game in town, but that doesn't spare it the responsibility of making sure people show up to play." - The Nation

What Researchers Are Learning About Language From Teaching AI

The difficulty in understanding transformers lies in their abstraction. Whereas a conventional program follows an understandable process, like outputting the word “grass” whenever it sees the word “green,” a transformer converts the word “green” into numbers and then multiplies them by certain values. - Nautilus

How Big Publishing Consolidated

As 2022 began, the U.S. trade publishing business was dominated by what has been called the Big Five—Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette Book Group, and Macmillan.  - Publishers Weekly

What Happens When Big Corporations Take Over Local Newspapers? A New Study Says —

— that there's "an immediate drop in content." The drop isn't exactly a surprise, but what one lead researcher found "shocking" was that the fall, and the staffing cuts that lead to it, happen so quickly after acquisition. - Nieman Lab

The Twitter Account That Collects Awkward Writing

The account tracks the ways that writers strive to express the same thing differently, with examples taken mostly from newspapers and magazines around the world. - The New Yorker

What It Takes To Be A Mid-Size Publisher

"The midsize publishing community has greatly contracted and, as I think about the businesses that still make up this community, I am struck by the fact that they all share two important attributes." - Publishers Weekly

“Recreational Puritanism”: A Warning To Right-Wing Book Banners About Their Battle Against The Woke Left

John McWhorter: "They miss that their book bans are just as tinny, just as local to petty concerns of our moment and just as, well, unjust. And by revving up its own cancel culture, the anti-woke right is providing the woke left with bulletin-board material." - The New York Times

What Makes The Difference Between A Dialect And A Language? Depends On Who’s Answering The Question

For governments, the quip that "a language is a dialect with an army and navy" is more-or-less true — so Czech and Slovak, Hindi and Urdu, Serbian and Croatian are different languages. For linguists, dialects are mutually intelligible and languages are not. So what of Cantonese — or Ukrainian? - The Conversation

Culture-War Censorship Bleeds From School Libraries Into Public Libraries

"Conservative activists in several states, including Texas, Montana and Louisiana have joined forces with like-minded officials to dissolve libraries' governing bodies, rewrite or delete censorship protections, and remove books outside of official challenge procedures." - MSN (The Washington Post)

Great Bookstores: The 130-Year-Old Pasadena Icon

By 1915, Vroman’s could count traveling dignitaries, engineers, scientists, men of finance and New York book editors as customers. Anticipating their requests, the store carried more than 30,000 titles of fiction and nonfiction and boasted the “largest selection of Bibles in Southern California.” - Los Angeles Times

Vladimir Sorokin Says Russian Writers Must Fight Back Against Totalitarianism

Sorokin: "A Russian writer has two options: Either you are afraid, or you write. ... I write." - The New York Times

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