"I wrote a biography of the man that was largely glowing. Football heroics, overcoming obstacles, practical joker, etc. And, looking at it now, if I’m being brutally honest—I’d advise people not to read it. He’s a bad guy. He doesn’t deserve the icon treatment. He doesn’t deserve acclaim." - Poynter
"Where groomer has a pedigree as a legitimate term of opprobrium, ... miscegenation was invented out of whole cloth, intended as a bludgeon to preempt debate in a racist society where intermarriage was deemed an appalling notion, even among many white abolitionists." The election year: 1864. - Literary Hub
The English vocabulary is especially limited, with only 170,000 or so words in an English dictionary. What does this mean to the art writer trying to capture a brushstroke? You fall back on tried and true descriptors like lush, bold, tentative, delicate. - LitHub
“Funding and the politics of funding within the Australia Council is dominated by performing arts, the lion’s share of funds goes to performing arts bodies, and it is essentially a performing-arts grants body. It’s time it was recognised as such, and literature split from it.” - The Guardian
In a longread laid out like a choose-your-own-adventure tale, Leslie Jamison looks at why kids adore the books (agency!), their own origin story, how authors approach them, and the series's progeny (e.g., Neil Patrick Harris's Choose Your Own Autobiography or the choose-your-own-Macbeth-play Sleep No More). - The New Yorker
It "was meant as reference, but also to be savoured. The 11th edition of Britannica (1929) featured Cecil B. DeMille on motion pictures and J.B. Priestley on English literature. It was ‘plausible, reasonable, unruffled, often reserved and completely authoritative’. And sometimes plain wrong. - The Spectator
"The scrap of papyrus — scarcely larger than a postage stamp with four lines of angular script — is one of just a few from the Late Iron Age, archaeologists said." How it ended up being sold to a Montana woman in 1965 is unclear, but it's been returned to Israel. - AP
"Punk feminist" author Virginie Despentes's novel, titled Cher connard (roughly, "Dear Asshole"), goes deep into what this correspondent describes as "France's sometimes difficult relationship with the #MeToo movement." - The Guardian
While some on the internet were glued to Twitter or the BBC, checking for news or watching the planes en route to Balmoral Castle, one group of dedicated Wikipedia editors sprang into action updating the late queen’s page in the minutes after Buckingham Palace announced the news. - Gizmodo
Strategies on how to lodge complaints against books are traded on Facebook and shared among branch chapters of parental rights groups. One of the most influential of these groups is the Florida-based Moms for Liberty. Since January 2021, it has grown to 200 chapters with 100,000 members. - The New York Times
"It’s absolutely beyond creepy—and therefore totally in keeping with Facebook’s general vibe—that adults are spending time avidly thumbing through children’s books to look for anything they might consider vaguely 'pornographic' (or, you know, vaguely affirming of non-white or queer identities)." - LitHub
One 17-year-old in the secret book club: "Anne Frank is, like, as a friend for me. ... I mean, Anne Frank is suffering from war, and I am, too. And Anne Frank cannot go to school, cannot, like, go out very freely. And I have the same situation." - NPR
"Sometimes writers draw from older stories—myths, histories, ancient epics—when crafting new ones. One might find in that rewriting an opportunity to recast a celebrated figure." Obvious. but many new (or popular on BookTok) works are strong on the retelling right now. - The Atlantic
Volunteers held the line for a decade, but now local government has stepped in to save and shore up the tower in Dublin where Joyce began Ulysses. - Irish Times
