The progressive wins are a development that looked unlikely as the right wing, often through organizations with connections to wealthy Republican donors, has introduced bill after bill in states across the country. - The Guardian
The book, Marvel Comics No. 1, published in 1939, is so valuable because it is known as the pay copy, in which the publisher recorded the payments he owed to the illustrators, said Stephen Fishler, the chief executive of ComicConnect, an online comic auction house. - The New York Times
Maybe because people love them so much. No, seriously, what's up with all of the lobbying against state legislatures trying to give libraries what they need? Follow the (large amounts of) money. - Sludge
The murder of George Floyd, and the protests, prompted her to rethink her own responsibilities. She says, "There are generations of freedom fighters who have been doing this work without the internet, without being spotlighted." - The Guardian (UK)
A book of short stories by a young Cambodian American who died before his book came out, a first novel about coming of age in the South, and a book that explores the long shadow of slavery across the history of the U.S. - among others. - Los Angeles Times
His 1992 novel Snow Crash is the source of the trem "metaverse"; his 1999 Cryptonomicon basically predicted cryptocurrency. With fans from Jeff Bezos to Bill Gates to Peter Thiel to Sergey Brin, "Neal Stephenson might be the most influential novelist among business tycoons since Ayn Rand." - The Baffler
“Thinking about how cultural heritage survives seems like a useful thing to do, because right now—among many other things—that’s one of the important things threatened by things like climate change.” - Scientific American
The copious notes the author made the springtime arrivals of flowers and birds provided valuable data to a team of Boston University scientists investigating precisely how much warmer and earlier spring is becoming in eastern Massachusetts. - JSTOR Daily
Molly McGhee, an assistant editor at the Macmillan sci-fi imprint Tor Books, just saw her first acquisition hit the NYT Bestseller List at #3 — and she's quit after being denied a promotion, citing "the invisibility of the junior employee's workload" as well as the low pay. - The New York Times
Latin, classical Arabic and Sanskrit were no one’s mother tongue. They are cosmopolitan tongues, mega-languages that evolved to facilitate communication between local dialects, then expanded to become world languages. - Psyche
A great first line can spur intense readerly attraction—provoke a compulsion to know more. Let’s call this: love at first sentence. Such a reading experience is also a rare one, however. - LitHub
You've got to hand it to New Zealanders. The main public library in Christchurch was closed for the national holiday on Feb. 6, but a glitch kept the automated doors open. 380 people came and went and used automated checkout; they left a mess, but nothing was stolen. - The Guardian
It’s not just that he lied––told tales––to people in the business of telling (and selling) tales. It’s that, in doing so, he touched up against an uncomfortable truth about how little space there can sometimes be between legitimate and illegitimate participation in a collective fiction. - The New Yorker
"Rather than a departure from his literary work, Handke's position on Serbia may be of a piece with it — a logical consequence of the postmodern experimentation for which he has long been celebrated." - The New Yorker
