"Some are exquisite condemnations from learned and accomplished men who escaped their enslavement. Some are brief queries, shots in the dark, dictated by illiterate women. One is brilliant sarcasm." - MSN (The Washington Post)
"Many are leaving publishing entirely, going to places they can be better compensated and work normal hours. The pandemic has put extra stress on already breaking structures. ... It has also allowed a lot of people to step back and reassess their priorities." - Shaken & Stirred
Sure, some claim mutual devotion, but "power dynamics undermine so many artists’ domestic worlds, particularly when the junior partner, or protege, begins to catch up." - The Guardian (UK)
Its CEO's sudden death left control of Scholastic to his ex-girlfriend. "The executive suites had already been gladiatorial, people said, with shifting alliances and backstabbing betrayals more suited to Game of Thrones than a wholesome children’s media company." Now it's worse. - Vanity Fair
Public pressure and a backlash might be convincing Bard College to pony back up: "The ever vibe-conscious Bard is now trying to figure out how to keep the prestigious journal in-house." - LitHub
In the two major library systems I patronize, every title on Ukraine, Russia and Putin I have sought in the last week is checked out, with a lengthy wait for both print and ebook versions. Publishing has yet to offer new books on the Ukraine-Russia struggle, though that is sure to change. - Los Angeles Times
After Putin invaded Crimea and the Donbas, the government in Kyiv began giving extra support to Ukrainian-language writing and media; publishing flourished, and Ukrainians began reading more. But right now few people there have time to read, and they're using books for protection in a more literal way. - The Guardian
Ukrainians frequently speak of the need to become Ukrainians: to consolidate their culture, language, and institutions after centuries of imperial domination. What Ukrainians see as a work in progress, however, Russia interprets as weakness; it views Ukraine as an accident of history. - The Atlantic
As the pandemic enters its third year, a cluster of new studies now show that about a third of children in the youngest grades are missing reading benchmarks, up significantly from before the pandemic. - The New York Times
"Artificial intelligence could bring to life lost texts, from imperial decrees to the poems of Sappho, researchers have revealed, after developing a system that can fill in the gaps in ancient Greek inscriptions and pinpoint when and where they are from." - The Guardian
In 2019, after years of management turmoil and falling revenue, James Daunt (who turned around British chain Waterstones) was brought in to fix things. He says that though the cafe and newsstand business hasn't yet recovered from COVID, book sales are up more than 5% from 2019. - Publishers Weekly
There’s an appealingly simple sociolinguistic view, one my grizzled inner skeptic appears to have embraced, whereby words function as vectors of status: where vocabulary and diction map faithfully to acculturation and lifestyle, where every social stratum has its vernacular and every vernacular its social stratum. - LitHub
"A team using techniques more commonly used to track wildlife estimates that 68 percent of chivalric and heroic works produced in medieval Europe survive today. For individual manuscripts, or handwritten copies of literary works, that figure drops to 9 percent." - Smithsonian Magazine
Scholar Silvia Ferrara suggests that — since we don't have a Rosetta Cord giving us a text side-by-side in Inca knots and Spanish letters — we take an approach something like the way Amy Adams's linguist character in Arrival deciphered the aliens' squid-ink emissions. - Literary Hub
"My background as an author is in young adult fiction, an area in which sensitivity readers are common, especially in the US, so I’m less fazed. I have also been a sensitivity reader, informally." - The Guardian
