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WORDS

Six Big Magazines — Including Entertainment Weekly — To Quit Print Publication

“It is not news to anyone that there has been a pronounced shift in readership and advertising from print to digital, and as a result, for a few important brands, print is no longer serving the brand’s core purpose.” - The New York Times

The Index At The Back Of The Book Deserves More Respect

The story of the index "is, on one level, a history of information science, but it's also a history of reading and writing and everything those actions entail — communication, learning and imagination, as well as competition, anxiety and no small amount of mischief." - The New York Times

The Language Police Are Threatening Education

These recent acts of illiberal language policing––coinciding with a racial reckoning on the left and a backlash against its excesses on the right––threatens to degrade the education of all young people. - The Atlantic

One Of Ukraine’s Strongest Defenses Against Russian Aggression Is The Ukrainian Language

For much of the past century in Ukraine, Russian has taken precedence over Ukrainian, even in the post-Soviet period. These days one hears more and more Ukrainian in the streets, especially among young adults. even in Kyiv and the Russophone stronghold of Kharkiv. - MSN (The Washington Post)

There’s A Whole Body Of Women’s Novels In Yiddish That Are Finally Reaching English-Speakers

The originals were mostly published as serials in Yiddish newspapers and never made it into bound volumes in any language until now. Says one scholar, "This literature has been hiding in plain sight, but we all assumed it wasn't there." - The New York Times

21st-Century London Is Developing A New Dialect Of English

Linguists have dubbed it Multicultural London English (MLE); it has developed organically among young people in a city where hundreds of languages are spoken, borrowing vocabulary and syntax from several of them, most noticeably Jamaican English. Rebecca Mead writes about watching her teenage son acquire it. - The New Yorker

Meet The Teenagers Who Started A Bookclub To Read Banned Books

The teen members of Kutztown’s Banned Book Club, meet every two weeks to read and discuss literature that conservatives across the country are working to ban from school libraries. - The Guardian

Virginia Woolf Was Many Things, But She Was Not A Great Cook

In To the Lighthouse, "these dishes are described with great fanfare but, as any competent home cook will know, beef stews are neither challenging to make nor impressive to look at. ... They do not require, as Woolf’s depiction would have it, a series of complicated steps." - The Paris Review

Yiddish Scholars Are Helping Rescue Immigrant Women’s Fiction From Obscurity

For decades, the early 20th century fiction written by Yiddish women was "dismissed by publishers as insignificant or unmarketable to a wider audience." Luckily, "there has been a surge of translations of female writers by Yiddish scholars devoted to keeping the literature alive." - The New York Times

The Rise Of The Literary Thrill-Seeking Complex

"New narrative booms. Its dissociative forms and themes — the anxiety/bliss of romance/sex, psychic roleplay, identity-in-ideology, dream states, trauma, more sex — now serve a community of passion addicts, haunted memoirists, and mental thrill-riders hungering for a higher high." - Los Angeles Review of Books

Is ‘Wonder Boys’ The Very Best On-Screen Depiction Of An Author?

Yes, partly because the film absolutely bombed at the box office. "Wonder Boys succeeds. It succeeds because it failed, and because at heart it’s about failure. And writers are connoisseurs of failure." - LitHub

The Latest Book Cover Trend Is A Bit Distressing

Or at least, distressed: Young women, well-dressed, sad ... and entirely faceless. - The Guardian (UK)

The Damage, And The Lie, Of The Myth Of Solitary Genius

The erasure of collaborators - and the sometimes terrible behavior to others - is just the tip of the iceberg. See: A new novel about Erik Satie for something a bit more balanced. - The Atlantic

Critics Of The Tennessee School District’s ‘Maus’ Vote Are Missing Something

"The elimination of Maus from a Tennessee county language arts curriculum does not live up to its more hysterical billing. It is not a ban, and it does not seem to be motivated by outright bigotry." However: There's something far more sinister on the horizon. - Slate

The Perfect Wordle Guessing Strategy Teaches Us Quite A Lot About English

"In Wordle, your own language skills, memory, and the Wordle dictionary mean that no human (with the possible exception of an eccentric memory champ) could correctly identify 12,972 eligible words in as many guesses." - Slate

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