Adam Gopnik considers how "slant rhyme" (English teachers call it assonance) and rap's constant use of it have revivified verse, both sung and spoken — and how long a history slant rhyme really has in the true-rhyme-impoverished English Language. - The New Yorker
Goodreads, BookTube, Bookstagram, and #LitTwit have been around for many years now. Do the denizens of BookTok talk about or choose what they're reading any differently? Here's a look at what has and hasn't been scrambled on the newer platform. - Book Riot
It may not inspire political campaign ads the way critical race theory does, but the debate over how to teach children to read — perhaps the foundational skill of all schooling — has been just as consuming for some parents, educators and policymakers. - The New York Times
Running from one free trial to another, even news junkies often think information demands to be free - to the consumer, that is. "Only 17% of respondents said they had paid for online news in the past year. ... This was, in fact, an improvement." - Nieman Lab
"Let’s start with his Italian (or non-Italian) identity, an Italianness always tilting toward the Other. These are some biographical facts (with which he loved to play): he was born in Cuba, raised in San Remo—an extremely cosmopolitan city at the time—and married an Argentine translator." - LitHub
To spend a lot of time with your head in dictionaries is to understand the extent to which your head is made up of dictionaries. And if our language doesn’t give us a word that another language contains, it may be that we won’t think or feel things that speakers of other languages do. - The New York Times
A “classic” is not an entry on some fixed list of books. Most of the time itis just a term for older—let’s say >25 years—books that we still read. Claiming that the classics are just the work of “straight cis Western white men” doesn’t strike me as a progressive stance. - CounterCraft
Before 1953, the only paperback books were, literally, pulp novels; the cheap pulp paper on which they were printed gave the genre its name. Purchasing affordable, durable paperback versions of serious classic or contemporary literature, something we now take for granted, was impossible. Then came Anchor Books. - The American Scholar
Atlantic Editions will publish between six and 12 nonfiction titles per year, all trade paperbacks, sold for $12.85. Each book will be “a single-author collection of essays from the Atlantic’s pages, focused on a single topic.” - Publishers Weekly
Protactile, as the new language is called, started with people (usually sighted) signing ASL into the hands of DeafBlind folks. But many of ASL's signs don't really come across in touch, so DeafBlind people have been gradually developing their own vocabulary and linguistic conventions. - The New Yorker
"After a journey even the creative minds at The Believer could not have imagined, the celebrated literary magazine is back in business and again being run by the company which first owned it." - AP
Why do people have such a problem with “like”? Is it because it simply won’t go away? In 1992, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a robust defence of the word and the way it carries “a rich emotional nuance”, responding to what had already been a decade of criticism. - The Guardian
