Think of all the speeches peppered with statements attributed to revered predecessors. Listeners are supposed to infer that the speaker has drawn upon a vast reservoir of material gathered from a lifetime of reading. But no: it was probably a quote pulled from such a compilation after two or three minutes of looking. - Los Angeles Review of Books
Whenever I see people in old movies say “Swell!” or the like, I always wonder what other kinds of things they said when we weren’t listening. There’s no reason to think they weren’t as linguistically fun as we are now. - The New York Times
Maia Kobabe: "I'm learning that a book being challenged or banned does not hurt the book and does not hurt the author. The book is selling better than ever. ... A book challenge is like a community attacking itself. The people who are hurt in a challenge are the marginalized readers." - Slate
Amanda Oliver, author of Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library, recounts some incidents from her years working in the DC library system, cautioning against the romanticization of public libraries and their equalizing role in society. - Electric Literature
In theory, the conference was still happening, but it wasn’t clear whether anyone would be in attendance, or what they’d be doing while there. Who, I wondered, risks death for the conference of a dying profession? - Washington Post
Lauren Hough's Leaving Isn't The Hardest Thing was a nominee for the Lambda Literary Award for Best Lesbian Memoir — until this week, when Lambda disqualified her for defending a fellow author being attacked on Twitter for alleged transphobia. Laura Miller looks into the matter and points out the lesson. - Slate
Most of the time, when we translate something, we think about the act of translation as changing the meaning that comes from one language and conveying it in another language. But the act of translation, particularly in writing, becomes complicated if there is technically no written equivalent of ASL. - LitHub
Art Spiegelman: "This is the most Orwellian version of society I've ever lived in." Margaret Atwood: "They're playing woke snowflakery back." Hamid Ismailov: "I'm the most widely published Uzbek, yet nobody can mention my books. It's a total ban of my name, of activity, of books, of existence." - The Guardian
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
