WORDS

Arguably the most prestigious division of the Penguin Random House conglomerate, Knopf has been without a leader since Mehta, who held the job for 32 years, died in late 2019. The new boss is Jordan Pavlin, whose current title at Knopf is editorial director. - The New York Times

Almanacs are an anomaly in the 2021 literary landscape, a choose-your-own adventure of print culture. So much of reading, especially online, is about seeking: looking for a fact, an image, a bit of information. - Los Angeles Review of Books

First, for God's sake, he shouldn't wipe it off himself. (This lesson was learned the hard way.) Beyond that, there are ways of repairing the damage, or at least keeping it from getting worse. - The Atlantic

"Some more enterprising major-media columnists sometimes compare Substack to the broadsheets of journalism’s early decades in the 1800s, though they do this, invariably, as a means of dismissing digital newsletters as retrograde." - Seth Abramson

Over six centuries in the Habsburg empire and most of another in Yugoslavia, the tongue of this tiny Alpine land might well have faded away. But one dedicated (or obsessive) 18th-century priest/author/publisher led the effort to mold a bunch of hillbilly dialects into a serious language. - Atlas Obscura

The first-person informality that has been present since the earliest days of web writing achieves its business apotheosis in the newsletter: from personal essay to personal brand. - New York Magazine

For instance, boys like fiction just as much as girls do. And developing brains need stories - that is, fiction - in order to grow. - LitHub

Eve Ewing, multihyphenate creative person (and sociology prof), calls writing poetry and writing comic books her most meaningful "cross-pollination." - The New York Times

This remains true, with big financial and other consequences: "Why does this matter? For a start, it narrows men’s experiences of the world." - The Guardian (UK)

If you want to be surprised, to have everything recast for you in light of new information, read Alice Munro's stories to their ends. - LitHub

This time the discourse is about whether writers can, or should, use real-life details in their fiction. - The Guardian (UK)

Summertime tells the stories of "a diverse community of young artists who turned to poetry as a way of coping with hardship." - Los Angeles Times

The shop has been fined for selling a children’s story depicting a day in the life of a child with same-sex parents, with officials condemning the picture book for featuring such families. - The Guardian

When Kristen Roupenian's New Yorker story went viral in 2017, Alexis Nowicki got a flood of text messages from people she knew asking if it was about her. Turns out it was, even though Nowicki had never met the author. Here's how she figured that out. - Slate

For you young'uns, back before Stonewall, this was an expression gay men used to identify each other. (If a guy replied "Dorothy who?", one quickly retreated.) But who was Dorothy — Gale or Parker? - Smithsonian Magazine