WORDS

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

"Truck driver shortages, widespread port congestion, and skyrocketing container costs are among the biggest challenges facing the book industry supply chain for the rest of the year and into 2022." - Publishers Weekly

"For every privileged kid too lazy to write an essay, there was a more complex story. To my surprise, of the hundreds of clients I worked with, many—maybe most—students were simply desperate for the help." - Slate

"One is a former communist, the other a former mujahid. Both have witnessed and participated in Afghanistan's turbulent history over the past half century. They have seen the rise and fall of regimes and today sell books about the men who made and unmade them." - Newlines

To take a genre or mass-market work seriously means recognizing the quiet skill in its pages. - The Atlantic

Researchers "have found that the uniquely peculiar way that Danes speak" – mangled consonants and 40 different vowel sounds – "seems to make it difficult for Danish children to learn their native language – and this challenges some central tenets of the science of language." - The Conversation