"A precise feeling of fondness accompanies the receipt of a letter from someone you care about. There are as many shades of this feeling as friends in the world. Yet I sometimes leave a letter unopened for days, not knowing if I am ready to read it. A friend I still write to confessed the same thing. I wonder what we think...
In January of 2017, a group of skilled, acrobatic robbers began a series of daring break-ins — climbing walls, breaking through skylights and barriers, lowering themselves dozens of feet with ropes, never setting off alarms — to steal shipments of rare books worth millions from storage facilities around London. Here's the story of how Scotland Yard, working with detectives...
Over the past few years, a series of stylometric analyses, employing both human brains and AI software, has found that the true identity of the famously pseudonymous and reclusive author is almost certainly that of writer Domenico Starnone. (The other prime candidate, identified by an investigative journalist in The New York Review of Books, is Starnone's wife, translator Anita...
Fans have been predicting the audiobook’s ascendance ever since it became possible to record books. But when exactly was that? The audiobook’s origins can be traced back further than most people realize. - Cabinet Magazine
The set of symbols known in the Rapa Nui language as rongorongo is the only indigenous system of writing known to have developed among Pacific Islanders. Only an elite minority of Rapa Nui people could ever read it, and they died out before mainland scholars could record their knowledge. What's more, only 26 examples of rongorongo have survived. Is...
"The Survive to Thrive grant program, created by Ingram Content Group chairman John Ingram, hopes to raise a total of $2 million by the end of May to support indie bookstores. The program will be administered by the Book Industry Charitable (Binc) Foundation. Initial donations include a $500,000 contribution from Ingram Charities and Ingram Content Group and significant gifts...
"No wonder most people would rather read Instapoems, or listen to a spoken-word performance, than engage with traditional poetry: the barriers to entry are much lower. People who love traditional poetry might be tempted to say that such writing isn’t poetry at all. But the battle over nomenclature is a losing one. If millions of people think Rupi Kaur...
"Union workers at The New Yorker, Pitchfork and Ars Technica said Friday they had voted to authorize a strike as tensions over contract negotiations with Condé Nast, the owner of the publications, continued to escalate. … At The New Yorker, the unionized staff includes fact checkers and web producers but not staff writers, while most editors and writers at...
"Medium in all its complexity: a publishing platform used by the most powerful people in the world; an experiment in mixing highbrow and lowbrow in hopes a sustainable business would emerge; and a devotion to algorithmic recommendations over editorial curation that routinely caused the company confusion and embarrassment." - The Verge
And, in this case, narrowing it to give more power to Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. "The acquisition will help HarperCollins expand its catalog of backlist titles at a moment of growing consolidation in the book business. Houghton Mifflin publishes perennial sellers by well-known authors such as J.R.R. Tolkien, George Orwell, Philip Roth and Lois Lowry, as well as children’s...
That's because, well, look at the image of the cover. Author Dav Pilkey said of The Adventures of Ook and Gluk, Kung Fu Cavemen From The Future, "It was brought to my attention that this book also contains harmful racial stereotypes and passively racist imagery. ... I wanted to take this opportunity to publicly apologize for this. It was...
Sure, Gmail offers to fill in text on your messages - but things are getting more complicated. "AI’s capacity for creativity—one of those supposedly sacrosanct human attributes—is becoming more and more of an existential sticking point as humans learn to live alongside intelligent machines." - The Atlantic
Ramona is messy, makes extremely normal kid mistakes, is impulsive, and always, always demands that her parents love her - not anyway, but as is. This might seem usual now, but "in 1950, when Ramona made her first appearance, they were not unremarkable; they were trailblazing. Cleary took every attribute that girls were then warned away from — bossiness,...
That is, for most of them, because Google Translate (and Bing) relies on written translations - which works well for French, Spanish, English, German, and other often-translated languages. "No such data mountain exists, however, for languages that may be widely spoken but not as prolifically translated" - languages such as Wolof, Luganda, Twi and Ewe, not to mention many...
