"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...
The organization’s annual awards, which it typically gives out in the spring to works published the previous year, are unusual in that book critics, rather than authors or academics, select the winners. The awards are open to any book published in English in the United States. - The New York Times
"We experience art as a repository of our humanity, a representation that tries to capture the meaning we seek in our lives. Treating art as a means to an end feels degrading, like reducing the worth of a service worker to the service she performs. The best self-improvement scheme I can think of is to prove ourselves better than...
Don't worry: so far, there's no evidence that they're forgeries. But "the editors of a scholarly volume in which the circumstances of the discovery were detailed have formally retracted the chapter because the manuscript's 'provenance is tainted'" — which is to say, the story told to researchers by the current owner of the manuscripts of how he acquired them...
Debates ensued about whether the choice of a translator should be only merit-based or whether identity should play a part. Another thread was about publisher practices and how translators are chosen. Some White translators who have spent their careers translating writers of color into other languages questioned their own pursuits. - Washington Post
"Today innovation is one of the most hallowed words in the contemporary lexicon. That onetime pariah term is now revered. Linguists call this process one of “semantic shift,” a significant change in a word’s meaning. Examples of such shifts are no further than Google News: cookie, cancel, gay, pod." - The American Scholar
Edgar Allan Poe ended his short story with "Darkness and Decay and the Red Death illimitable dominion over all." Others, from Daniel Defoe to Mary Shelley to Jack London, leave only a few survivors behind. José Saramago and Albert Camus handle things more subtly but perhaps more painfully. Jill Lepore gives us a look. - The New Yorker
Because we use screens for social purposes and for amusement, we all — adults and children — get used to absorbing online material, much of which was designed to be read quickly and casually, without much effort. And then we tend to use that same approach to on-screen reading with harder material that we need to learn from, to...
"For a few decades in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, authors from across ideologies and genres published stories that today would be called 'cli-fi,' or climate fiction." Among those authors were no less than Mark Twain and Jules Verne (who wrote about industrialists intentionally heating the Arctic in order to mine coal). - JSTOR Daily
The magazine, co-founded and long run by the late George Plimpton, "has a new editor, only the sixth since being founded in 1953, but its third since 2017. Emily Stokes, currently a senior editor at The New Yorker, succeeds Emily Nemens, who announced earlier this month that she was leaving to work on a new book." - AP
