"By the time that America’s reckoning on race reached a fever pitch last year, publishing was months into a messy upheaval of its own. On Twitter, publishing insiders railed against the blinding whiteness of the industry, while writers of color used #PublishingPaidMe to show that they often received far less money than their white peers. The resulting move by...
"For those who view the very notion of the canon as inherently elitist, it’s worth noting that the phenomena mostly clearly implicated in its formation were the democratizing processes of the late 19th and early 20th century: the massive extension of free education—not just to little white proto-patriarchs, but to girls, and children from diverse communities as well—together with...
"Google is negotiating individual licensing deals with a divided Spanish news industry that could allow the U.S. tech giant's news service to resume in the country. … Google News, which links to third party content, closed in Spain in late 2014 in response to legislation which meant it had to pay a mandatory collective licensing fee to re-publish headlines...
Uyghur, a Turkic language that uses the Arabic alphabet, has about 10 million native speakers, most of them in the Xinjiang province of northwestern China. With the Chinese Communist Party engaged in a campaign to suppress the Uyghur minority and their language (including scrubbing Uyghur websites based in China from the Web), a WeChat group of academics, translators, and...
"The French government is appealing for corporate help to acquire the manuscript of the Marquis de Sade's notorious The 120 Days of Sodom, valued at €4.5m (£3.9m), for the National Library of France." - The Guardian
Sometimes, virtual isn't going to cut it - and certainly won't replace "the interstitial socializing, the sidewalk conversations on the way to the next bar, the hungover confessionals of the diner booth, the 4 am rants about art and life and the absurdities of corporate publishing. … Finding their way through it all, giving it purpose and passion, are...
A researcher comes up against French bureaucracy: "To learn more about the day-to-day life of Parisians during the war, I turned to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF). This modern library is made up of four buildings in a configuration that resembles four open books; however, the public resources are less accessible than this design would suggest, with the tomes for...
“The problem with writing is it’s just another screen, and that’s all there is … I can’t connect with my imagination. I can’t connect with any creativity. My whole brain is tied up with processing, processing, processing what’s going on in the world.” - The Guardian
"In 2009, the Green family, owners of the Hobby Lobby chain of arts-and- crafts stores, began acquiring a series of weathered fragments advertised as Dead Sea Scrolls, including this one, … were displayed at the Museum of the Bible. … Last spring, however, scientific analysis proved what a number of biblical scholars had begun to suspect: the sixteen...
Among the winners of this literary resurgence is a micro-industry: book subscription services, which curate a selection for you and deliver them to your home. In an era of information overload and a crowded literary market with an often debilitating degree of choice, it isn’t hard to see the attraction of professionals highly attuned to the market – or...
Back in 2014, when the EU passed a law allowing people to petition Google to de-index old news stories about them (e.g., criminal convictions or embarrassing incident from youth that became public), American newsrooms were dead-set against the idea. Now, The Boston Globe, The Plain Dealer of Cleveland, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and some other papers have begun to institute...
"Our data consists of digital editions of 200 works of prize-winning fiction, divided into four subcorpora of equal size: U.S.-American, French, German, and a collection of novels drawn from 19 different "minor" European languages. We ultimately find no evidence to support Casanova's theory that minor literatures are more nationalistic than literature produced within major cultural capitals. Indeed, the evidence...
"Comic creators have been wrestling with contemporary Australia and its identities in a series of publication coming out this year. What they show is a nation divided by racism and on a collision course with dystopia rather than being 'one and free'." - ArtsHub (Australia)
“The best way to think about magazines is as the analog Internet—they’d foster communities of people, just like on social networks,” Steven Lomazow, a seventy-three-year-old New Jersey neurologist who created the exhibition from his personal collection of more than eighty-three thousand magazine issues, said the other day. - The New Yorker
"The texts in The Seventy-Five Pages were written in 1908, around the time Proust began working on In Search of Lost Time, which was published between 1913 and 1927. The papers were part of a collection of documents held by the late publisher Bernard de Fallois, who died in 2018." Gallimard will release the book in France on...
