The unique selling point of the publisher, launched in 2011 by QI researchers John Mitchinson and Justin Pollard, and Crap Towns author Dan Kieran, was that it allowed writers to pitch ideas online directly to readers. - The Guardian
“This has a lot to do with the fetishization of what’s difficult, especially as both poetry and criticism professionalized. … (Ordinary people) understand the words. People read the poems and think they know what the poems mean. … (And) many people read Frost for the first time as children.” - The Paris Review
According to those who depend on them, local libraries are far more than a repository of books - they are community focal points and, for some, a vital lifeline to the outside world. What happens when one closes? - BBC
The truism has it that most great New York magazine editors come from away—from the West or the Midwest or across the Atlantic—and arrive with an ability to see what natives don’t. - The New Yorker
The initiative by Il Foglio, a conservative liberal daily, is part of a month-long journalistic experiment aimed at showing the impact AI technology has “on our way of working and our days”, the newspaper’s editor, Claudio Cerasa, said. - The Guardian
A wave of proposed state laws that would hold librarians criminally liable for the presence of any material in their libraries’ collections deemed “obscene” has been getting increased attention and drawing opposition. Yet it’s important to remember that such laws are (a) straight out of Project 2025 and (b) not new. - Book Riot
Folk tales offer a kind of fabular impersonality, where an author’s voice is lost in a wider fiction machine or culture of storytelling. That form of multi-voiced impersonality played a big part in some of the most influential 20th-century fictions. - London Review of Books
One “striking feature of Grade’s fiction is that it almost never acknowledges the imminent annihilation of the world it so meticulously reconstructs—as if by ignoring that obscene fact, he could annul it.” - The Atlantic
“The book, Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams, who used to be the company's global public policy director, includes a series of critical claims about what she witnessed during her seven years working at Facebook.” - BBC
The “Great Charter” signed by John of England and his barons lasted less than three months before they were back at war with each other; new versions were issued in 1216 and 1217 by John’s successor, nine-year-old Henry III. But it’s the revision of 1225 that settled matters. - History Today
The authors mocked Meta for raising what they call "the Bob Dylan defense" of its torrenting, citing song lyrics from "Sweetheart Like You" that say, "Steal a little and they throw you in jail / Steal a lot and they make you king." - Ars Technica
“Three trade groups said they were launching legal action against Meta in a Paris court over what they said was the company’s ‘massive use of copyrighted works without authorization’ to train its generative AI model. (One group) noted that ‘numerous works’ from its members are turning up in Meta’s data pool.” - AP
For most poets, pandemics could provide a context for poems, but rarely became a focus. A tome of significant poems about pandemics would only be achievable with considerable barrel-scraping – perhaps excluding poetry about AIDS, which of course devastated some communities significantly more than others. - The Conversation
