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
That it’s experimenting with writing could suggest OpenAI feels its latest generation of models vastly improve on the wordsmithing front. Historically, AI hasn’t proven to be an especially talented essayist. - TechCrunch
“Gatsby is a more complicated book than its pop-culture footprint suggests. It’s big enough to survive all those turgid high school essays about color symbolism and the American dream, … all those mediocre movies and bad plays. Here’s the story of how The Great Gatsby has endured — and why we keep misreading it.” - Vox
For hundreds of years, we—broadly speaking, these books’ Anglophone-ish audience—have been reading too much into Greece. There were the philhellenes, like Nietzsche, who believed the ancients to be “the only people of genius in the history of the world.” - LA Review of Books
It is thought that about 90 per cent of self-published books sell fewer than 100 copies, although some self-publishing writers have become successful, notably Colleen Hoover. - The Times (UK)
“I thought, why don’t we go through, like, all of the papers?” The AI tool has analysed more than 37,000 papers in two months. Its website flags papers in which it has found flaws – many of which have yet to be verified by a human. - Nature
