You may not recognize the term, but you use pragmatics all the time; we all do. John McWhorter explains what exactly they are, and he predicted that when AI programs started incorporating pragmatics properly, chatbots would start become convincing to human users. - The New York Times
The Deep South’s largest daily is going digital-only and will print its last hard-copy newspaper in December 31, ending a run which began in 1868. The closure comes despite the fact that the print version, with about 40,000 subscribers, is still profitable. - AP
“CliffsNotes for students who struggle to get through Brontë, Woolf, or Shakespeare seem laughably analog in the time of ChatGPT, but CliffsNotes offer genuine analysis and even scholarship. The difference between CliffsNotes and today’s computerized counterparts encapsulates the disintegration of knowledge, particularly of reading comprehension.” - Literary Hub
Unlike his contemporary and admirer T.S. Eliot, he didn’t see history as ending “with a whimper” but rather with a long, subsiding, pleasurable sigh of recollection. For Constantine Cavafy, when life and history came close to their ending, poetry began. - The New Republic
The 54-year-old paper, one of the US’s oldest alt-weeklies, made major layoffs and narrowly avoided shutting down in January. The Reader has now been acquired by Seattle-based Noisy Creek, which owns The Stranger as well as The Portland Mercury. - WTTW (Chicago)
Anthropic has reached a preliminary settlement in a class action lawsuit brought by a group of prominent authors, marking a major turn in of the most significant ongoing AI copyright lawsuits in history. - Wired
Jonathan Karp became CEO in 2020 and steered the publishing house through COVID, an antitrust case and a change in ownership. He’s moving on to launch the imprint Simon Six, which will release just six books a year. (In 2005, he started a similar imprint, Twelve — one book each month — at Hachette.) - AP
After a few Fridays, I noticed that one of the most inveterate nonreaders was not only listening, but also looking at his book, even mouthing along. - Washington Post
Virginia Giuffre spent several years completing Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice with co-author Amy Wallace. On April 1, shortly after a serious automobile collision, Giuffre wrote to Wallace asking that the book be released “in the event of my passing”; she committed suicide later that month. - AP
On Friday afternoon, writers who applied for the National Endowment for the Arts’ 2026 Creative Writing Fellowships received an email from the NEA saying that the program had been canceled. - Publishers Weekly
Yes, a decline in reading with kids “suggests a missed opportunity for parents to instill in their children an early love of reading.” But there’s so much more. “Reading aloud to my children was ... a way to guide them as they started to understand the world.” - The Atlantic
Who can afford this? And yes, writers’ retreats “have long been a staple of creative life,” but “you don’t need an approved writing sample to go on these luxury retreats. All you need is cash and time.” - Slate
You write about the imperfections, of course, even when a New York Times interviewer is so doubtful about your narrative that he says, “Help me through my skepticism.” - The New York Times
"Cheap and easy, at least five hundred lesbian-themed paperbacks sold millions of copies nationwide between 1935 and 1965. That’s a lot of lesbians.” - LitHub
The government says it is cancelling the VAT on books, one of the highest in the world, — despite the estimated loss of €44 million ($51.5 million) in tax revenue — to combat a growing “reading crisis.” Literacy statistics from the OECD indicate that one-quarter of Danish 15-year-olds cannot read and understand a simple text. - Euronews
