"There is simply no way that whiteness and Blackness will mingle as they have in music, cuisine, gesture, greeting styles, dating, and multiracial identity, and yet for some reason be halted at language. One might wish to enforce an artificial blockade here, but it’s far too late." - The New York Times
"In 40 years, it’s gone from a politically suspect niche to one of China’s most successful cultural exports, with author Liu Cixin gaining an international following that includes fans like Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg. But it’s had to overcome obstacles created by geopolitics for just as long." - AP
"Scholars had estimated that there were about 70,000 books waiting to be rescued. (Aaron) Lansky went on to gather 1.5 million Yiddish books — a trove that evolved into the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass., one of the nation’s leading Jewish cultural institutions." - The New York Times
"It is permissible in English for a preposition to be what you end a sentence with," the dictionary publisher said in a post shared on Instagram last week. - NPR
User numbers of an app called “Bookclubs,” designed to help organize clubs, grew 240% from 2020 to 2021. Since then, its user base has been roughly doubling annually, the company says. The app currently has just under one million users with accounts. - The Wall Street Journal
For instance, moderators at the Perth Festival Writers’ Weekend in Australia were sent a memo titled "Facilitator safety tips." Among those tips: discussing with panelists in advance what are off-limits topics and ending (or simply forgoing) audience Q&As if they risk becoming too inflammatory. - The Guardian
All told, there are more endangered languages in and around New York City than have ever existed anywhere else, says Perlin, who has spent 11 years trying to document them. - The New York Times
Al-Kalima joins a long list of destroyed libraries. In addition, “the Central Archives of Gaza (which contained 150 years of records pertaining to Gaza’s history) and the Great Omari Mosque (which contained one of the most significant collections of rare books in Palestine) have both also been destroyed.” - LitHub
The great success of Fifty Shades has turned publishers’ attention to the wealth of stories found in online fan fiction archives. These stories sometimes have huge loyal readerships. - The Conversation
The news that a team of students, using AI on digital scans, has deciphered the text on one of the scrolls carbonized in the 79 AD eruption of Vesuvius was greeted with excitement in many places — but not among the current residents of the site. - Artnet
"Most linguists think those speakers were nomadic herders on the steppes of Ukraine and Russia about 6,000 years ago. Yet a minority put the origin 2,000 to 3,000 years earlier, (in agricultural) Anatolia. ... Now a new analysis, using techniques borrowed from evolutionary biology, has come down in favor of the latter." - Knowable
The controversy is over nominations for the 2023 awards: the ceremony was held for the first time in China, in Chengdu. Memos leaked afterward show that, in an act of anticipatory censorship, several titles with enough votes to be finalists were declared ineligible out of fear of offending China's government. - Salon
It turns out that the volumes most frequently pilfered from SFPL shelves aren't, say, bestselling thrillers; they're books about addiction and recovery. So city officials want to start giving such books away for free. - AP
