More than 600 writers have signed a letter that "condemns PEN’s relative silence on the unfolding genocide in Gaza ... on the heels of two prominent novelists cutting ties with the organization over its decision to platform controversial actor and outspoken ceasefire opponent Mayim Bialik.” - LitHub
Was it No Child Left Behind? Common Core? COVID-19 school shutdowns? Or - as is the case for most people, from child to adult - the smart phone? - Slate
Romantic fiction, that is. With romances propping up the entire publishing industry, how hard could it be to write one? (Turns out writing a whole book simply isn’t that easy.) - Irish Times
Current debates about writing machines are not as fresh as they seem. As is quietly acknowledged in the footnotes of scientific papers, much of the intellectual infrastructure of today’s advances was laid decades ago. - Hedgehog Review
The Akwesasne Freedom School, on the St. Regis Mohawk Reservation, on the St. Lawrence River where New York, Ontario and Quebec meet, teaches K-8 classes entirely in Mohawk. The school, run by a nonprofit, has both American and Canadian students but accepts no money from either government. - The Christian Science Monitor
"It is testament to the fresh energy injected into the (bande dessinée) market by the pandemic: between 2019 and 2021, fanned by measures such as the Culture Pass that gave teenagers hundreds of euros to spend, it almost doubled in size from 48.4m sales a year to 87.2m." - The Guardian
Plenty of people, upon hearing the biggest music announcement of the year, started thinking about diacritical marks and then talking about them on social media. - The New York Times
"I called a friend with kids and said, 'Have you heard of an author named Raina Telgemeier?' 'Of course,' she said, sounding bemused, as if I’d asked whether she was familiar with the automobile." As one school librarian said, "Children reread those books over and over and over." - The Atlantic (MSN)
Perhaps no writer has been more clairvoyant about our current technological age than Neal Stephenson. His novels coined the term metaverse, laid the conceptual groundwork for cryptocurrency, and imagined a geoengineered planet. - The Atlantic (MSN)
The barrier to attempting lyric poetry is so low it’s basically asphalt. Platforms for the stuff are plentiful, and rotten poems, furred with hyperlinks, abound. - The Millions
The scroll is one of hundreds, all far too fragile to unroll, from Herculaneum that constitute the only intact library from the ancient world to survive, By using machine-learning to decipher scans of the scroll, the students have won the $700,000 prize offered in the Vesuvius Challenge. - Time
"Tender Buttons is a collection which attempts to do with words the same thing that Stein’s friend Picasso did with shapes; to render their familiarity strange and disorienting, to be less concerned with content and meaning than with the interplay of sound." - Literary Hub
