“The excavation of the political from the personal is always worth studying, which is part of the reason People has always been such a rich text. But today’s People Magazine is thinner, less glossy, and generally less substantive.” True for many magazines, but for People? It's Barry Diller. - Culture Study
Cue the sounds of a long search for success: "After a decade of self publishing, McFadden signed a series of deals with Sourcebooks’ mystery and thriller imprint, Poisoned Pen Press,” which is releasing her novels at an absolutely punishing rate. - The New York Times
Ugh. “The people who run publishing companies consistently value quantity over quality. This is stressful for the workers on the ground, the ones who likely chose to work in book publishing in the first place because they actually, you know, like books.” So … outside consultants seem attractive. - LitHub
A fleet of ten is now seven, of which a majority “carry fewer books and have to be loaded and unloaded. librarian, whose yellow van did not return from the garage in April, said: 'I am worried that the mobile library service will fizzle out and die.’” - The Scotsman
First, is language acquired by specialized mental processes that are dedicated to this task or learned by general-purpose processes used for a variety of learning tasks? Second, can we project the processes of language acquisition/learning that we observe in the present into the prehistoric past to gain insights about the evolution of language? - LitHub
"By opening itself more forthrightly to a wider audience, the library is doing something that Henry Clay Folger could probably never have imagined would be necessary: assert the importance of Shakespeare to public life, from scholars to laymen, passersby and politicians." - The Washington Post (MSN)
"Lahiri’s urge to escape English has many origins, but in part stems from her rebellion against contemporary publishing’s subsidiary plan for nonwhite authors, which incentivizes them to write about the persecution and difference they experience." Her new collection of Italian stories indicates that she may remain stuck in that paradigm. - Public Books
The fake journals show how easy it is to game the systems used to evaluate researchers for promotions and hiring — and this could be a bellwether for knowledge workers in other industries. - TechCrunch
Beginning in September, this is what the majority of elementary-school kids in New York City will be doing. More than two-thirds of its school districts selected the Into Reading curriculum. For those kids, learning to read will no longer revolve around books. - The Atlantic
Works by white writers dropped from 88 percent to 75 percent in five years. It is by far the biggest such change in U.S. literary history. Although these findings point to significant gains, they also demand that we reckon with what appears now to be the beginning of their reversal. - The Atlantic
"Today, figures like Schomburg and … W.E.B. Du Bois are hailed as the founders of the 20th-century Black intellectual tradition. But increasingly, scholars are uncovering the important role of the women who often ran the libraries, where they built collections and — just as important — communities of readers." - The New York Times
Tattered Cover has faced a difficult financial situation in recent years. The local bookstore chain has been staving off bankruptcy for years under two different owners. It finally filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last October, closing three locations and laying off nearly 30 workers in the process. - Denverite
The alleged crime happened when the Booker Prize-winning author was speaking at a human rights conference in Delhi in 2010; she said, "Kashmir has never been an integral part of India. It is a historical fact. Even the Indian government has accepted this." (For this, she was originally accused of sedition.) - BBC
“Style isn’t something you apply later,” Amis said in 2021, explaining why he couldn’t abide JM Coetzee. “It’s embedded in your perception, and writers without that freshness of voice make no appeal to me. What is one in quest of with such a writer? Their views? Their theories?” - New Statesman
Even in an age when people frequently wrote by hand, messy and at times illegible handwriting was still a common problem. They even had a word for it: cacography, calligraphy’s evil twin. - The Conversation
