At Montgomery Ward, Robert L. May’s “boss tapped him to write the children’s story and suggested it have an animal protagonist because Ferdinand the Bull, a popular animated short produced by Walt Disney Productions, had just been released.” - Fast Company
Well: “Writers are not content for their talents and their hard work to be used to generate positive publicity for companies who are engaged in deeply harmful activities,” says one climate protest leader. Will the awards survive at all? - The Guardian (UK)
But it’s not just a larger temporal lobe that correlates to reading - it’s also the auditory cortex. “Isn’t reading mainly a visual skill? Not only. To pair letters with speech sounds, we first need to be aware of the sounds of the language.” - Wired
"By the 16th century, intensity rather than trueness had become the word very’s primary sense, through a process (called) 'semantic bleaching.' Interestingly, words whose meanings involve truth ... are particularly prone to semantic bleaching. And 'truth,' as in 'exactly as said or written,' takes us back to 'literally.'" - The Conversation
"After years of battles in school and public libraries, the campaign by conservative-leaning 'parent rights' groups has succeeded in casting a nationwide chill over the market for children's books they deem inappropriate, greatly diminishing sales and opportunities for authors to promote their work." - Los Angeles Times (Yahoo!)
"Taking a stand in the national debate on banning sexually explicit books from school libraries, Gov. Phil Murphy on Monday signed a law that will dictate how school boards in New Jersey will evaluate sensitive and controversial materials and protect librarians from legal challenges." - NJ.com
“A book sits atop a large language model, allowing readers to converse with an A.I. facsimile of its author.” At last: No more having to think about the meaning of complicated passages, or trace the lines of thought that got an author from A to B. - AV Club
"Might these events deter future winners of prizes with controversial sponsors" — the Baillie Gifford prize in the UK, the Scotiabank Giller Prize in Canada, and so on — "from accepting prizes or prize money, and could that threaten those prizes’ funding?" - The Guardian
The diary that Yitskhok Rudashevski kept from June 1941 to April 1943, written entirely in Yiddish, contains references not only to folklore from the Vilna Ghetto, but also to the Jewish community’s cultural resistance to the Nazi occupation. - Smithsonian
Several scholarly publishers have forged agreements with technology companies looking to use content to train the large language models (LLMs) that underlie their AI tools. A new tracker aims to catalogue what deals are being made — and by whom. - Nature
"The Strand Book Store has reached a tentative contract agreement with its staff union, which is represented by United Auto Workers Local 2179, putting an end to a strike that stretched through the weekend and much of Monday." - Publishers Weekly
"A federal judge in Texas rejected the auction sale of Alex Jones’ Infowars to The Onion satirical news outlet, criticizing the bidding for the conspiracy theory platform as flawed as well as how much money families of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary shooting stood to receive." - AP
Novelists increasingly defined their craft by opposing tradition, and so placed themselves at loggerheads with most of their possible audience. There is something essentially Pyrrhic about the triumphs of “Ulysses” (1920) and “The Man Without Qualities." - The Wall Street Journal (MSN)
"The store’s 110 unionized workers went on strike in the middle of the busy holiday season, leaving the shop’s '18 miles of books' to be run by a skeleton staff. … The union wants base pay to increase from $16 an hour, which is minimum wage in New York City, to $18 an hour." - Gothamist
