ArtsJournal: Arts, Culture, Ideas

WORDS

Debates About Machines Writing Have Been Raging For Years

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 Little Schoolhouse On The US-Canada Border That’s Keeping The Mohawk Language Alive

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

Bigger Than Ever: Now One Of Every Four Books Sold In France Is A Comic

"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

Taylor Swift V. The Comma Police

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

Why We Still Need Paper Books

Research suggests that comprehension is six to eight times better with physical books than e-readers. - Psychology Today

“Like The Beatles For Children”: This Author’s “Magic” Is Real

"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)

The Sci Fi Writer Who’s Been Pretty Good At Predicting The Future

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)

A Very Low Bar For Lyric Poetry

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

Three Students, Using AI, Decipher Text From Ancient Papyrus Carbonized In Mount Vesuvius Eruption

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

Why Gertrude Stein Matters As A Writer, Not Just As Patroness And Lesbian Icon

"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

The Book That ‘American Fiction’ Came From Is Still All Too Relevant

"The movie has come at a time when new authors of color are engaging with the same questions posed by Erasure — and publishers have paid substantial sums for novels that satirize the literary world’s racial inequities." - The New York Times

Utah Legislation Would Make Teachers Criminally Liable If Banned Books Are Found In Their Classrooms

"HB417 would allow ... public school employees to be charged with a class A misdemeanor if they keep materials specifically deemed 'objectively sensitive' available to students. … If found guilty, they could be fined no less than $500 and jailed for a term lasting no fewer than 30 days." - The Salt Lake Tribune

When Writers Choose Camp Over Tragedy

Shades of American Fiction, but make it gay: "If you were a young Black writer in America in the 1950s and early ’60s, it was generally expected that you would write about struggle." - LitHub

The Point Of Writing Is Writing

“A book’s quality is not dispositive—or sometimes even relevant to book sales. The publisher isn’t going to be able to charge more for my better book. The satisfaction of making a better book is almost entirely personal." - Inside Higher Ed

Audible Feeling The Heat From Spotify’s New AudioBook Plans

The concerns were unveiled during an internal all-hands meeting this week, where Audible CEO Bob Carrigan addressed employee inquiries about the company’s focus on competition rather than customer needs, according to a recording obtained by Business Insider. - GoodReader

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