Academia is a serious place, and it takes itself seriously. But it is also, like Hollywood or Washington, profoundly ridiculous — the kind of symbolically overburdened, sociologically peculiar environment that can only really be understood through satire. Luckily, we have an entire literary subgenre, the campus novel, to fulfill that requirement. - The New York Times
Nihar Malaviya, 49, has been at the helm of Penguin Random House for a year — not enough time to turn a battleship, but enough to make some key decisions that give clues to his outlook and goals. - The New York Times
"The Alabama Public Library Service has voted not to renew its American Library Association membership. This comes after some in the state have accused the ALA … of promoting Marxism, supporting keeping sexual content in libraries, and discriminating against religious organizations." - Book Riot
"Following legislation introduced in states like Massachusetts, Colorado, Kansas, and New Mexico, legislators in New Jersey introduced a newly revised Freedom to Read Act into the (state) Senate." - Book Riot
A spokesperson for the Swedish tech giant said users have listened to more than 90,000 individual titles from the platform’s catalogue of more than 200,000 audiobooks, and that the catalogue continues to grow month after month. - The Bookseller
"In elementary school, we learn logical rules for using punctuation. Semicolons connect two related independent clauses, while colons follow an independent clause and introduce a further explanation, etc.. … (But) this logical approach to punctuation is only a few centuries old. Earlier, punctuation was largely a guide to reading aloud." - JSTOR Daily
Set up under the patronage of George IV to “reward literary merit and excite literary talent”, the society still has royal sponsorship from Queen Camilla. But those critical of its recent past speak of a “shambolic” and “clubby” institution – a place intended to shelter elite talent, rather than represent the wider community of accomplished writers. - The Guardian
The new parlance is a Spanish-influenced dialect of English being spoken in Southern Florida, a lingo-infusion born out of decades of immigration from Spanish-speaking countries, most notably Cuba since the end of the revolution in 1959. - IFL Science
With the addition of Spotify, the audiobook sector grew by 28 percent in that period, the company said. Using figures provided by Spotify, Bookstat estimated that Spotify had a market share of 11 percent, putting it ahead of Apple and behind Audible, which has long been the dominant player in the medium. - The New York Times
Dozens of cities and states across America are overhauling the way their schools teach reading — attempting to close gaps exacerbated by the pandemic. - Axios
"The shuffling and reshuffling has reached the point where Condé is now spitting out the people who were brought in to replace the prior generation of people it spit out. … Says senior correspondent Delia Cai. 'You would be shocked at how few people are holding it up.'" - New York Magazine
Orwell contended that language had become corrupt and debased in his time, but the survival of his examples into the present contradicts him, suggesting that not only the problem but the very examples may be timeless. - The New York Times
She is not having it with the censors. For one of her students, it's changed his life. "Until recently, he says, was not naturally inclined towards reading. But the secret bookshelf opened a world of characters and situations he immediately related to." - NPR
Non-verbal autistic people aren't non-thinking. Why, then, has it "taken so long for society to question the deeply ingrained fallacy equating speech fluency with intelligence, thereby condemning this whole population of people to a virtual prison?" - The Guardian (UK)
