ArtsJournal: Arts, Culture, Ideas

WORDS

A Room Of One’s Own: Creative Space For Writers

Every writer is different. The path to telling stories about our world is hard won, and the space that’s necessary to allow us to find our respective voices differs. The world we carry in our heads is arguably the most important space of all. It is a space whose suffocations and seductions compete for our attention. - LitHub

I Was An Established Writer. Then I Went Back To School And Learned…

Despite all the one-click-away distractions, my peers had insightful queries, if rather too many, interrupting lectures as if pressing every hyperlink. Rarely were they the moralizing young bores depicted by moralizing old bores in the culture wars. Mainly, they worried about finding jobs. - The New York Times

All Appalachian Writers Are Environmentalists

Well, maybe not J.D. Vance. But everyone else, thanks to decades - a century - of devastating floods and mudslides, mountaintop removal and mining disasters. - Book Riot

Pushing Back Against That Long Atlantic Freak-Out About Students Not Being Asked To Read Books

Maybe the problem is the reporter’s clickbait comprehension? “Young readers are eminently capable of critically engaging in long form content, but they’re rightfully demanding a seat at the table where decisions about texts are being made.” - Teaching & Learning

Booker Shortlist Authors On The Moment Inspiration Struck

“It feels incorrect, to have inspiration strike in the midst of grief, but what probably happened was that I was trying to get away somehow, to tell myself a distracting story. And a distracting story it was.” - The Guardian (UK)

Why Doesn’t Being A Good Writer Equal Being A Good Public Speaker?

Often, it’s an inverse relationship, as anyone who has gone to too many readings can tell you. - LitHub

A Time To Mourn, A Time To Publish

This is a tale of Walt Whitman’s influence on an AIDS activist, his partner’s devotion, and a posthumous novel. - NPR

Who Defines Asian-American Literature?

“There is no overarching chronology or guideline of how one behaves as an Asian in this country. One can immigrate and have no knowledge of the history and burden of yellowface, the Chinese Exclusion Act or the incarceration of Japanese Americans.” - LitHub

This Historian, For One, Would Rather Not Live In Quite Such Interesting Times

Helen Castor, writer about monarchs, says it has been extraordinary “to watch what happens when a leader is so consumed with the idea of power and authority as their own right that they are willing to attack and indeed break not only rules but the rule of law.” - The Guardian (UK)

Back To The Future: The Atlantic Magazine Returns To Monthly Print

“The decision to restore our print publication frequency to pre-internet levels was not made lightly, but it also seemed logical, given the strength and reach of our magazine, and the wide acclaim it receives." - The Atlantic

How The Nobel Literature Prize Keeps Getting It Right

The fact that the Academy has alighted on a deserving, interesting winner of the prize continues to be strange and miraculous, even if the twenty-first century has had far more hits than misses, many more recipients in the Doris Lessing zone—i.e., timeless—rather than the Rudyard Kipling zone—i.e., timeful (pejorative). - The New Republic

Wikipedia Declares War On Pink Slime AI

The group is clear that they don't wish to ban responsible AI use outright, but instead seek to eradicate instances of badly-sourced, hallucination-filled,  or otherwise unhelpful AI content that erodes the overall quality of the web's decades-old information repository. - Futurism

Nobel Literature Win Demonstrates Importance Of Small Presses

South Korean writer Han Kang's win as the 2024 Nobel Literature laureate is a triumph not only for Korean literature but also a reminder of the huge reach and influence of small press publishing, which takes on so much of the heavy work of introducing literature in translation to a wider audience. - The Guardian

Who Uses Public Libraries In The US? A Look At Statistics

"One thing that doesn’t seem to drive most people to libraries? Financial hardship. In fact, the higher your income, the more regularly you avail yourself of their ... services. And while we can’t say for sure, it seems bookstores and libraries complement each other more than they compete." - The Washington Post (MSN)

Who Invented The Marvel Multiverse? Look Back To Balzac

I believe the first person to master the fictional multiverse was the 19th-century French novelist, Honoré de Balzac, in his monumental work La Comédie Humaine (The Human Comedy, 1829-1847). - The Conversation

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