"BBC Culture polled 177 books experts from 56 countries in order to find the greatest children's books ever. From Where the Wild Things Are to Haroun and the Sea of Stories, here's the top 100." - BBC
“Complexity neither disguised the shortcomings of poor essays, nor enhanced the appeal of high-quality essays.” In other words, George Orwell got it right: “Never use a long word where a short one will do.” - Big Think
"The U.S. Department of Education has found that a suburban Atlanta school district's decision to remove some books from its libraries may have created a hostile environment that violated federal laws against race and sex discrimination." - AP
Some of the laws impose severe penalties on librarians, who until now were exempted in almost every state from prosecution over obscene material — a carve-out meant to permit accurate lessons in topics such as sex education. - Washington Post
"One glance at Filipino social media and you will find a recurrent set of waves, twists and inverted heart shapes. They’re more than just symbols — they’re part of the 17-character writing system called Baybayin, which is making a comeback after hundreds of years." - NBC News
"Wanting to write ... made me unintelligible to my mother. I couldn’t explain how I would survive on a career in words, and she couldn’t fathom why I would squander the chance at prosperity my parents had contorted to give me." - The Atlantic
What I find most fascinating about the lawsuit, though, is the glimpse it offers into how national and state-level political dynamics empower the most fanatical members of a community to impose their will on everyone else. - The New York Times
Working with ChatGPT, an author inputs a prompt request and can choose from an infinite number of outputs. If you don’t like a paragraph ChatGPT wrote, you can edit your prompt and ask it for another one. These tools can guide anything from character names to plot points. - Wired
Joined by free-speech advocacy group PEN America and several authors and parents, Penguin Random House filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday against the Escambia County School District and its school board, alleging they were violating the 1st Amendment by scrubbing library shelves of books based on a political or ideological disagreement. - Los Angeles Times
To demonstrate how this improves the AI's performance, Anthropic loaded the entire text of The Great Gatsby (72,000 tokens) with one line modified from the original. The AI was tasked with spotting the difference, which it did in just 22 seconds, the company claimed in a press release. - Interesting Engineering
"Stories online will no longer include a traditional dateline that tells where a story was reported from. Instead, certain stories will have 'enhanced bylines' that tells readers more about how journalists did the reporting." - Nieman Lab
"PEN America, Penguin Random House, a group of authors, and a group of parents have filed a federal lawsuit against a Florida school district over the 'unconstitutional' removal of books from school libraries." - Publishers Weekly
"The Codex Sassoon, a leather-bound, handwritten (10th-century) parchment volume containing a nearly complete Hebrew Bible, was purchased … on behalf of the American Friends of ANU and donated to ANU Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv." - AP
"Jen Cousins and Stephana Ferrell track school board votes and the fates of books across Florida's 67 districts. They file public records requests, appear before the Legislature, enlist volunteers and try to find wins in a state firmly in the hands of a conservative Republican Party." - Yahoo! (Los Angeles Times)
"Books about the Tiananmen Square massacre, Hong Kong protest movements, and other subjects deemed politically sensitive by Beijing have been removed from the former British colony's public libraries in the lead-up to the 34th anniversary of the killings." - The Guardian
