ArtsJournal: Arts, Culture, Ideas

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Long Before Hogwarts, There Was The Wizard School Of Diana Wynne Jones

"Jones’s work is galvanised by her respect for the children who read her books. They are warm, sardonic and, in places, unexpectedly elliptical." - The Guardian (UK)

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Next Book Will Be A Bunch of Song Lyrics

"The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain: Lyrics for Stacey Kent will be published on 7 March 2024 by Faber, featuring 16 sets of lyrics alongside specially commissioned illustrations by Italian artist Bianca Bagnarelli and an introduction by Ishiguro." - The Guardian

The Dangers Of Storytelling As A Learning Device

Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories which gain attention and make ‘impact’. But anyone in the business of reporting on reality - scholars, scientists, journalists - ought to be suspicious of narrative, even if they use it. - Ian Leslie

The Scrappy Independent Publisher That Established English As A Language Of Indian Literature

In 1958, P. Lal, Anita Desai, and other Kolkata writers who gathered in a Sunday-morning adda (a long, often serious discussion, very typically Bengali) founded the publisher still known as Writers Workshop, dedicated to Indian writing in English, which gave a start to many authors now famous worldwide. - Literary Hub

Badge Of Honor: Eight Writers Talk About What It Feels Like To Have Their Books Banned

"I find talking about the ridiculousness of the bans sometimes brings laughter, in the ways our people have learned to laugh to keep from crying. We do what we need to do: we resist, we inform, we amplify, we write.” - Harper's Bazaar

Argentine Police Make “Historic Seizure” Of Nazi Propaganda And Shutter Local Publisher

"Argentina's Federal Police shut down a publisher that sold books that praised Nazi ideology, seized hundreds of texts and arrested one person … during Tuesday's raids in the town of San Isidro, north of Buenos Aires." - AP

Does Studying A New Language Interfere With The Foreign Languages You’ve Already Learned?

"This is a frequent observation among multilinguals, that 'Languages can co-exist, but they tussle, as do siblings, over mental resources and attention,' as (language scientist Julie Sedivy) put it." Recent research put this observation to the test. - Psyche

The College Essays ChatGPT Wrote For Me To Submit To The Ivies

"I used several free tools to generate short essays for some Ivy League applications. The A.I. chatbots’ answers have been edited for brevity and clarity." - The New York Times

AI Readers Of Audio Books Are Here. There Are Some Issues…

If the listener is wholly unaware that the narrator is digital, this raises some of the many ethical questions (such as that of consent) that arise whenever users are unaware that they are interacting with an AI-driven technology, rather than with a person. - The Conversation

Michael Chabon, Ayelet Waldman, David Henry Hwang Sue OpenAI For Copyright Violation

"A group of authors… have filed suit in federal court against OpenAI, alleging the company unfairly used their copyrighted works to teach its chatbots how to respond to written prompts." - MSN (San Francisco Chronicle)

Agatha Christie Pilgrims Have A New Stopping Point

The author of 66 novels and 15 short-story collections gets her own (seated) statue in the town where she lived for more than four decades. - The Guardian (UK)

Did Yeats Ever Say The Quote Engraved On Dublin Marathon Finishers’ Medal?

Twenty thousand finishers of the marathon are set to receive a medal reading, "There are no strangers here; only friends you haven’t met yet." - LitHub

Novelist Lauren Groff Writes Several Novels At A Time

She writes them in longhand - twice, the second draft without referring to the first draft - and sometimes in iambic pentameter "just for fun." - The New York Times

The Vulture Capitalists Who Now Own Simon And Schuster

"If you train an AI model on Danielle Steel’s nearly 200 books and write a new one, somebody has to own the rights." - The Atlantic

So There’s A Literary Quarterly About Taco Bell

The Taco Bell Quarterly editor's thoughts: Taco Bell's advertising and image is "all sort of unhinged. ... So I knew that would fit in well with the creative writing community." - Slate

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