ArtsJournal: Arts, Culture, Ideas

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The Restorative Powers Of Reading

We all recognise how important self-care is and that books help you feel part of a bigger world. Which is why we choose to read diversely and share good reads with each other. - Psyche

Consider The Poetry Slam

"Poetry slam is one of the few examples we have of a 'language game'. ... t is a place to play with words, and that is the entire point of the gathering: to think aloud under pressure and work out arguments in ensemble." - The Nation

The Rising Alarm Over Library Book Bans

It appears that public libraries are another battleground for the United State's ever-present culture wars. - NPR

Why BuzzFeed News Didn’t Survive While Its Sister, HuffPost, Did

"BuzzFeed News was 'a social media ecosystem company, and the ecosystem went away,' said a former BuzzFeed exec. 'HuffPost was a pre-social media company. And then got eclipsed by BuzzFeed in the social media age. And then as social media goes away, HuffPost is still there among the rocks.'" - Digiday

The Big US Publishers Have Raised Starting Salaries by 23%

"As of April 1, the average entry-level salary for publishing employees located in New York City at the Big Five trade publishers and Scholastic was $47,583, up from $38,583 before the Covid-19 pandemic. … That marks an increase of 23.3%, during a period when prices rose 12.4%." - Publishers Weekly

Shakespeare’s Environmentalism

It would, of course, be an anachronism to dub Shakespeare an environmentalist. But he was acutely aware of what we would term the environmental issues of his era. - The Conversation

The Science Of Punctuation In Languages

Punctuation can be a nuisance; it is often simply neglected. Wrong! The most recent statistical analyses paint a different picture: punctuation seems to "grow out" of the foundations shared by all the (examined) languages, and its features are far from trivial. - Phys

Book Ban Attempts Are At The Highest Level We’ve Ever Seen, Says American Library Association

"The ALA ... said in 2022 it had seen the highest number of reports of calls to remove or restrict books since it began compiling data more than 20 years ago." They had to expand their annual list of most-banned titles, too. - The Guardian

How Shakespeare Was Influenced By Mathematical Breakthroughs

With 2023 marking 400 years since the publication of Shakespeare’s First Folio, it is exciting to see how the Bard’s plays spoke to significant developments in the 16th-century mathematical world. - The Conversation

When Hilary Mantel Died, She Left Behind A Jane Austen-Inspired Manuscript

The book world is salivating. "Imagine the post-modernist-Austenite novel that would have been! Imagine the Mantel treatment being given to poor Charlotte Lucas, not-quite-good-enough-and-not-rich-enough and doomed to serve as vessel for the world’s most boring man." - LitHub

Putin’s War On Ukrainian Cultural Memory

It's always the libraries. "Three national and state libraries, including the National Scientific Medical Library of Ukraine, as well as some 25 university libraries, have been severely damaged or destroyed, the most shocking statistics relate to public libraries."- The Atlantic

Imagine Being A 16-Year-Old Bookstore Owner Who Gets To Interview Judy Blume

Just, like, wow. That is extremely cool. And: "'It’s people like you who give us hope, because you’re the next generation and you’re who’s going to be most affected it,' Blume told the teenager." - Variety

A City That’s Been Longing For A Bookstore Finally Gets Its Own

"Most of Buho's books are secondhand or donated, costing around $10 to keep them accessible. Literacy rates in the region are some of the lowest in the country, and Hernandez sees his store is something that can only help." - NPR

Author Celeste Ng On Book Hangovers And Getting Through The Last Few Years

"I had a crisis of faith in the early days of the pandemic. I thought: books don’t do anything, maybe I should go and become a nurse? And then I realised that I was turning to poetry." - The Guardian (UK)

Perhaps Writers Don’t Actually Fetishize The Tools Of The Trade Enough

Tobias Wolff reflects on his unfilled notebooks and wonders, "At what point do the tools of writing go from functional objects in their own right to signifiers that give the trappings of being a writer without ever having to sit down and write?" - LitHub

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