WORDS

When Your Reading List Becomes A High Score (Is That Good?)

LitHub explores how platforms like Letterboxd and Goodreads transform intimate cultural experiences into competitive metrics. Because apparently we can't enjoy a book anymore without turning it into content for our personal brand. — Literary Hub

Britain’s Daily Telegraph Bought By German Media Conglomerate Axel Springer

Axel Springer, which owns the German publications Bild and Die Welt and the US website group Politico, will pay £575 million ($766 million) for Telegraph Media Group. Springer intends to “turbocharge” the Telegraph’s expansion into the U.S. marker and to make it “the leading center-right media outlet in the English-speaking world.” - AP

Why Dictionaries Still Matter

The book is formal and highly structured; it seems like something from another, vaguely bygone time. Still, dictionary editors have long paid close attention to how language is used and perused—in signs, in novels, in articles and pronouncements, and lately on the Web. - The Nation

How A Scholar Stumbled On Handwritten Notes By Galileo

Historian Ivan Malara spotted notes, annotations and a Bible verse handwritten by the young Galileo circa 1590 in an early printed copy of the Almagest, the second-century C.E. treatise on astronomy by Ptolemy which placed the Earth at the center of the universe. - Smithsonian Magazine

Colm Tóibín: Of Course AI Is A Threat To Creative Writing

"This idea no machine could ever replace my sensibility, which is so rich, varied, complex, and arising from experience and from history – that’s all rubbish. You can actually manufacture that." - The Conversation

Who Wrote This? The Age-Old Question Gets Circuitry

Before ChatGPT made everyone panic about robot poets, writers were already grappling with authenticity's slippery slope. Ghostwriters, collaborators, editors—the literary world's dirty secret is that pure authorship was always a romantic fiction. — LitHub

The Artist Who Copied Out The Complete “Moby-Dick” By Hand

Bethany Collins spent four months transcribing the 900-odd-page text. She finds many of Melville’s concerns relevant today: “following the lone madman who will take the whole ship down, … overconsumption, the pursuit of oil and an obsession with whiteness.” (Okay, the last one might be a stretch.) - T — The New York Times Magazine

The AI-Written College Essay And The Decline Of Thinking

Surely the most dismal prospect is that we will lose sight of our own forms of thinking and understanding if those terms are assimilated to the capacities of AI. - Public Books

Poet Threatens To Sue Arts Council England After Defunding

A poet is threatening Arts Council England (ACE) with legal action after a magazine it funds withdrew her work from publication based on her “social media presence”, which she believes refers to gender-critical posts. - The Guardian

Firefighters Rescue Rare Books From A Library On The Cliff Edge After Landslide

“Firefighters drilled through the wall of a building behind the structure and entering for minutes at a time, strapped the bookcases together and hauled them backwards to reach the books.” - The Guardian (UK)

Ode To A Great Editor

During my own editing stint, I came to understand writers as prisoners of their own minds, pressed up against the bars of the words they have already committed to the page. Writers suffer from a cognitive impairment that limits their ability to see flaws in their prose. - The Atlantic

Congressional Republicans Propose National Book Banning

House Resolution 7661 transforms grassroots library battles into national policy, giving censors sweeping powers to purge school and public collections. Democracy's reading rooms become political battlegrounds as cultural wars scale up. — Literary Hub

Where Has The Sex Gone? Our Literature Is Getting Cleaner

Literary writers have other demands to satisfy. In general, readers come to their books seeking not an escape from reality but perspective on it. Romance novels can provide this, just as literary novels can have happy endings, but they’re still beholden to the fantasy that’s part of the genre. - The Atlantic

A Rebirth In Critic-ing?

If the review sections of newspapers are closing down, there’s a sense that this moment could make room for a meatier, weirder kind of criticism. - Columbia Journalism Review

A Reporter Starts A “Book Club” For Newspaper Articles

At a St. Petersburg bookstore, Lauren Peace, an enterprise equity reporter at the Tampa Bay Times, moderates conversations about a selected story among its author and community members. The idea is not just to discuss the story’s substance, but to give readers a behind-the-scenes look at the reporting process and decision-making. - Nieman Lab

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