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
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
"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
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
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
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
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 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)
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
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
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
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
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
A correspondent tries a method designed by professors of cognition to mirror language-learning in the real world. The tasks basically simulate how we would cope if dropped into a foreign country with an unknown language, simply using our innate skills to start making sense of the mysterious sounds made by everyone around us. - BBC
“They had that democratic aspect to them where you can just find them anywhere and it always felt like it was the pick ’n’ mix candy-type store where there is something here for everyone, whether it’s the Harlequin romance novel or something very pulpy like a sci-fi or horror novel that you could quickly get.” - The Guardian
