ArtsJournal: Arts, Culture, Ideas

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The Joys Of Revisiting Edna Ferber

Even a century ago, "Ferber is not interested in cautionary tales of shrinking violets, favoring instead women who, out of necessity or desire or both, discover that meaningful work and recognition outside the home can unlock the door to a meaningful life." - JSTOR Daily

Books As Home Decor, With Professional Designers To Select Them And Lay Them Out

"More often than not, these books come across as props intended to be on camera — signifiers much like a Birkin bag or expensive watch. While those items can indicate a certain level of status and wealth, an artfully staged bookcase aims to convey something as well, although perhaps more subtly." - Literary Hub

The Rise Of Queer Comics, And Why Bans Will Backfire

"Long before witty digital comics found a home on your Instagram feed, depicting things from the struggle with Grindr to birth-control access, there were 'Gay Comix' and 'Dykes to Watch Out For.'" - MSN (Washington Post)

Rereading Russian Classics In The Shadow Of The War In Ukraine

"The idea that great novels disclose universal human truths, or contain a purely literary meaning that transcends national politics, wasn’t evenly distributed across the world. I had seen no signs of it in Kyiv." - The New Yorker

Little Free Library Expands Its Work Into Indian Country

"Little Free Library's ... latest initiative, the Indigenous Library Program, which launches this spring, will provide book-sharing boxes for installation on tribal lands, as well as in other Indigenous communities throughout the U.S. and in Canada." - Publishers Weekly

Kids Want Books. Increasingly Librarians Aren’t Allowed To Provide Them

States and districts nationwide have begun to constrain what librarians can order. At least 10 states have passed laws giving parents more power over which books appear in libraries or limiting students’ access to books, a Washington Post analysis found. - Washington Post

Can ChatGPT Replace Human Writers? No, But It Can Make Them Better

I decided to try a combination of tools to see if the AI-assisted work product would outperform my purely original work. Unsurprisingly, the work done in partnership with my AI-coworker outperformed work I did alone. - Shelly Palmer

The Battle Over Redesigning Wikipedia

Some Wikipedia contributors have a hard time trusting Wikimedia Foundation designers. No one on the paid design team was around 12 years ago when the last skin was made, and only some of them were involved with the wiki communities before they were hired. - Slate

Canada’s Griffin Prize Decided To Reinvent. Poets Are Furious

The prize’s founder, Scott Griffin, had anticipated some controversy, if not this degree of fury. He maintains trustees made the right call. After twenty-two years, it was time to revisit the prize structure and the question whether Canadian poets still needed their own category. - The Walrus

AI Might Doom The College Essay, But Students Have Already Moved On

The current generation of students has moved on from writing. Literally. Most students fail to see the relevance of writing in a world—their world—that is largely post-literate. They are at home in media not yet born when I began teaching, media that privilege images and sounds over written text. This does not spell the end of the world, but...

An Author Sells A Bucket List Weekend, And Fans Absolutely Line Up For It

What draws hundreds of fans of writer Elin Hilderbrand to Nantucket in January? The chance to hang out in person with the author, of course, on the island she most often writes about. - The New York Times

The Ambitious Second Novel Of Nigerian Author Ayobami Adebayo

Adébáyò's first novel, Stay With Me, "told a closely focused story about the impact of childlessness and sickle-cell disease on the life of a young couple ... but A Spell of Good Things deals with political corruption, social injustice and domestic violence." - The Guardian (UK)

This Year’s Book Resolution Is To Stop Worrying About Books You’ll Never Read

That's one writer's resolution, anyway: "After a lifetime of climbing, I’m happy to stop and just enjoy the view. For so long, I, like others, have measured myself against what I had yet to achieve. It was a game no one could win." - The New York Times

Watch Out, New York Times, The Dictionary Just Bought Quordle

The Wordle knockoff - though perhaps harder, since it has four five-letter words to guess at once, with only nine guesses - "now redirects to its own space on the Merriam-Webster website." - TechCrunch

Good Book News From Florida

That is to say, some libraries are still doing their darnedest to serve their communities - including creating a library on wheels, with mobile hot spots to serve the most rural residents. - NPR

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