ArtsJournal: Arts, Culture, Ideas

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Poll: Americans Overwhelmingly Oppose Banning Books

A new CBS News poll offers data that should prod Democrats into rethinking these culture-war battles. It finds that surprisingly large majorities oppose banning books on history or race — and importantly, this is partly because teaching about our racial past makes students more understanding of others’ historical experiences. - Washington Post

The Chinese Writers For The New Generation Of Chinese

Having come of age at a time of unprecedented prosperity and opportunity, many have been spoiled and are referred to as “little emperors,” doted upon by their parents, kitted out in designer labels, and free to think only about themselves. - LitHub

How Henry Louis Gates Changed The Literary Canon

As a literary critic, Gates made an impact on the field by helping to establish a canon of African American literature—one that was neither separatist nor a mere appendage to the traditional, white canon. - The New Yorker

Linguists Analyze “Q” Writings And Identify The Author

Two teams of forensic linguists say their analysis of the Q texts shows that Paul Furber, one of the first online commentators to call attention to the earliest messages, actually played the lead role in writing them. - The New York Times

A Brief History Of Food Writing, From Ancient Greece To Pete Wells

"As with any compartmentalizing of genre, there is something in the title that implies a diminishment, as if today, as in ancient Greece, the act of eating were too frivolous to be worthy of serious meditation." - T — The New York Times Style Magazine

Time Was, Respectable Newspapers Hated Word Games — Even Crossword Puzzles

"As far as the journalistic establishment was concerned, crosswords were another mindless fad used (by tabloids) as a substitute for good editorial, to keep readers coming back — much like BuzzFeed quizzes were in the 2010s." Yet the ways that establishment described the effect of crosswords were tabloidesque. - The Big Think

How a Small Quebec Publisher Flipped The Page On Diversity

What happens when a press does more than increase its roster of writers of colour? What happens when diversity is built into its very structure? Mémoire d’encrier suggests that the results can be transformative. - The Walrus

Analyzing The Books That Paris’ Shakespeare & Company Lent In The 1920s

The Shakespeare and Company Project is a relational database and web application. The Project uses documents from the Sylvia Beach Papers at Princeton University Library and other libraries to give researchers and the general public access to the world of Shakespeare and Company. - Cultural Analytics

The Editor Who Published “Maus” Recounts His Decision To Go Ahead With It

Tom Engelhardt, then at Pantheon Books: "The feeling that I simply had to do Maus was one of the two least rational decisions I ever made in publishing. … In some gut way, I simply knew that a world without this book would be a lesser place." - TomDispatch

The Problem Of Writing Fiction Of Now During The Pandemic

“It seemed too soon to be writing about the pandemic, which we were living through, but it also seemed hard to be writing about anything else. If it’s set now, it has to be part of the story.” - The New York Times

The Scourge Of Book Blurbs

It is perhaps true that blurbs are rarely the deciding factor. Most likely a potential reader has heard word of mouth recommendations, read reviews, or simply seen the cover all over the place before they even pick up the book to see the blurbs. But that’s actually the point. - Countercraft

The Mechanizing Of The Humanities Is Not Going Well

The academic insistence on using bibliographic citation techniques developed for the printing press feels increasingly eccentric now that reading materials and essays exist in a digital (and therefore interconnected) form. The norms concerning what counts as a credible source, or a legitimate quotation or paraphrase, have been under pressure for some time. - London Review of Books

Developers Have Known All The Worldle Answers From The Very First Day

Developers have a little thing about looking at source script - "the digital equivalent of popping open the hood to see what’s underneath." - Make Zine

During The Pandemic, We Sometimes Read To Escape

Well, not just sometimes. "The practice provides a valuable form of understimulation, an inoculation against an illness-inducing reality." - Los Angeles Review of Books

Pandemic Fiction Is Booming Right Now, But Have Novelists Had Time To Truly Contemplate This Deep Plot Twist?

"Some writers worry a pandemic plot might drive away readers who want to escape our grim reality, but ignoring it might feel jarringly unrealistic. Others wonder if it’s too soon to recreate the atmosphere of a tragedy that’s still killing thousands of people every day." - The New York Times

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