As conservative U.S. adults go on absolute orgies of book objections and attempts to censor and ban books by or about LGBTQIA+ people, Black history and contemporary life, and anything else their joyless brains decide aren't "good" for kids, some teens fight back. - The Guardian (UK)
"Until recently Black authors had a hard time getting book deals from mainstream Brazilian publishers," when a few authors decided to change things: "They published inexpensive titles, priced at less than $4, and held book events in outdoor public places." - The New York Times
Or any letter at all - what's the reasoning behind letter shapes? Turns out it might not be as random as linguists thought, and taught, for decades. - Vice
But, in the UK at least, there was a corresponding gain in e-usage. But "borrowing of physical books had returned to around 84% of pre-Covid levels by December 2021, although digital and audio borrowing have remained high, which 'brings its own challenges to library budgets.'" - The Guardian (UK)
For Jennifer Croft, the campaign to bring greater recognition to translators isn’t just a plea for attention and credit, though it’s partly that. Croft also believes that highlighting translators’ names will bring more transparency to the process and help readers evaluate their work. - The New York Times
"Across the country, universities are slowly, quietly, cutting funding and shutting their literary publications down. Even magazines not connected to universities are closing their doors or changing publication strategies — a trend made worse by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic." - CNN
"The books are kind of incidental. What we're really arguing about is, what does it mean to be a citizen of the United States? How do we want our children to be educated? What do we want to say about our history?" - The Christian Science Monitor
Physical library visits fell from 214.6m to 59.7m in the year to March 2021, a drop of 72%, as Covid-19 restrictions shut branches for much of the 12-month period. The closures also led to a major decline in the number of books borrowed. Unsurprisingly, the number of web visits grew – up by 18% to 154.7m. - The Guardian
“It is not news to anyone that there has been a pronounced shift in readership and advertising from print to digital, and as a result, for a few important brands, print is no longer serving the brand’s core purpose.” - The New York Times
The story of the index "is, on one level, a history of information science, but it's also a history of reading and writing and everything those actions entail — communication, learning and imagination, as well as competition, anxiety and no small amount of mischief." - The New York Times
These recent acts of illiberal language policing––coinciding with a racial reckoning on the left and a backlash against its excesses on the right––threatens to degrade the education of all young people. - The Atlantic
For much of the past century in Ukraine, Russian has taken precedence over Ukrainian, even in the post-Soviet period. These days one hears more and more Ukrainian in the streets, especially among young adults. even in Kyiv and the Russophone stronghold of Kharkiv. - MSN (The Washington Post)
The originals were mostly published as serials in Yiddish newspapers and never made it into bound volumes in any language until now. Says one scholar, "This literature has been hiding in plain sight, but we all assumed it wasn't there." - The New York Times
Linguists have dubbed it Multicultural London English (MLE); it has developed organically among young people in a city where hundreds of languages are spoken, borrowing vocabulary and syntax from several of them, most noticeably Jamaican English. Rebecca Mead writes about watching her teenage son acquire it. - The New Yorker
