I wanted to share with my academic network, so I posted a photo of myself holding a physical copy of my PhD thesis on X. The post amassed 120 million views and sparked a lot of anger in response to its title: Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose. - The Conversation
The genre’s masterworks urge us to set a slower pace, savoring what each novelist puts on the table and realizing, as we push back our chairs, how much more substantial the meal was than what we thought we wanted. - The Baffler
"Since about December of last year, (the Penguin Classics little black book edition of) White Nights has been all over BookTok and its Instagram parallel, Bookstagram. Searching for the 1848 tale on these platforms will result in page after page of reviews, quotes, and moody shots of the book next to cups of coffee." - The Guardian
Lebanon's book industry is historically one of the Arab world's most important, due to the country's relative tolerance and press freedom. But this year's violence has made traveling to book fairs risky, and Hezbollah's party headquarters, an aerial bombardment target, are in a neighborhood that's a major logistics center for publishers. - Publishers Weekly
"'Investigations of a Dog' presents a brilliant and sometimes hilarious parody of the world of knowledge production, what the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan called 'the university discourse.' And the contemporary academy might easily be qualified as Kafkaesque," - The MIT Press Reader
Will people's preference for video over text affect our brains or our evolution as a species? What kind of brain structure do good readers actually have? My new study, published in Neuroimage, has found out. - ScienceAlert
At Montgomery Ward, Robert L. May’s “boss tapped him to write the children’s story and suggested it have an animal protagonist because Ferdinand the Bull, a popular animated short produced by Walt Disney Productions, had just been released.” - Fast Company
Well: “Writers are not content for their talents and their hard work to be used to generate positive publicity for companies who are engaged in deeply harmful activities,” says one climate protest leader. Will the awards survive at all? - The Guardian (UK)
But it’s not just a larger temporal lobe that correlates to reading - it’s also the auditory cortex. “Isn’t reading mainly a visual skill? Not only. To pair letters with speech sounds, we first need to be aware of the sounds of the language.” - Wired
"By the 16th century, intensity rather than trueness had become the word very’s primary sense, through a process (called) 'semantic bleaching.' Interestingly, words whose meanings involve truth ... are particularly prone to semantic bleaching. And 'truth,' as in 'exactly as said or written,' takes us back to 'literally.'" - The Conversation
"After years of battles in school and public libraries, the campaign by conservative-leaning 'parent rights' groups has succeeded in casting a nationwide chill over the market for children's books they deem inappropriate, greatly diminishing sales and opportunities for authors to promote their work." - Los Angeles Times (Yahoo!)
"Taking a stand in the national debate on banning sexually explicit books from school libraries, Gov. Phil Murphy on Monday signed a law that will dictate how school boards in New Jersey will evaluate sensitive and controversial materials and protect librarians from legal challenges." - NJ.com
“A book sits atop a large language model, allowing readers to converse with an A.I. facsimile of its author.” At last: No more having to think about the meaning of complicated passages, or trace the lines of thought that got an author from A to B. - AV Club
"Might these events deter future winners of prizes with controversial sponsors" — the Baillie Gifford prize in the UK, the Scotiabank Giller Prize in Canada, and so on — "from accepting prizes or prize money, and could that threaten those prizes’ funding?" - The Guardian
The diary that Yitskhok Rudashevski kept from June 1941 to April 1943, written entirely in Yiddish, contains references not only to folklore from the Vilna Ghetto, but also to the Jewish community’s cultural resistance to the Nazi occupation. - Smithsonian
