"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
Several scholarly publishers have forged agreements with technology companies looking to use content to train the large language models (LLMs) that underlie their AI tools. A new tracker aims to catalogue what deals are being made — and by whom. - Nature
"The Strand Book Store has reached a tentative contract agreement with its staff union, which is represented by United Auto Workers Local 2179, putting an end to a strike that stretched through the weekend and much of Monday." - Publishers Weekly
"A federal judge in Texas rejected the auction sale of Alex Jones’ Infowars to The Onion satirical news outlet, criticizing the bidding for the conspiracy theory platform as flawed as well as how much money families of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary shooting stood to receive." - AP
Novelists increasingly defined their craft by opposing tradition, and so placed themselves at loggerheads with most of their possible audience. There is something essentially Pyrrhic about the triumphs of “Ulysses” (1920) and “The Man Without Qualities." - The Wall Street Journal (MSN)
"The store’s 110 unionized workers went on strike in the middle of the busy holiday season, leaving the shop’s '18 miles of books' to be run by a skeleton staff. … The union wants base pay to increase from $16 an hour, which is minimum wage in New York City, to $18 an hour." - Gothamist
It does not have to be clear or obscure. In the voyage out between these binaries – between the oil spills, thistles and phantoms a novel might pass on the way, between desire, disappointment and the people who clean offices at dawn on page 33 – a novel can reach for understanding and re-examine meaning. - New Statesman
"When Barnes & Noble took over they were saying, 'Hey, this is the Tattered Cover. The name Barnes & Noble will be nowhere in the store.' And then we got all this stuff, like machines, that said Barnes & Noble on them. - Westword
“The phenomenon of the lesbian pulp paperback — and it was a phenomenon, both culturally and financially — … was both problematic and pioneering, although neither word adequately describes something that was at once a cynical business proposition and a burgeoning art form.” - The New York Times
“Some of the critics’ critics miss the old days because they conflate harshness with honesty. This logic assumes that most nice reviews are written by compromised liars. For starters, I think that’s pretty condescending.” - LitHub
