"Earlier this month, a group of protesters gathered outside the London headquarters of Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. They were demonstrating over the company’s use of millions of pirated books and research papers to feed their family of generative AI models.” - The Guardian (UK)
Then the Academy, apparently not fearless, censored the lecture. "I did not want to cause them trouble. I did, however, feel it was essential to make the point that the pursuit of wisdom is impossible without engaging with (and challenging) uncomfortable ideas.” - The New York Times
“Theme always comes last. I never say, I want to write about capitalism or women. What gets me into writing is always this tiny moment of someone saying something that’s stuck with me.” - The Guardian (UK)
Poet and memoirist Maggie Smith says, “You have to enjoy the process more than you enjoy patting yourself on the back about having a product that you created. I mean, the most fun is the making of the thing.” - Slate
Author Sayaka Murata: “Ever since I was a child, I’ve had 30 or 40 imaginary friends who live on a different star or planet with whom I have shared love and sexual experiences.” - The Guardian (UK)
After announcing she was moving her independent bookstore about a block away to a new location, her regular customers all had the same question: “How can I help?” - Washington Post
Andrea Chu has achieved a rare ascendancy in the literary world over the past several years, in equal parts for her clever, lethal takedowns of various authors and for her long essays on gender and sexuality, written from her perspective as a trans woman. - The New York Times
“Didion left no instructions about the (diary), so nobody knows how she would feel about its publication as a book, titled Notes to John. But even ahead of its release on Tuesday, the book … has triggered strong reactions among the writer’s friends and readers.” - The New York Times
“It makes sense, then, that subscription services want to push their curation skills further, by commissioning, editing, and publishing titles that aren’t already in the world. They have a guaranteed customer base, a strong sense of the titles that work for them and the ability to create exclusive editions.” - The Guardian
In the early 20th century, the industrialist Andrew Carnegie provided the seed money for the Simplified Spelling Board, which, unlike the Spelling Reform Association, was committed to subtracting letters from the alphabet rather than adding them. - The Wall Street Journal
When you studied literature in school or university, I expect that you were taught, implicitly or explicitly, that this plot-focused way of reading was simplistic, and that you were trained to read in new ways where plot was largely irrelevant. The message is: Only amateurs read for the plot. - Public Books
“The Iliad is the poem of death. Death stalks its lines, blood soaks it. Countless young men appear in the poem only to be cut down. … But at the heart of the Odyssey there is life, and survival. This survival isn’t pretty, or comforting, or dignified.” - The Guardian
“We can read the Odyssey today with a sense of déjà vu: we feel we know these narratives, we have met these characters, we recognize these themes. Yet the epic of Odysseus’s return is, in many ways, as unfathomably strange to us as the one-eyed giant Cyclops was to its hero.” - Literary Hub
By definition, a book town is “a small, preferably rural, town or village in which secondhand and antiquarian bookshops are concentrated… available to everyone…” Today, there are dozens of towns with the designation. - National Geographic
The rise of more inclusive YA has felt as much like a seismic shift as “The Hunger Games” did back in the day. It’s given teen books a new relevance, and a new energy. Alas, sales of young-adult fiction have been declining since 2021, in part due to well-organized efforts to ban books. - Los Angeles Times
