ArtsJournal: Arts, Culture, Ideas

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What These Newly Deciphered 4,000-Year-Old Tablets Tell Us About The Akkadian Empire

These particular artifacts mostly demonstrate that the people running the empire day-to-day were (pick one or both) thorough, detail-oriented administrators or obsessive bureaucrats. - The Observer (UK)

How Government Layoffs Are Affecting DC Bookstores

"There’s also been a noticeable uptick in conversations among shoppers about the general plight of federal workers and the precarity of government employment these days.” - Publishers Weekly

The Phrase “Pride And Prejudice” Has History From Long Before Jane Austen’s Novel

“The phrase, which has religious origins, appeared in hundreds of works before Austen was born. From Britain it traveled to America, and from religious tomes it expanded to secular works. It even became a hallmark of abolitionist writing.” - The Conversation

AI And Writing: Looking Beyond Whether It’s Cheating

As a history and literature concentrator, most of my humanities courses strictly prohibit generative AI, viewing it as a shortcut that undermines learning. But it seems that AI is here to stay—so how can generative AI coexist with the goals of humanities education, and what does this mean for the future of writing? - HarvardMagazine

Publisher Sold, Leaving Writers Wondering If They’ll Get Paid

The unique selling point of the publisher, launched in 2011 by QI researchers John Mitchinson and Justin Pollard, and Crap Towns author Dan Kieran, was that it allowed writers to pitch ideas online directly to readers. - The Guardian

Why Robert Frost’s Poetry Became Uncool, Especially Among Literary Types

“This has a lot to do with the fetishization of what’s difficult, especially as both poetry and criticism professionalized. … (Ordinary people) understand the words. People read the poems and think they know what the poems mean. … (And) many people read Frost for the first time as children.” - The Paris Review

The UK Is Losing About 40 Libraries A Year

According to those who depend on them, local libraries are far more than a repository of books - they are community focal points and, for some, a vital lifeline to the outside world. What happens when one closes? - BBC

Graydon Carter And The Golden Age Of Magazines

The truism has it that most great New York magazine editors come from away—from the West or the Midwest or across the Atlantic—and arrive with an ability to see what natives don’t. - The New Yorker

Italian Newspaper Publishes First All-AI Generated Edition

The initiative by Il Foglio, a conservative liberal daily, is part of a month-long journalistic experiment aimed at showing the impact AI technology has “on our way of working and our days”, the newspaper’s editor, Claudio Cerasa, said. - The Guardian

The Rise Of Legislation That Could Make Librarians Criminals

A wave of proposed state laws that would hold librarians criminally liable for the presence of any material in their libraries’ collections deemed “obscene” has been getting increased attention and drawing opposition. Yet it’s important to remember that such laws are (a) straight out of Project 2025 and (b) not new. - Book Riot

Fairy Tales Seem Like Common Culture. They’re Not

Folk tales offer a kind of fabular impersonality, where an author’s voice is lost in a wider fiction machine or culture of storytelling. That form of multi-voiced impersonality played a big part in some of the most influential 20th-century fictions. - London Review of Books

Meet The Guy Who Chooses The Books In White Lotus

“It’s one of the more fun things for me on most jobs, because it gets right into either who people are or who they want to be.” - LitHub

The Last Great Yiddish Novel Is Now Available In English

One “striking feature of Grade’s fiction is that it almost never acknowledges the imminent annihilation of the world it so meticulously reconstructs—as if by ignoring that obscene fact, he could annul it.” - The Atlantic

Michael Connelly Was Writing A Lincoln Lawyer Book Set In 2025 Los Angeles When The Fires Exploded

What does a writer do when not only his own beach house but much of his beloved city burns? - The New York Times

Meta Manages To Muzzle Former Employee Who Published Memoir

“The book, Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams, who used to be the company's global public policy director, includes a series of critical claims about what she witnessed during her seven years working at Facebook.” - BBC

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