"In April, a beneficiary of his sister-in-law’s estate in Paris auctioned (Léopold Sédar_ Senghor’s private library of over 800 works, including 343 signed books. Worried about preserving his cultural legacy, the Senegalese government stepped in to halt the sale and bought the entire collection last month." - The New York Times
"In short, Internet Archive transmitted literary works to the entire world while refusing to license the requisite rights from the authors and publishers who make such works possible." - Ars Technica
We’re in a language crisis. "The discourse that produces new slang is not only publicly available online, but also amplified based on its ability to attract attention from outside its original context, … destroying the power of slang to perform its basic function: to signal membership in a group.” - The Atlantic
Finishing a trilogy or a series isn’t easy for most writers, but Adeyemi faced physical challenges along the way. She says, "I like that I can stand in front of readers and say, “Hey, we know life’s going to knock us down. That’s life. Life is going to life.” - The New York Times
Jeremy Cooper, the winner of the 2019 Fitzcarraldo Prize, remembers when he had a little cushion of money from selling art and a lot of chutzpah: "I ditched my literary agent Curtis Brown, as they strongly advised me against writing fiction and since then I’ve handled all my work myself.” - The Guardian (UK)
“The excavation of the political from the personal is always worth studying, which is part of the reason People has always been such a rich text. But today’s People Magazine is thinner, less glossy, and generally less substantive.” True for many magazines, but for People? It's Barry Diller. - Culture Study
Cue the sounds of a long search for success: "After a decade of self publishing, McFadden signed a series of deals with Sourcebooks’ mystery and thriller imprint, Poisoned Pen Press,” which is releasing her novels at an absolutely punishing rate. - The New York Times
Ugh. “The people who run publishing companies consistently value quantity over quality. This is stressful for the workers on the ground, the ones who likely chose to work in book publishing in the first place because they actually, you know, like books.” So … outside consultants seem attractive. - LitHub
A fleet of ten is now seven, of which a majority “carry fewer books and have to be loaded and unloaded. librarian, whose yellow van did not return from the garage in April, said: 'I am worried that the mobile library service will fizzle out and die.’” - The Scotsman
First, is language acquired by specialized mental processes that are dedicated to this task or learned by general-purpose processes used for a variety of learning tasks? Second, can we project the processes of language acquisition/learning that we observe in the present into the prehistoric past to gain insights about the evolution of language? - LitHub
"By opening itself more forthrightly to a wider audience, the library is doing something that Henry Clay Folger could probably never have imagined would be necessary: assert the importance of Shakespeare to public life, from scholars to laymen, passersby and politicians." - The Washington Post (MSN)
"Lahiri’s urge to escape English has many origins, but in part stems from her rebellion against contemporary publishing’s subsidiary plan for nonwhite authors, which incentivizes them to write about the persecution and difference they experience." Her new collection of Italian stories indicates that she may remain stuck in that paradigm. - Public Books
The fake journals show how easy it is to game the systems used to evaluate researchers for promotions and hiring — and this could be a bellwether for knowledge workers in other industries. - TechCrunch
Beginning in September, this is what the majority of elementary-school kids in New York City will be doing. More than two-thirds of its school districts selected the Into Reading curriculum. For those kids, learning to read will no longer revolve around books. - The Atlantic
