Authors are suing to get their work, and characters, out of AI programs. "OpenAI, for its part, has contended that training an AI system falls under fair use protections." - Los Angeles Times
Right now, a few authors joining together to sue the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and Meta is a bit of a David-vs.-Goliath situation. Book publishers need to join this fight. Magazine publishers need to join this fight. - Washington Post
This week, the Iowa City Community School District released a list of 68 books that it removed from schools to comply with the law. Among the titles: “Ulysses” by James Joyce, “Nineteen Minutes” by Jodi Picoult, “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood and “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison. - Washington Post
Ahmed Naji, the only writer in Egypt ever to be sent to prison for the crime of offending public morality: "These words haven’t vanished because speakers of Arabic have stopped using them, by the way. ... It’s only the immortality of being written down that is denied them." - Literary Hub
This isn't the first of Steve Bell's cartoons to draw accusations of anti-Semitic imagery in 40 years with The Guardian, but it could be the most poorly timed. It features Netanyahu cutting a Gaza-shaped hole in his abdomen; the likely association with Shylock's pound of flesh evidently escaped Bell. - AP
The children's-book publisher and its beloved school sales events were already getting attacked by the right for the usual reasons. Then, this year, Scholastic separated out supposedly controversial titles (such as a bio of Ketanji Brown Jackson) into an opt-in-only package, and former fans are calling the company cowardly. - Slate
Individual stores develop their own looks. "Any design agency would have a heart attack if they could see what we’re doing,” said CEO James Daunt. “We don’t have any architect doing our design at any stage. And certainly the identity people would have a complete crisis.” - The New York Times
"For hundreds of years, writers enjoyed the punchy power of a well-placed !, wielding its mighty sword of 'here be feelings!' with aplomb and persuasiveness. Here are five ways that literature can recuperate the abused exclamation point." - The Millions
Weirdly: "People who do not know how librarians select material are much more likely to also believe librarians should be prosecuted for that material." - BookRiot
For instance: "If you describe a character running a discarded leather glove scented with lavender under her nose, the reader can feel the cool-then-warm of the leather against her upper lip, hear the faint creak of the leather, smell that lavender." - LitHub
"The novel, by Adania Shibli, is titled “Minor Detail” in English and tells the true story of the 1949 rape and murder of a Palestinian Bedouin girl by Israeli soldiers." - The New York Times
