The scrolls, intact but carbonized and impossible to unroll, came from a library in Herculaneum destroyed by the 79 AD eruption that both wiped out and preserved Pompeii. Thousands of 3D X-ray images were released, and computer scientists took up what's called the Vesuvius Challenge to decipher them. - The Guardian
The college's president granted that the Review is "a superb literary journal, does really extraordinary work … (but) its purpose is not the education of students." Many former interns at the Review disagree. Others say the college has done little do leverage the magazine's high reputation. - Inside Higher Ed
Amy Mae Baxter, founder of Bad Form: "As costs rise for everyone, it doesn’t feel fair for me not to be paying our contributing writers more, too. So, instead of closing down completely, I have shut down our regular online content, so I can focus on events, community building and print issues." - The Guardian
The audiobook’s ascent into full-blown aesthetic autonomy came with the arrival of the iPod and its MP3 file format in 2001, and, as of 2023, more than half the U.S. population has listened to an audiobook (in Sweden, they outsell hardcovers). - The New Yorker
Is it the ultimate pairing of the lowbrow (baseball cap) and the highbrow (literature)? Or is it wearing books as one might wear cult fashion labels — and the uncanny performance of it all? Does it matter? - The New York Times
As he wrote in "The Soul of Man Under Socialism," "Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion." - The Nation
"A common trope in horror is that the character being haunted, possessed, or hunted is going through a personal agony — one that either helps them rise above the evil or destroys them altogether. … Grief cannot — should not — be sugar-coated. So we come to scary movies and books to relate." - Literary Hub
Literary fiction might be dead. More precisely, what might have died is literary fiction as a meaningful category in publishing and bookselling. - The Nation
"Book bans are at record levels, and libraries across the country are facing catastrophic budget cuts. … In a separate line of attack, library collections are being squeezed by draconian licensing deals, and even sued to stop lending digitized books." - The Guardian
We are at a moment of disjunction in the history of reading, driven by a technological shift that already seems to be as consequential as the birth of the printing press, a shift whose magnitude was already present to me 15 years ago when I had my dizzying encounter with my own text. - Tablet
"The paperbacks were intended to help soldiers pass the time. But they were also meant to remind them what they were fighting for, and draw a sharp contrast between American ideals and Nazi book burnings." - The New York Times
One judge on the 784-page Mr. B: George Balanchine’s Twentieth Century, by Jennifer Homans: "I’m hopeless on the dancefloor, ... but this book takes you in. It’s a story of the 20th century." - The Guardian (UK)
Poet Vona Groarke: "I think my voice is being appropriated, my life, in a strange way, I fear, is also being appropriated, my sensitivity, my sensibility." - Irish Times
