Macquarie Dictionary defines the word as "the gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking." - The Guardian
The word saw an enormous spike in searches on the site in August, thanks to a TikTok video by a creator named Jools Lebron that went viral. - Smithsonian Magazine
Copyright law is a jagged rock on which many seemingly promising ideas have been wrecked. In this particular case, the perilous legal provision turned out to be Section 107 of the Copyright Act, which governs “the fair use of a copyrighted work.” - FreeThink
Taking Alex Ross’ 2007 book “The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century” as a model, Frank’s book makes the case for what, exactly, a 20th century novel is, what its authors’ methods and goals were, and how the unprecedented events of an ever more interconnected world shaped it. - Los Angeles Times
Spines, founded in 2021 but which published its first titles this year, is a startup technology business which—for a fee—is offering the use of AI to proofread, produce, publish and distribute books. - The Bookseller
Michèle Roberts, author of French Cooking for One, says, “Writing a recipe is very close to writing a poem, which is about choosing words and ingredients and things. The right thing in the right place and so on, the time, the narrative.” - Vittles
“When your homeland has been under foreign control for centuries, your tastes are inevitably shaped by that reality—by the culinary traditions the colonizers bring with them, and by the attempts to maintain traditional flavors in the face of erasure.” - The Atlantic
“The theory is simple. Countless classic works of literature have fallen out of copyright and into the public domain, granting normal people the right to reproduce, remix, and resell them.” - Slate
“Everybody knew about Augusta, but they all knew her as a secret. … Because they met when she was so young, she was an abused child, she was a runaway, and Cormac was in his 40s, it was a situation that in many ways would look bad.” - The New York Times
Onion CEO Ben Collins's first thought was, "That’d be one of the funniest jokes of all time if we pulled this off." Once it became a serious possibility, Collins saw the opportunity to use Onion-style satire to expose the fear-mongering, guns-and-dietary-supplements-peddling scam that right-wing outlets like Infowars run. - New York Magazine
This year’s winner of France’s biggest book prize is being sued in Algeria over claims he stole the story from a patient of his psychiatrist wife. - BBC
When do we feel compelled to say “etcetera” or “ityadi” or even “blah blah,” not just literally or in a manner of speaking but in the way we experience and create the world? - LA Review of Books
"The formal 600-year-old word (has) been given new life by Olympians like Simone Biles, entertainers like Dua Lipa, and people across social media who increasingly use the word to describe channelling their dreams into successes." - CBC
Everett's revisionist riff on Huckleberry Finn continued its prizewinning streak in the fiction category; in nonfiction, de León's Soldiers and Kings pipped Knife, Rushdie's memoir of his stabbing and recovery. Lena Khalaf Tuffaha's Something About Living took poetry honors; Shifa Saltagi Safadi’s Kareem Between won for young people's literature. - AP
A.I. chatbots can imitate famous poets like William Shakespeare well enough to fool many human readers, according to a new paper published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports. In addition, many study participants actually preferred the chatbot’s poetry over the works of renowned writers. - Smithsonian
