Category: words

“With A.I.-generated writing able to fool many readers, disinformation-as-a-service will become possible, eliminating the need for human-staffed ‘troll farms.’ … [Software like GPT-3] could enable what sociologist Zeynep Tufekci calls ‘modern censorship’ — information campaigns that harass, confuse, and sow mistrust with the goal of undermining individual agency and political action.” – Slate

Charles Finch: “For me, books evoke a feeling first, and then you have to try to feel lucidly in words. … That’s the art of criticism to me: trying to explain emotions, which, in a way, all art forms are trying to do through different means. … The best reviews often have an essayistic quality. They’re trying to say, what is this telling us about our moment of life?” – Slate

The writer-diplomat tradition, though largely ignored in the history of letters, has been critical to the development of many European and Latin American writers. Eight poets with diplomatic experience, including Octavio Paz and Czeslaw Milosz, have won the Nobel Prize for Literature. – Robert Fay

Even today, the institutions of creative writing in the United States reflect their origins in the Cold War. In the 1940s and 1950s, early advocates for such programs, including Paul Engle at Iowa and Wallace Stegner at Stanford, shared a common vision for American culture with the internationalists of the Truman and Eisenhower administrations and influential philanthropic foundations. – Chronicle of Higher Education

Well, one kind of poetry in particular — that of Rupi Kaur, who is so popular that her most recent collection knocked Dr. Seuss off the top of Amazon’s poetry bestseller list. (Her two previous books are no. 5 and no. 8.) “For Kaur’s publisher, Andrews McMeel Publishing, this kind of immediate market impact has become customary.” – Publishers Weekly

Each year for Banned Books Week, the American Library Association releases a list of the books that offended parents or patrons tried most often to have removed from schools and libraries; for 2020, the ALA has compiled a list covering the 2010s as a whole. As usual, Huck Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird are there, as are Fun Home and the kids’ book about the gay penguins in Central Park, but top of the list is Sherman Alexie’s award-winning The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. (The runner-up is Captain Underpants.) Right in the middle of the list, at no. 52, is The Holy Bible. – The Guardian

“I was a youngish editor at Random House, overseeing the Modern Library, our classics imprint. The book had come to me because of her. With her letter she enclosed two lectures she had written, one given three years earlier; the other she would deliver during her upcoming travels. “Perhaps a Random House editor could suggest a way to draw from the talks to compose an introduction.” – Paris Review

If I don’t write this novel, no one else will. No one will know what hasn’t been written. If I don’t translate Calasso, someone else will quickly replace me. – New York Review of Books

Most of the coronavirus-related changes that the editors have noted have to do with older, more obscure words and phrases being catapulted into common usage, such as reproduction number and social distancing. They’ve also documented the creation of new word blends based on previously existing vocabulary. – Fast Company

After announcing the lineup, judge and novelist Lee Child said The Mirror and the Light was “an absolutely wonderful novel, there’s no question about it”, but “as good as it was, there were some books which were better”. – The Guardian