A Caveman Would Never Do CrossFit. Why There’s Nothing Natural About Exercise

Speaking of sitting around, sheltering in place, eating and drinking holiday cheer, etc. From The Wall Street Journal: One of the biggest myths about exercise is that it’s natural. If anything, human instincts lean more toward taking a nap. Want to feel bad about skipping a workout? Blame evolution. Daniel E. Lieberman argues this theory … Read more

An Upbeat Winter Institute—With Some Caveats

From Publishers Weekly: Winter Institute, which American Booksellers Association CEO Oren Teicher has called “some of the most significant few days in our calendar,” drew 1,000 attendees to Memphis the week of January 22, including more than 680 booksellers from all 50 states. . . . . “For more than five years now, our channel … Read more

Why Some Are More Equal Than Others

From Literary Review: The Remigia cave, about eighty miles north of Valencia, features paintings dating from around 6500 BC. Some depict bands of archers hunting ibex; others appear to show executions. These are the ones tourists come for. But the most significant image is the least dramatic. Fourteen individuals gather closely together, watching a lone … Read more

Extreme Anti-Free Speech Codes Rule American Universities, A New Report Reveals

From Newsweek: You can’t make this stuff up: Stockton University investigated a college student for the crime of making Donald Trump his Zoom background. American University launched a harassment investigation against pro-choice students who criticized the Supreme Court’s abortion ruling. Syracuse University investigated another student for a slightly risqué scavenger hunt. And these colorful incidents … Read more

Everyone in the publishing industry should be watching CES this month. Because AI is not about us. We’re just a sideshow.

From The New Publishing Standard: How many of us today are doing our job in the same way it was done late last century? More importantly, how many of us today are doing jobs that even existed last century? “This Year’s CES Will Totally Be All AI, All the Time.” That’s according to an opinion … Read more

Kubla Khan

Or, a vision in a dream. A Fragment. In Xanadu did Kubla KhanA stately pleasure-dome decree:Where Alph, the sacred river, ranThrough caverns measureless to manDown to a sunless sea.So twice five miles of fertile groundWith walls and towers were girdled round;And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;And here were … Read more

Will you ever buy mostly e-books?

From Nathan Bransford: I first launched this poll in 2007, when Amazon’s first Kindle had just been released and iPads didn’t even exist yet. Now we have gadgets and gizmos aplenty, though paper has held on strong. It’s been interesting through the years to get the pulse of e-book optimism and pessimism. My usual caveats … Read more

Narcissist Test: Is My Partner a Narcissist?

From PsychCentral: Imagine you’ve been dating a new person for around 5 months. Things started off on a great note. They made you feel special by showering you with attention and compliments. But recently, things have started to feel different. You’ve noticed how much your partner likes to talk about themself… to the point that … Read more

‘Empire of the Sum’ Review: It All Adds Up

From The Wall Street Journal: In 1976, Steve Wozniak sold his HP-65 programmable calculator for $500 to start a computer company with Steve Jobs. It wasn’t a huge sacrifice. As a calculator engineer at Hewlett-Packard, he knew that the HP-67 was on its way and, with his employee discount, he could buy one for $370. … Read more

Cooking, Monasteries, Arithmetic: Lorraine Daston on the History of Rules

From Public Books: Historian of science Lorraine Daston’s many pathbreaking works include Against Nature and Classical Probability in the Enlightenment. Among her many coauthored works is Objectivity (with Peter Galison), which developed an influential account of historically changeable “epistemic virtues.” Now she is back in the same conceptual domain with Rules: A Short History of What We Live By (Princeton University Press, 2022). … Read more

The Deadly Beauty Regime: Historical Practices of Risky Cosmetics

From Culture.org: From the mountainous region of Styria, Austria, to the high society salons in Mayfair, London, the quest for beauty has taken humans on a dangerous journey. This journey, spanning centuries, has been marked by the use of deadly substances such as arsenic, radium, mercury, cantharidin, petroleum, and X-rays as cosmetics and remedies. Arsenic: … Read more

Self-published authors earn more than traditionally published counterparts, according to ALLi report

From The Bookseller: New research by the Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi) claims authors who self-publish currently earn more than traditionally published authors. ALLi circulated the survey to its members and subscribers, as well as “through other key self-publishing and author organisations” in February 2023. It was answered by more than 2,000 respondents – 60% … Read more

How to Pursue a Career in Editing: Advice for College Students

From Jane Friedman: Question I’m a college student majoring in English. I have had internships but not in the world of editing, but my dream is to be an editor and writer. Do you have any advice or guidance to offer on how to make this dream a reality? —Desperate Gen-Zer Dear Desperate Gen-Zer: I’m … Read more

Open Road Media: A New Version of Its Marketing Offer

From Publishing Perspectives: Our Publishing Perspectives readers may remember our announcement in July that New York City-based Open Road Integrated Media had begun offering a service beyond its core “Ignition” marketing plan called Open Road Activation. Late in the day on Thursday (January 11), the company messaged the news media that it has opened its … Read more

The Future of AI Writing and Audio

From Publisher’s Weekly: Digital Book World, a conference focusing on publishing innovation, offered insight into how technologists, and some publishers, are planning to implement AI into their workflow. Asked about AI and the use of ChatGPT, which automates writing, Mary McAveeney, CEO of Abrams, was skeptical of its ability to write books. She conceded, “It … Read more

In The Stacks

From In The Stacks: I’M A LIBRARIAN, so of course I was picking melted plastic out of the 3D printer when I heard the news that Maisie Martin had died. I wandered out of the maker space, past the robotics lab, around the VR cave, into the music studio. We do have books in this library, … Read more

The Year in Review Part 3: Bestsellers

From Kristine Kathryn Rusch: In my Pocket Reader app, I stored a September article from BBC News as much for the article’s title as its content. That title? “When Is A Bestseller Not Necessarily A Bestseller?” I think that’s been the burning question in publishing for the past ten years. Bestsellers haven’t entirely lost their meaning, but … Read more

The Forever Witness

From The Wall Street Journal: In November 1987, a scavenger searching for bottles found the body of a half-naked woman near a rural road north of Seattle. Days later, beneath a bridge 60 miles away, a hunter found a dead man, bludgeoned with rocks and asphyxiated by a pack of cigarettes shoved down his throat. … Read more

The Enduring Allure of Choose Your Own Adventure Books

From The New Yorker: You were a girl who wanted to choose your own adventures. Which is to say, you were a girl who never had adventures. You always followed the rules. But, when you ate an entire sleeve of graham crackers and sank into the couch with a Choose Your Own Adventure book, you … Read more

Copyright: American Publishers File for Summary Judgment Against the Internet Archive

From Publishing Perspectives: [F]our primary member-publishers of the Association of American Publishers have filed a motion for judgment against the Internet Archive in this case that has international implications because of the reach of Internet connectivity. A “summary judgment” is a way for one party to win a case without a trial. As Publishing Perspectives readers will … Read more

Two Books Plumb the Hidden Depths of the Fairy Tale

From The Wall Street Journal: Once upon a time, fairy tales were the rage in fashionable Paris. At literary salons and at the court of Louis XIV, ladies and gentlemen beguiled one another with fantastical tales of talking animals and monster-husbands; of djinns and sorcerers; of sleeping beauties and ravenous ogres. Many tales had their … Read more

How Astonishing Women from Romania’s Past Inspired Me as a Woman Writer

From Woman Writers, Women’s Books: When I started writing Dreamland, my second book of short stories about Romania’s history and folklore, I imagined I’ll write about what I know best, my native country. As I started my research, I discovered surprising legends and inspirational tales about women from Romania’s past that inspired me not only … Read more

Working on a Vineyard Taught Me to Slow Down and Pay Attention

From Catapult: I first saw L’Albera at night. I’d traveled north by train from Barcelona to Figueres, Salvador Dalí’s hometown, and then by bus to Sant Climent Sescebes, a village of about six hundred people near the French border. It was dark when I boarded the bus, and I could only make out vague silhouettes … Read more

New Look, Same Great Look

From Lapham’s Quarterly: Color is among the most challenging aspects of our experience to describe. Spectrophotometers and colorimeters can quantify light waves, yet their measurements have little impact on our feeling for color. As the philosopher Zeno Vendler put it, “Vincent van Gogh loved the color yellow—and certainly not because of its wavelength.” Color is infamous for … Read more

Chestnut Trees

From The Paris Review: Everywhere we’ve lived takes on a certain shape in our memory only some time after we leave it. Then it becomes a picture that will remain unchanged. As long as we’re there, with the whole place before our eyes, we see the accidental and the essential emphasized almost equally; only later … Read more

A Bookstore Revival Channels Nostalgia for Big Box Chains

From Bloomberg: When the final Harry Potter installment was published on July 21, 2007, bookstores across the U.S. celebrated with midnight release parties — some with booze, befitting a series whose earliest readers were now in their 20s. These parties took place at thousands of bookstores at a time that was, in retrospect, Peak Bookstore. … Read more

Who Needs Other Women?

From Woman Writers, Women’s Books The friend you used to tell every scrap of good news to, and every heartache, too. The sister you shared a bedroom with for years. The woman at work who knew more about your day and your reaction to it than anyone else. Where are they now? Women’s fiction is … Read more

The Value of Percolation

From Jane Friedman: I love learning how the brain works during the writing process. I’ve mostly been interested in how to “turn on” the brain’s right, creative hemisphere through exercises like free writing. A book I recently read gave me insight into a different aspect of the writing process: the value of not writing—of setting … Read more

Crave Rejection? 7 Never-Fail, 100% Guaranteed Tips for Raising your R-Score.

From Anne R. Allen’s Blog… with Ruth Harris: Here’s some advice for those who feel they are missing out on one of the basic building blocks of a successful author’s career: Rejection. For those who feel they are not paying their dues. For every writer who is not receiving an adequate, soul-satisfying number of rejections, … Read more

Books about Estate Planning and Authors

PG took a look on Amazon to locate books on the topic. He hasn’t reviewed any of these books and warns one and all that a book is not a substitute for a competent attorney familiar with estate planning and intellectual property issues. One caveat – While the Federal Estate Tax is uniform across all … Read more

How to Fight Fair Use Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt: The Experience of One Open Educational Resource

From The Journal of Copyright in Education and Librarianship: At the launch of one of the early online open educational resources (OER) in 2002, the approach to addressing copyright was uncertain. Did the university or the faculty own their material? How would the third-party material be handled? Was all of its use considered fair use … Read more

Jo was the first to wake in the gray dawn of Christmas morning

Jo was the first to wake in the gray dawn of Christmas morning. No stockings hung at the fireplace, and for a moment she felt as much disappointed as she did long ago, when her little sock fell down because it was crammed so full of goodies. Then she remembered her mother’s promise and, slipping … Read more

The Dawn of Everything

From The Wall Street Journal: ‘The Dawn of Everything” is a brainy and braggadocious book, styling itself—without a hint of modesty—as “a new history of humanity.” A combative work that pushes a revisionist view of prehistory, it takes its fight to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Hobbes, whose ideas on early man as a creature mired … Read more

Four hundred years of melancholy—why Robert Burton’s masterpiece speaks to our pandemic age

From Prospect: It has become increasingly difficult to ignore our great capacity for experiencing and describing psychological pain. To many observers across the globe, mental illnesses and disorders are now alarmingly prevalent, and talk of crises, unprecedented surges and epidemics has become widespread amongst clinical experts and in the media. Living through a viral pandemic … Read more

The Dangers of Editing

From Writer Unboxed: I edit books for a living, so I know it’s true that writing is rewriting. But I’ve sometimes seen clients fall into editing traps that can cause real damage to their work. Although some simply waste valuable writing time, others get so caught up in the wrong kind of editing that they … Read more

Reading Jane Eyre as a Sacred Text

From The Paris Review: The summer that I did my chaplaincy internship was a wildly full twelve weeks. I was thirty-two years old and living in the haze of the end of an engagement as I walked the hospital corridors carrying around my Bible and visiting patients. “Hi, I’m Vanessa. I’m from the spiritual care … Read more