Amazon remains defiant that it is doing more than enough to combat the issue. In its blog post, the company claimed that in 2018 alone it “invested over $400 million in personnel and tools built on machine learning and data science to protect our customers from fraud and abuse in our stores.” – Publishers Weekly
Category: words
Webster Vs. Worcester: America’s Dictionary Wars
As the desire for an authoritative dictionary of American English developed in the first half of the 19th century, there was a serious battle between the partisans of Noah Webster — who was passionate and devoted, yes, but whose definitions could be, well, idiosyncratic, and whose ideas about spelling reform were mocked — and the more scholarly Joseph Emerson Worcester. Who won? Not Webster, though it may look otherwise. – Aeon
When Norman Mailer Covered The Moon Landing (It Wasn’t Pretty)
“Mailer on the moonshot: loads of words, loads of money. A big deal for Life magazine. And for Mailer? Grim opportunism. Out of tune, bardically bereft, plucking (as it were) flaccid strands of sheep’s gut, he was ripe for anticlimax. But he needed the cash.” – The Atlantic
Auction Of Caravaggio Discovered In Attic Called Off
“Judith and Holofernes, which was found under an old mattress in the attic of a house in the French city of Toulouse, was snapped up by a foreign buyer, the auction house selling it said on Tuesday.” – Yahoo! (AFP)
Anna Burns’s ‘Milkman’ Gets Another Major Award, The Orwell Prize
The novel, which has already won the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, has received the first-ever Orwell Prize for political fiction. The more-established Orwell Prize for political non-fiction writing went to Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing. Both books concern the Troubles in Northern Ireland. – The Guardian
In The Age Of Amazon, The Few Queer Bookstores Left Are Lifelines For Queer Teens
Even as the number of LGBTQ stories told in young adult literature keeps growing, there are still many teens whose libraries don’t offer it and who don’t feel comfortable asking for that subject matter in a regular bookstore. Giovanni’s Room, Philadelphia’s LGBTQ bookstore, is still in business; Abbey White visits it and talks to some teens about why it’s important to them. – The Philadelphia Inquirer
The Website That Broke The Aziz Ansari #MeToo-Or-Bad-Date Story? It Was A Mess, And Here’s How It Collapsed
Babe.net, which marketed itself as “for girls who don’t give a fuck,” was an HR professional’s nightmare, and a journalism professor’s nightmare, too. Allison P. Davis reports on how its biggest story was only a part of what brought it quietly crashing down. – The Cut
The Decline Of New York City’s Iconic Newsstands (Once There Were 1500 Of Them)
Today, the city has a little more than three hundred newsstands. They are required by law to sell printed material. But Max Bookman, a lawyer who represents the New York City Newsstand Operators Association, told me, “I talk to newsstand operators who feel lucky if they sell fifty newspapers a day.” – The New Yorker
What Happens When Amazon Dominates A Market Or A Consumer Good? Check Out Its Bookstore
Uh, not good: “Amazon takes a hands-off approach to what goes on in its bookstore, never checking the authenticity, much less the quality, of what it sells. It does not oversee the sellers who have flocked to its site in any organized way. That has resulted in a kind of lawlessness. Publishers, writers and groups such as the Authors Guild said counterfeiting of books on Amazon had surged.” – The New York Times
The Deal With MFA Groupthink
Author Mona Awad: “Iwas definitely interested in leaning into that and the horror of it, the scariness of that kind of groupthink. It is scary. I guess it’s one of the risks you take when you go into one of these programs: that fear that you’ll start all speaking the same language, and then you’re not an individual artist anymore with your own imagination.” – LitHub