The Russian government (which you’d think might not want to publicize this) estimates that between a quarter and a third of all books on the market in the country are pirated. (The problem is virtually nil with print books, though; it’s all in the e-book sector.) Even more worrisome is what one survey found about Russians’ beliefs regarding pirated content.
Category: words
First Person Account: The New Republic As A Cautionary Journalism Tale
“Data have turned journalism into a commodity, something to be marketed, tested, calibrated. Perhaps people in the media have always thought this way. But if that impulse existed, it was at least buffered. Journalism’s leaders were vigilant about separating the church of editorial from the secular concerns of business. We can now see the cause for fanaticism about building such a thick wall between the two.”
Read Annie Dillard’s Classic Essay About Solar Eclipses
“I had seen a partial eclipse in 1970. A partial eclipse is very interesting. It bears almost no relation to a total eclipse. Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him, or as flying in an airplane does to falling out of an airplane. Although the one experience precedes the other, it in no way prepares you for it.”
In honor of this month’s event, The Atlantic brings back Dillard’s 1982 piece “Total Eclipse.”
Twitter Vigilantes Poison Social Media Discussion Of Young Adult Novels
“Led by a group of influential authors who pull no punches when it comes to calling out their colleagues’ work, and amplified by tens of thousands of teen and young-adult followers for whom online activism is second nature, the campaigns to keep offensive books off shelves” – often waged by people who haven’t read the novel they’re condemning – “are a regular feature in a community that’s as passionate about social justice as it is about reading.”
Public Broadcaster Sues LaVar Burton Over “Reading Rainbow”
The suit alleges “copyright infringement, conversion, cybersquatting, violations of the Lanham Act, breach of contract and interference with customer relations,” and seeks profits from LeVar Burton Reads, which Burton did describe on the podcast itself as “a Reading Rainbow for adults.”
Salman Rushdie, Kiran Desai, Pankaj Mishra, And Others On The Partition Of The Indian Subcontinent, 70 Years Later
“More than a million were killed and many millions more displaced by Indian partition. [Eleven] authors consider its bloody legacy and the crises now facing their countries.”
In Search Of The Lost Sylvia Plath Novel That We Know Exists
“While the hope for new finds continues unabated, one known text eludes all who seek it. In the summer of 1962, Plath began work on her second novel. We know what it was about—a fictionalized autobiography in the vein of The Bell Jar about an artist who discovers her husband has cheated—and we know that she completed a number of pages of the book before her death. But in the years that followed, the manuscript for Double Exposure vanished.”
Jane Austen Died 200 Years Ago, So This Year, The Tours Are Bigger Than Ever
And the divisions loom larger as well: “Though Austen lovers are outwardly polite about this particular issue, there is a clear divide between the sort of Janeites who like to exchange learned scholarly remarks, and the sort of Janeites who like to dress up in nonlearned period outfits.”
Reading Mrs. Dalloway When You’re The Same Age As Mrs. Dalloway
It’s … intense. “My life has been scattered across the earth like sand, and I long to gather all the grains together and have them around me in one place, as Clarissa does at her party.”
The Making, And Potential Undoing, Of Canadian Novelist Joseph Boyden
This massive profile concerns whether Boyden is Indigenous or not, but “the real difficulty of answering the question rests with the essential thorniness of coming to grips with Indigenous identity in a country that has spent centuries trying to warp and misconstrue the very concept.”