Category: Miscellaneous

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NaNoWriMo is No Mo

The nonprofit behind National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, has announced that it is shuttering. The closure follows a period of turbulence which included disputes over the organization’s stance on AI and its content moderation, as well as what NaNoWriMo described in an announcement as financial challenges. NaNoWriMo was launched by Chris Baty in 1999 as an online community centered around its flagship annual monthlong novel-writing challenge, in which participants attempted to write 50,000 in 30 days. It continued to grow year over year—at its height, hundreds of thousands of writers around the globe participated in the challenge, facilitated by scores of volunteers who oversaw online forums and local gatherings—and became a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in 2005. Read more

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Meta Seeks to Block Further Sales of Ex-Employee’s Scathing Memoir

Meta won a legal victory on Wednesday against a former employee who published an explosive, tell-all memoir, as an arbitrator temporarily prohibited the author from promoting or further distributing copies … The filing did not appear to limit the publisher, Flatiron Books, or its parent company, Macmillan, from continuing publication of the memoir. Read more

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Six Older Books That Deserve to Be Popular Today

Happily, unfairly forgotten treasures are in vogue. Major publishers and small presses are reissuing novels long out of print, exhuming unpublished manuscripts from celebrated writers, and championing unpopular works dismissed for their abstraction or difficulty. Reading can offer the delightful opportunity to find your present-day thoughts, worries, and emotions in a book published before you were even born. These books may also change how you think about the past, or feature prose you’d never encounter in contemporary life. The following titles are only a small selection that have, in recent years, through the efforts of obsessive editors and fans alike, found themselves justifiably rescued from oblivion. Read more

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James Tilly Matthews and the Air Loom

James Tilly Matthews was delusional. He believed that secret gangs of people were operating across London, using a bizarre machine called the “Air Loom” to control his thoughts and those of others from a distance. According to Matthews, this device emitted “magnetic fluids” to manipulate minds and was being wielded by spies to influence political decisions. Read more

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Antifascist, Feminist, Timeless: On Alba de Céspedes’s ‘There’s No Turning Back’

There’s No Turning Back follows eight young women living in a convent-boarding house in Rome, most of whom are studying at the university. They come from different backgrounds, have different desires and goals, and make different choices, yet they are united in the task of finding their way in the world. “It’s as if we’re on a bridge,” one of the girls says. “We’ve already departed from one side and haven’t yet reached the other. What we’ve left behind we don’t look back at. What awaits us is still enveloped in fog. We don’t know what we’ll find when the fog clears.” Read more

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