If you step into the headquarters of the Internet Archive on a Friday after lunch, when it offers public tours, chances are you’ll be greeted by its founder and merriest cheerleader, Brewster Kahle. You cannot miss the building; it looks like it was designed for some sort of Grecian-themed Las Vegas attraction and plopped down … Read more
There is, of course, no mandate that Rooney populate the landscape of her fiction with fat bodies as some kind of feint toward inclusion, even if those bodies do happen to comprise almost half the US population. But consider a reversal: If another writer, even one of Rooney’s stature, populated her novels with a similar … Read more
On Sept. 4, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of book publishers in their copyright case against the Internet Archive. The case, which narrowly involves questions of copyright and the online distribution of books, has garnered the attention of open-internet advocates and the publishing industry, but normally would not generate broad interest. … Read more
.jpg "Alexandra “Zan” Romanoff’s New Book ‘Big Fan’ Serves Up Political Intrigue With a Side of Spine-Tingling Romance")
Despite the efforts of bookstores like Los Angeles’s The Ripped Bodice and San Diego’s Meet Cute Romance Bookshop, stories that center romantic love don’t always get their due as the cerebral, witty works of art that they so often are. Author Alexandra “Zan” Romanoff’s most recent novella, Big Fan (from the recently launched romance publisher … Read more
The Internet Archive has lost a major legal battle—in a decision that could have a significant impact on the future of internet history. Today, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled against the long-running digital archive, upholding an earlier ruling in Hachette v. Internet Archive that found that one of the Internet … Read more
In Loving Corrections, activist adrienne maree brown’s new collection of essays, the often fraught work of correction—which is to say, effecting some personal, professional, and/or political change, sometimes by confronting other people espousing harmful ideas—is rooted in a place of mutual trust, and a shared vision for the future. This isn’t to say that the … Read more
That criminalization kills. That it endangers sex workers, even when they’re ostensibly not the targeted party—as with the so-called Nordic model. People do this work because it is work, meaning it pays: It is a way to earn a living. It’s fine for you to not like it or be uncomfortable with it or feel … Read more
We may seem to be in a golden age of trans books, with novels like Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby and Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater earning mainstream acclaim—but the reality of trans inclusion in media and publishing is considerably more fraught. Many trans writers still struggle to get published or paid fairly for their work, while books … Read more
In The Coin, Yasmin Zaher’s novel about a young Palestinian woman doing her best to build a life that works for her in New York City, cleanliness is, indeed, close to godliness. Zaher’s narrator becomes obsessed with spotlessness and purity even as she gets sucked further and further into chaos while balancing her job teaching … Read more
There are so many niche hobbies and careers in Long Island Compromise. What was the weirdest rabbit hole you found yourself in? I have two very close friends who are land-use lawyers. And I’ve overheard enough of their jobs to be like, This is completely absurd. I’m going to use it. So I wrote a … Read more
