Jen Gallagher

An advert for a company called Magibook. The headline reads "Turn HARD books into EASY books with Magibook! Maximize your reading potential and avoid difficult language today." Underneath is two covers of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Above the first cover is the original version of the opening sentence (captioned "Turn Hard Books"), which reads "In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since." Above the second cover (captioned "into Easy Books") is a simplified version, which reads "When I was young, my dad told me something that I still think about."

THE BELL JAR

HARD ❌

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York

EASY ✅

That summer was sizzling, and so were the Rosenbergs

You may not think that the hours of 6am to 7am are the perfect time for a screaming argument, but my neighbours would like to heartily disagree with you.

I love these old texts, the words somehow feel more poetic, more romantic, more... hang on a minute... ;)

"The nature of forgeries, a subject on which I may boast of some small expertise, is to fool the least discerning, not the most; it is to convince the general public that true greatness never existed, that imitation is reality, that shoddiness is quality. It is an assault on pleasure itself."

Excellent! And now I know about another 100 articles that I probably don’t need to know about, but it’s all good progress 😅

Spending the morning tracking down articles and chapters to save and upload to the reference manager…totally counts as PhD work, right?

I have done five hours of work today, please say it counts 🙏

#phdlife

Excellent timing seeing this post. I’m listening to the audiobook of this (which is wonderful) and was just thinking I also want to buy a physical copy ❤️

Dr Carla Hayden was a truly great Librarian of Congress. It is an outrage that she has been sacked - a national shame on the United States. I had the pleasure of knowing her and working with her - she’ll continue to do good in the next phase of her career whatever that is.

The American Library Association praises servic of Dr. Carla Hayden, decries 'unjust dismissal' of Librarian of Congress. [Image of Dr. Carla Hayden standing in the stacks in a library]

NEW: ALA salutes Dr Carla Hayden for her exceptional service to the nation as the Librarian of Congress. We are deeply disappointed in Dr Hayden's abrupt & unjust dismissal last night, an insult to the scope & breadth of her work.

Read ALA Pres. Cindy Hohl's statement: www.ala.org/news/2025/05...

Using AI to 'create' something is like teleporting to the top of Everest and comparing yourself to Edmund Hillary. The AI 'creator' has risked nothing, achieved nothing, has not been forced to dig deep, and is unchanged by the experience.

ON WEDNESDAY 21 MAY: Dr @noreenmasud.bsky.social (English) is in conversation with SJ Kim to discuss her new memoir, This Part is Silent: A Life Between Two Cultures

⏰ 7-9pm
📍 @gloucesterroadbks.bsky.social
🎟️ bit.ly/3GAUpy1

[2/3]

AKA "writers' sweet spot".

Clutching at (paper) straws

Due to the Conclave the Sistine Chapel will be closed to the public from Monday 28 April 2025 Visits to the Vatican Gardens and the Necropolis of the Via Triumphalis are suspended

Someone should remake "Conclave," but from the point of view of inconvenienced tourists

This is pretty much my approach to PhD writing except for “fifth volume” it’s “each paragraph”

Royal Society decides not to take disciplinary action against Elon Musk Exclusive: Fellows argue Musk has violated code of conduct but council believes investigation ‘could do more harm than good’

Shameful cowardice from the Royal Society.

www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

The Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem Meta pirated millions of books to train its AI. Search through them here.

What a depressing irony that my #Burningthebooks & seven of my scholarly articles have been pirated by Meta for LibGen. We are experimenting with AI @bodleianlibraries.bsky.social using only public-domain materials. This industry needs to be regulated! www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

The new OpenAI creative writing bot's "short story" has the phrase "democracy of ghosts". It's the sort of phrase that would make me stop and admire it, if I were reading a human author - which, it turns out, I was, because it's from Nabokov's 1957 novel "Pnin".

www.theguardian.com/books/2025/m...

It’s just cruel to make us wait over a year for this! Cannot contain my joy for how great I know this book is going to be.

Reminder: with it being International Women's Day yesterday, anything we sell in our store this weekend sees 25% of the price donated to Sheffield Women's Aid. Please buy something if you can. It includes everything available and all preorders!
www.northodox.co.uk/bookstore

The spines of four books: Playboy by Constance Debré; Cloistered by Catherine Coldstream; Satisfaction by Nina Bouraoui; Strange Journey by Maud Cairnes

Accidentally fell into a book shop. Was powerless to stop what happened next

This is digital humanities

A tree - possibly an ent - with legs, arms and an unusually large bellybutton.

Had to clamber over a barbed wire fence, rip my coat and trespass to get a photo of this folkloric monster pretending half-successfully to be a tree. I have no regrets.

University of Manchester logo: 'Knowledge, wisdom and humanity'. Features Victorian buildings with a rainbow behind them on the right side.

At a time when so many UK universities are closing Humanities courses and limiting so-called 'unfunded' Humanities research, this investment in 14 three-year postdoctoral fellowships by @official-uom.bsky.social 's Faculty of Humanities is especially impressive. Deadline 7 March.

Trump supporters tolerated in our bookshop but not welcomed. #BookSky
(Poster from the former Albion Beatnik bookshop in Oxford, adapted from a design by Beatrice Warde.)

Dr. Jones illustrating the most important and rewarding part of being an archaeologist.

Katherine Rundell · Why children’s books? Children’s books, to a great extent because they are written for those who cannot participate in the market, can offer...

‘The great children’s writers trusted children with irony and with sophisticated ideas: they trusted them to see in language a set, not of rules, but of possibilities.’

Katherine Rundell on children’s literature: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

If you complain about your hard-to-read archival sources, remember: it could be much worse. 😳
Court of Common Pleas Brevia Files, 1272-1796, UK National Archives.
Brevia files are the main series of writ files of the court, containing writs returned by the sheriff of each county.

A page from the incunable "Der f°uszpfadt tz°u der ewigen seligkeyt/ diß Büchlein genant ist", from 1489 Heidelberg [GW 10429]. An armed knight sits on a horse. The missing lance has been drwan into the print by a later owner or user of the book. Source: http://dl.ub.uni-freiburg.de/diglit/fusspfad1494/0057

When you printed a glorious knight late at night in 1489, and woke up to notice that you forgot the lance ...

#earlymodern #bookhistory #proofreading

Britain has seen an alarming rise in poetry sales --The Economist, 15 Jan 2024

2024 Headline of the Year nominee (January)