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☆ A Florida parent tried to get Amanda Gorman's inaugural poem banned from school — and confused her with Oprah
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-24 | by ( Rebecca Cohen | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

A Florida parent tried to get Amanda Gorman's poetry banned, complaining it could "indoctrinate students." Gorman said she is "gutted," but the school told Insider the poem isn't bannedGorman slammed the situation on Twitter, repeating claims that the school banned the book. "Because of one parent's complaint, my inaugural poem, 'The Hill We Climb,' has been banned from an elementary school in Miami-Dade County." The organization, along with Penguin Randomhouse, filed a lawsuit against a Florida school district over the book bans, the Miami Herald reported. "I wrote 'The Hill We Climb' to that all young people could see themselves in a historical moment.

☆ How to Avoid Work Burnout: Lessons From a Wall Street Rising Star
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-23 | by ( Simone Stolzoff | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +11 min

But despite all his professional success, Khe started to notice a nagging feeling that he wasn't playing the right game. "Success is like an addiction," Khe told me. When Khe told his closest confidants that he was unhappy and considering leaving BlackRock, they'd say things like "That's so risky" or "What about your daughter?" At BlackRock, Khe had job security, a seven-figure annual income, and a fancy job title. Simone Stozloff is an independent journalist, a consultant from San Francisco, and the author of "The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work."

☆ Martin Amis, British writer of dark comedic novels, dies at 73
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-20 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +2 min

[1/2] Novelist Martin Amis (L) talks to Tina Brown at the launch of Brown's book "The Diana Chronicles" at a party hosted by Reuters in the Serpentine Gallery in central London, June 18, 2007.... Read moreWASHINGTON, May 20 (Reuters) - Martin Amis, a British writer of dark comedic novels, has died at the age of 73, his publisher said Saturday on Twitter. Penguin Books said Amis "leaves a towering legacy and an indelible mark on the British cultural landscape, and will be missed enormously." Amis died Friday at his home in Lake Worth, Florida, the New York Times reported earlier, quoting his wife, Isabel Fonseca, as saying the cause was esophageal cancer. He worked as an editor at The Times Literary Supplement and later the literary editor of The New Statesman. In a 2020 interview with the New York Times, Amis said "we read literature to have a good time.

CNN —British author Martin Amis, best known for the 1984 novel, “Money,” and 1989’s “London Fields,” has died, his publisher Penguin Books UK announced Saturday. “(Amis) leaves a towering legacy and an indelible mark on the British cultural landscape, and will be missed enormously,” the British publishing house said on Twitter. LONDON - APRIL 5: Writer Martin Amis at home in London on April 5, 1995. His 1991 novel, “Time’s Arrow,” and 2014’s “The Zone of Interest,” explored the Holocaust. “It’s hard to imagine a world without Martin Amis in it,” his UK editor, Michal Shavit, said in Penguin’s statement.

☆ This PTA Mom From Escambia County Is Suing Her School District For Banning Books - The New York Times
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-19 | by ( Michelle Goldberg | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

in bright-red Escambia County, Fla., knows that coming out as a public face in the fight against book banning could make her life difficult, but she’s made peace with it. “I don’t want my business to suffer,” the optometrist and mother of elementary school-age girls told me. I’m not one to keep my mouth shut.”Durtschi is part of a groundbreaking lawsuit, filed on Wednesday, against the Escambia County School District and Escambia County School Board for their sweeping school library censorship. In addition to Durtschi and another Escambia County parent, the plaintiffs include the free expression organization PEN America, Penguin Random House and a group of authors of children’s and young adult books. The suit seeks to have Escambia’s book restrictions declared unconstitutional for targeting specific viewpoints and for infringing on the rights of students to receive information.

“The attack on books, the attack on teaching, the attack on libraries, in – how can I put this – Florida, has never been more dangerous, never been more important to fight,” he said. Rushdie spoke at the PEN America Gala in New York City, praising the literary and free speech advocacy group for its latest efforts to block politicians and local officials seeking to ban literature concerning race and gender identity. PEN America, along with book publisher Penguin Random House and several parents and authors, filed a lawsuit on Wednesday challenging Florida’s Escambia County school district’s removal of certain books on race and LGBTQ issues from school libraries. “I was really proud to hear yesterday that PEN America, together with my publisher Penguin Random House, has taken this step of bringing a lawsuit in Florida,” Rushdie said. “Tonight, we recognize the courage of an Iranian writer, and we’ve done so over and over (with) writers from all over the world.

☆ The world's biggest publisher is suing a Florida school district for banning books by writers including Toni Morrison and Khaled Hosseini
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-18 | by ( Ryan Hogg | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

Penguin Random House is suing a Florida school district and board after it banned certain books. Penguin Random House has joined forces with an authors' group to sue a Florida school district after it banned a number of books. Books removed or restricted by Escambia include "The Bluest Eye" by Toni Morrison, "Slaughterhouse-Five" by Kurt Vonnegut, and "The Kite Runner" by Khaled Hosseini. All have had books removed from libraries or had student access restricted by the district, PEN America said in a press release. "The book removals and restrictions enacted by the School District and School Board are denying students access to books they would like to read, or chilling such access."

☆ Penguin Random House Sues Florida School District Over Book Bans
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-17 | by ( Suryatapa Bhattacharya | Jennifer Calfas | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit www.djreprints.com. https://www.wsj.com/articles/penguin-random-house-sues-florida-school-district-over-book-bans-dd301e0f

☆ Penguin Random House and Florida parents sue school district over book bans
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-17 | by ( Jo Yurcaba | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +3 min

A selection of books including "The Bluest Eye," by Toni Morrison, that have been the subject of complaints from parentsPenguin Random House, authors, parents and an advocacy group filed a lawsuit Wednesday against a Florida school district for removing 10 books related to race and the LGBTQ community after a high school teacher complained. In addition to the publishing house, PEN America, a nonprofit group that advocates for free expression in literature, five authors whose books have been removed from the district, and two parents whose children go to school in the district filed the suit against the Escambia County School District and the Escambia County School Board in Pensacola, Florida. "The clear agenda behind the campaign to remove the books is to categorically remove all discussion of racial discrimination or LGBTQ issues from public school libraries. Neither the district nor the school board immediately returned requests for comment. More than 100 other titles are restricted and require parental approval for access.

☆ TikTok has influenced nearly every aspect of book publishing and helped push sales to record highs. 25 insiders describe how it's changed their industry.
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-17 | by ( Marta Biino | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +11 min

The BookTok phenomenon helped send book sales to an all-time high and reignite a love for reading. From authors to stores, the book world is turning to TikTok to drive sales and build community. Still, while authors might feel pressure to try TikTok, industry experts say it's better to focus on craft than marketing. Aster is one of the hundreds of authors who are benefitting from the success of TikTok and its book-related hashtag #BookTok. But TikTok's influence on publishing has also dialed up the pressure on authors to be marketers, as well as writers.

☆ Bernie Sanders doubled his income last year by writing a best-selling book that condemns capitalism
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-12 | by ( Bryan Metzger | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Sen. Bernie Sanders wrote a book called "It's OK to Be Angry About Capitalism." Per new disclosures, he made $170,000 in book royalties in 2022, nearly as much as his $174,000 salary. Coupled with another $170,000 royalties payment from publisher Penguin Random House in 2020, Sanders has so far made $340,000 from the book. Sanders, a two-time runner-up for the Democratic presidential nomination and a proponent of Democratic Socialism, has long drawn scrutiny for the wealth he's managed to amass while in office. Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, a fellow progressive and 2020 presidential candidate, made even more than Sanders in book royalties in 2022, according to her own recently-filed financial disclosures.

☆ With 'The Ferryman,' Justin Cronin explores a brave new dystopian world
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-07 | by ( Mike Calia | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +7 min

"I didn't sit down and say to myself, 'I'm going to write another dystopia,'" Cronin told CNBC in an interview Tuesday at a bustling lower Manhattan diner. There was a very specific arrangement, military and political, that's no longer there. Some point I'm going to do something else. As a writer, you need to walk a lot of different streets, in a lot of different ways, to know this stuff. Even where political will is absent, even where there are strong disincentives to change, things come along and make it happen.

☆ Scientists used DNA to unlock who wore a 25,000-year-old pendant
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-06 | by ( Ashley Strickland | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +6 min

Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary AnthropologyA deer tooth pendant has revealed details about the woman who wore it between 19,000 and 25,000 years ago. The groundbreaking analysis by a team of European researchers marks the first time scientists have successfully isolated ancient human DNA from a Stone Age artifact. Gregory BretonWith large ears and adorable faces, sand cats went viral seven years ago when their kittens were photographed in the wild for the first time. Although smaller than domestic cats, sand cats live in harsh environments with scorching heat, hunt venomous Saharan horned vipers and rely on blood from prey as a source of water. To unravel the many mysteries of sand cats, researchers tracked 22 of the felines that had been fitted with radio collars for four years.

☆ 2 Supreme Court justices failed to recuse themselves from cases involving their publisher after receiving exorbitant amounts in book advances and royalties
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-05 | by ( Madison Hall | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

On two occasions, the Supreme Court has declined to take on cases involving publishing conglomerate Penguin Random House. There have been two cases that came before the Supreme Court involving publishing conglomerate Penguin Random House. In both situations, the Supreme Court declined to take on the copyright infringement cases, allowing the publisher to win at a lower court level. Conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch was confirmed in 2017 and was also a member of the Supreme Court during the second case. Sotomayor and Gorsuch had both signed major book deals with the publisher before the cases occurred, and both justices declined to recuse themselves from the cases involving Penguin Random House.

☆ Check out the 16-slide deck Rebel Girls used to raise $8 million to expand its empowerment-focused storytelling to TV, film, and more
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-03 | by ( Lucia Moses | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Rebel Girls is a certified B Corp focused on empowering girls through inspiring content. Rebel Girls is a media company that started in 2016 with a mission to empower girls through inspiring, women-focused content. "It used to be if there was a female protagonist, she'd use magic — and the female protagonist was considered just for girls," Rebel Girls CEO Jes Wolfe told Insider. Rebel Girls' content strategy is to show up everywhere girls are, online and offline. Scroll down to read the pitch deck Rebel Girls used to raise its Series A.

☆ John Blake: The story about race I didn't know how to tell
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-02 | by ( John Blake | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +14 min

John Blake, seen here in a second-grade photo, grew up as the son of a White mother and Black father. What I didn’t know was that my community had died long before the Freddie Gray protests. That’s the story I wanted to tell, but I didn’t know how. I didn’t know how to tell Harlow any of that because my story doesn’t fit traditional narratives about race or identity. My white family members didn’t change because I shamed them with an impressive lecture on systemic racism.

☆ An ex-Walmart cashier made $6 million in revenue in 3 years selling things online. Here's how she got started and her top 5 tips for print-on-demand products.
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-30 | by ( Laila Maidan | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +10 min

It's a low-cost way to sell products online because you don't need inventory. She had purchased an ebook about how to make money online and then realized it had an affiliate link she could promote. Finding something that stuckIt was around this time that she began dabbling with print-on-demand products. The demand was strong from others who were also offering print-on-demand products. She estimates that about 30% of the revenue came from selling her print-on-demand products.

☆ To my son, born in the climate crisis: I see signs of hope
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-23 | by ( Bill Weir | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +11 min

The first looked at the twin crises of Covid and climate change as River was born; the second introduced him to Earth Day and what he could do. Watch Weir investigate “How to Unscrew a Planet,” on CNN’s “The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper,” Sunday at 8 p.m. Energy from clean sources, like this windmill in Texas, is heating and cooling more homes in America than ever before. “We call it climate intervention,” Kelly Wanser told me as we sat under bluebird skies and the Washington Monument. So far, it feels like your future will be marked in new stories to frame our wants and needs, and new tools to build Life As We Know It Could Be.

☆ Warner Bros Discovery reveals pricing, promotion, and content details of its new streamer, Max, as it aims to take on Netflix and fire up Wall Street
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-12 | by ( Lucia Moses | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +7 min

Called Max, the app will feature content from HBO Max and Discovery+. Discovery announced the details of its new streaming app on Wednesday, after much anticipation from Hollywood and Madison Avenue. The prices will stay the same for HBO Max subscribers, who will begin to be automatically ported over to the new service. Presenting the entire WBD content catalog on the combined streamer without diluting HBO's prestige factor was another challenge. HBO Max has greater recognition with younger consumers, according to a new Samba TV/HarrisX poll, which could help grow awareness for Discovery+.

☆ Nobody showed up to a best-selling author's book launch. She called it a 'career low point' but found out she's far from alone.
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-08 | by ( Pete Syme | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

But nobody turned up to the launch event at the NYT-best-selling writer's local indie bookstore. The launch signing event for her new book, "In Nightfall," was on March 28. Instead, Young tweeted a picture of the 17 empty chairs, describing the moment as a "career low point" and saying she was "crying my entire way home." He said that in his experience, bookstore launch events had been "hit or miss — some packed, some empty, most in between." She'll consider virtual events in future, saying that this was her first book launch since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

☆ Rising Antarctic ice melt will dramatically slow global ocean flows, study finds
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-29 | by ( David Stanway | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +3 min

REUTERS/Natalie Thomas/SINGAPORE, March 29 (Reuters) - Rapidly melting Antarctic ice is dramatically slowing down the flow of water through the world's oceans, and could have a disastrous impact on global climate, the marine food chain and even the stability of ice shelves, new research has found. The "overturning circulation" of the oceans, driven by the movement of denser water towards the sea floor, helps deliver heat, carbon, oxygen and vital nutrients around the globe. But deep ocean water flows from the Antarctic could decline by 40% by 2050, according to a study published on Wednesday in the journal Nature. Ocean overturning allows nutrients to rise up from the bottom, with the Southern Ocean supporting about three-quarters of global phytoplankton production, the base of the food chain, said a second study co-author, Steve Rintoul. Reporting by David Stanway; Additional reporting by Gloria Dickie in London; Editing by Alex RichardsonOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

REUTERS/Stefan WermuthMarch 25 (Reuters) - A U.S. judge has ruled that an online library operated by the nonprofit organization Internet Archive infringed the copyrights of four major U.S. publishers by lending out digitally scanned copies of their books. The San Francisco-based non-profit over the past decade has scanned millions of print books and lent out the digital copies for free. But Koeltl said there was nothing "transformative" about Internet Archive's digital book copies that would warrant "fair use" protection, as its e-books merely replaced the authorized copies publishers themselves license to traditional libraries. "Although IA has the right to lend print books it lawfully acquired, it does not have the right to scan those books and lend the digital copies en masse," he wrote. Internet Archive promised an appeal, saying the ruling "holds back access to information in the digital age, harming all readers, everywhere."

REUTERS/Stefan WermuthMarch 24 (Reuters) - A U.S. judge on Friday ruled that an online library operated by the nonprofit organization Internet Archive had infringed the copyrights of four major U.S. publishers by lending out digitally scanned copies of the books. The San Francisco-based non-profit over the past decade has scanned millions of print books and lent out the resulted digital copies for free. But Koeltl said there was nothing "transformative" about the Internet Archive's digital book copies that would warrant "fair use" protection, as its ebooks merely replaced the authorized copies publishers themselves license traditional libraries. "Although IA has the right to lend print books it lawfully acquired, it does not have the right to scan those books and lend the digital copies en masse," he wrote. The Internet Archive in a statement promised an appeal, saying the ruling "holds back access to information in the digital age, harming all readers, everywhere."

☆ Inside the germy, sneeze-filled meeting between Morgan Stanley's CEO and the Saudi crown prince at the onset of COVID-19
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-08 | by ( Liz Hoffman | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +8 min

James Gorman, CEO of Morgan Stanley, met with the Saudi crown prince at the onset of the pandemic. The young royal kept sneezing during the meeting — and Gorman's fear of a deadly pathogen began to grow. He was in the royal palace in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, seated to the right of the country's crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. Given their recent experience with a deadly virus, Gorman took the caution of his Kuwaiti hosts as a sign that the West was underestimating the dangers of this one. And now, as Gorman chatted with the controversial 34-year-old crown prince about ways Saudi Arabia could diversify its economy and reduce its reliance on oil, the young royal kept sneezing.

☆ Justice Department sues to block JetBlue’s acquisition of Spirit Airlines
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-07 | by ( Leslie Josephs | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +3 min

The Justice Department on Tuesday sued to block JetBlue Airways ' $3.8 billion proposed takeover of budget carrier Spirit Airlines , the Biden administration's latest attempt to prevent industry consolidation. Spirit Airlines agreed to sell itself to JetBlue last summer after a long battle for the carrier between JetBlue and Frontier Airlines . A JetBlue-Spirit combination would be the first major U.S. airline merger since Alaska Airlines' takeover of Virgin America in 2016. The Justice Department at the time required Alaska to scale back its code share with American Airlines to clear the deal. Separately, JetBlue is awaiting a ruling on its Northeast partnership with American Airlines, which the Justice Department sued to undo in 2021.

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