May 15, 2022 0
May 10, 2022 0
The Literary Origins of Netflix’s ‘Lupin’

As adaptations go, Lupin is close to perfect. Rather than directly translate the character to television, the writer George Kay imagines Lupin as the inspiration for a 21st-century con artist named Assane (played by Omar Sy).
(via The Atlantic)
Mar 17, 2022 0
Ebony and Topaz

Ebony and Topaz was started in 1927, and featured essays, art, and poetry—nothing so dissimilar from Opportunity. It was likely because of the audience, argues art historian Caroline Goeser. While Opportunity explicitly tried to be a bridge toward racial equality, Ebony and Topaz was designed to “express a variety of creative responses to African American culture without the burden of appealing to a wide readership.” Johnson wanted to let the readers decide which pieces resonated and how. His hands-off approach to editing let “the writings and art of his contributors to evince a variety of themes.”
(via JSTOR Daily)
Sep 12, 2021 0
The library economics of e-books

In the first days of the lockdown, the N.Y.P.L. experienced a spike in downloads, which lengthened the wait times for popular books. In response, it limited readers to three checkouts and three waitlist requests at a time, and it shifted almost all of its multimillion-dollar acquisitions budget to digital content. By the end of March, seventy-four per cent of U.S. libraries were reporting that they had expanded their digital offerings in response to coronavirus-related library closures. During a recent interview over Zoom (another digital service that proliferated during the pandemic), [Steve] Potash recalled that OverDrive quickly redirected about a hundred employees, who would normally have been at trade shows, “to help support and fortify the increase in demand in digital.” He recalled a fellow-executive telling him, “E-books aren’t just ‘a thing’ now—they’re our only thing.”
(via New Yorker)