Writing

In a capitalist world, even a radical publishing house devoted to the works of socialist thinkers has to make money to survive. That’s the argument being used by Lawrence & Wishart, a London-based publisher, to explain why it has asked the Marxists Internet Archive, a volunteer-run online collection of socialist writers’ works, to remove from the website copyrighted material from the publisher’s Marx Engels Collected Works. Read More at The Chronicle of Higher Education »

Two rare-book dealers claim that they have come into possession of the Bard’s own annotated dictionary. Scholars’ initial reactions have been more cautious than celebratory. Read More at The Chronicle of Higher Education »

In which I think about all the demands on our time-- When did we get so busy? For many of us, life unspools as a never-ending to-do list. Wake up, pack lunches, get the kids to school, get ourselves to our jobs, work all day, collect the kids, make dinner, supervise homework, do the laundry, walk the dog, pay the bills, answer e-mail, crawl into bed for a few fitful hours of sleep, wake up already exhausted, then do it all over again. Weekends, which ought to be oases of leisure, have their own hectic rhythms: errands, chores, sports events, grocery shopping, exercise. Dispatch one task and six more take its place, a regenerating zombie army of obligations. --and what we can do about it.   Read More at The Washington Post »

Sometimes one word makes all the difference. A dispute over a clause in a publishing contract has landed a small scholarly association and the parent institution of a major university press in court, battling over who owns the intellectual rights to the association’s journal. Read More at The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription) »