Secondary students at New Braunfels Independent School District (TX) have just been barred from using their school libraries.

The New Braunfels Independent School District (NBISD) voted earlier this week to shut down all but elementary school libraries in the district in order to ensure their collections are compliant with SB 13, one of the state’s new laws governing the materials available to students in libraries.

Freedom to read advocates warned for months that implementation of the law would lead to measures such as these. The law is purposefully vague, and it is intended to create a chilling effect across the state’s public schools. 

The district’s secondary libraries contain more than 50,000 items, meaning that it will likely be weeks or months before students can use the library again, and what books will still be in those libraries remains to be seen.

Read more… – KJ

The next time you’re yelling at your phone, "I never mean ‘duck,’" take a minute to appreciate that your typos don’t cost you anything but dignity.

Here are a few of the most expensive typos in history.

🚀 A missing symbol in an equation forced NASA to explode an $80 million rocket bound for Venus during a 1962 mission. (That’s the equivalent of $850 million today.)

🍆 The one-letter difference between "erotic" and "exotic" in a 1988 Yellow Pages ad led to a $10 million lawsuit.

📱 An employee who dropped his phone on his keyboard in Wasatch County, Utah entered a single home’s property value so incorrectly that it resulted in a countywide overvaluation of more than $6 million.

Really makes me feel better about the time I signed an email as the editor of Boob Riot. – RS

The wait is over! Fenty Skin ’s new body collection has officially dropped, and it’s exclusively at Ulta. Transform your routine with irresistible scents like Vanilla Flowers and Hey, Bouquet, and let every shower feel like a main character moment. Enjoy free shipping on any purchase over $35.

Originally published in 1958, Seichō’s Matsumoto’s Tokyo Express is said to be the novel that launched the mystery genre in Japan.

This week, Modern Library released the first widely available English edition, translated by Jesse Kirkwood, which boasts an introduction by Amor Towles. Dude must truly contain multitudes.

In his introduction, Towles praises the book’s "elegant spareness of prose," comparing it to the aesthetics of traditional Japanese design. He also notes that while the whodunit plot is brilliant, it’s Matsumoto’s "stylistic invention and thematic critique" that elevate it to being a work of art.

New editions of two more of Matsumoto’s novels will follow in 2026.

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was first published 75 years ago today. It was not an instant sensation, but by 1960, C.S. Lewis was asked often enough about the origin of his Narnia stories that he published a short piece about the inspiration.

From "It All Began With a Picture" (1960):

One thing I am sure of. All my seven Narnian books, and my three science-fiction books, began with seeing pictures in my head. At first they were not a story, just pictures. The Lion all began with a picture of a Faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself: ‘Let’s try to make a story about it.’….I know very little about how this story was born. That is, I don’t know where the pictures came from. And I don’t believe anyone knows exactly how he ‘makes things up’. Making up is a very mysterious thing. When you ‘have an idea’ could you tell anyone exactly how you thought of it?

🎧 Hear Lewis read the full piece.

What’s your fall reading mood? Fill your fall TBR with cozy, spooky, and spicy (why choose?) reads from Harlequin.com.

Save 30% on all your favorite tropes, genres, and series with code 30SAVEHQN through November 30.

You know that thing people say about wine? “I don’t know what it is, I just know that I like it.”

That was me with art until a few years ago, when a Mickalene Thomas installation blew my mind, and I wanted to understand what I was looking at and why I responded to it.

Start your Art 101 curriculum with these:

• How to See by David Salle: These essays about 20th-century artists and how they think about their work offer an engaging and accessible starting point.
• This is What I Know About Art by Kimberly Drew : Art is always political, and it can be a powerful tool for change. I learned a lot from curator and activist Kimberly Drew’s exploration of the ways in which “art and protest are inextricably linked."
• What Are You Looking At? by Will Gompertz: An art critic and former Tate Gallery director sets out to explain "why an unmade bed or a pickled shark can be art—and why a five-year-old couldn’t really do it.” – RS

Dan Houser is the writer of the Red Dead Redemption and Grand Theft Auto series. His debut novel A Better Paradise is out now.

A Better Paradise is told from several different characters’ perspectives through a series of first-person monologues, a structure Houser finds powerful when done well because "you see events unfold and learn of people’s histories from multiple points of view."

Here are three books he’s loved that play with narrative in similar ways.

• A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan: This book is a twenty-first-century masterpiece. Lots of formal innovation, but also incredibly readable. It bounces between perspectives, locations, and time periods, across industries with a fascinating focus on music and technology.
• Another Country by James Baldwin: Not a first-person narrative, but a complex, multi-layered narrative that leaps around a tragic event and inside and outside of a very memorable set of characters’ psyches as they grapple with what it means to live in this world—all told in Baldwin’s incredibly powerful prose.
• Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture by Douglas Coupland: For some reason, people do not speak enough about Douglas Coupland, but Generation X was so inventive when it came out, and it captured this sense of a post-Cold War world in which people were beginning to feel subsumed by the vast machine of modern consumerism and work.

Unlock your creativity with The Steal Like an Artist Audio Trilogy, a new compilation of Steal Like an Artist, Show Your Work, and Keep Going, read by author Austin Kleon. This bestselling series has inspired millions to create, share, and stay true to their work.

Discover how to find inspiration in others (Steal Like an Artist), build community and audience (Show Your Work ), and sustain your creative life for the long haul (Keep Going). Practical, funny, and deeply motivating, this is your portable guide to a lifelong creative practice.

Listen in the podcatcher of your choice and get chapters delivered as episodes.

For notable literary birthdays, I’ve just been choosing just one quote for each author to mark the day. But with Oscar Wilde, for whom riches were embarrassing, there is indeed an embarrassment of riches. So I offer a smattering of Wilde witticisms that still feel oddly, and perhaps disconcertingly, relevant. – JO

• "Most modern calendars mar the sweet simplicity of our lives by reminding us that each day that passes is the anniversary of some perfectly uninteresting event." – from “A New Calendar”
• "An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all." – from The Epigrams of Oscar Wilde
• "One is tempted to define man as a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason." – from “The Critic As Artist”
• "The growing influence of women is the one reassuring thing in our political life." – from “A Woman of No Importance”
• "Wherever there is a man who exercises authority, there is a man who resists authority." – from “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”

😻 Read a poem from Ursula K. Le Guin’s book about cats.

🗳️ Be an informed pro-library, pro-literacy voter this election season.

🛍️ Treat yourself to an " Ask a Librarian" sweatshirt.

🎧 Listen to an OG podcaster reflect on how 16 years of conversations changed his life.

⁉️ You will never guess who Nicholas Sparks is collaborating with now.

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Written by Rebecca Schinsky, Jeff O’Neal, and Kelly Jensen. Thanks to Vanessa Diaz for copy editing.

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