• I'm quoted in this very good short sendoff for the APRIL Festival in this month's Seattle Met, by Darren Davis:

The party may be ending this year with a send-off event, but it leaves having made its mark on the local literary scene. “APRIL took readings out of bookstores and into bars, onto the street,” says Paul Constant of The Seattle Review of Books, who started noticing younger crowds at readings after 2012.

• Blogging service Medium announced yesterday that they're going to start selling memberships for $5 per month. A whole lot of blogs that we like, including The Awl and Electric Literature, moved over to Medium last year. Then, Medium laid off a bunch of employees. Hopefully, they'll figure this out, because there aren't very many blogging options available to people anymore. I remain skeptical that a subscription, which offers "exclusive stories" and an "offline reading list," is going to be lucrative enough to support the company, but I wish them luck.

• The latest issue of Evidence Based Library and Information Practice features an article titled "A Comparison of Traditional Book Reviews and Amazon.com Book Reviews of Fiction Using a Content Analysis Approach.” The idea is to determine whether traditional book reviews or Amazon reviews are more helpful for librarians. Here's the conclusion from the abstract:

Although Amazon.com provides multiple reviews of a book on one convenient site, traditional sources of professionally written reviews would most likely save librarians more time in making purchasing decisions, given the higher quality of the review assessment.

• I interviewed former Elizabeth Warren staffer Ganesh Sitaraman at Town Hall last night about his new book The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution. Sitaraman is an incredibly smart man who had a lot to say about the history of income equality in this country, and the audience Q&A portion of the evening was fantastic. You should read Sitaraman's book, which will influence political theory for years to come. And if you would like more information before you pick it up, I'd encourage you to read this wonderful Atlantic interview with him.