A newspaper vendor reads an edition of the sports colum of a newspaper printed in Russian July 31, 2001 in downtown Baku, Azerbaijan. In accordance with a decree issued by President Heydar Aliyev last June, Azerbaijan had to change all its Azeric writing, including books, newspapers, and street signs from the old Soviet-era Cyrillic to Latin script on August 1.

Alpha. Bravo. Cyrillic.

Free from Russian dictates over language usage and education, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan prepare to embrace Latin lettering. It’s the latest chapter in the region’s fraught history of alphabet reform.
Part of a painting by Paul Sandby of Reading Abbey Gateway

The Reading Abbey Girls’ School

This all-girls boarding school in England produced a generation of accomplished female writers in the eighteenth century.
The Queen of the Night by Alexander Chee

A Conversation with Alexander Chee

While fact-checking his critically acclaimed novel about an enigmatic soprano of the Paris Opera , Chee happened upon a piece of information on JSTOR he could not ignore.