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William Shakespeare
You can unzip this tiny image on Twitter to reveal the complete works of Shakespeare
The Verge - Dami Lee
Shakespeare was a prolific playwright, penning more than 37 plays and 154 sonnets throughout his entire career. Now, his life’s work has been compiled into a tiny image on Twitter by computer science David
Social Media
How Instagram Saved Poetry
The Atlantic - Faith HillKaren Yuan
Social media is turning an art form into an industry. Tom spent his days as a clerk, two floors below ground level in the cellars of Lloyds Bank. He worked in the foreign-transactions department from a.m.
When an AI Goes Full Jack Kerouac
The Atlantic - Brian Merchant
A computer has written a “novel” narrating its own cross-country road trip. On March 25, 2017, a black Cadillac with a white-domed surveillance camera attached to its trunk departed Brooklyn for New Orleans.
The Power of Untold Slave Narratives
The Atlantic - Torry Threadcraft
In Barracoon, Zora Neale Hurston challenges the American public’s narrow view of the African continent, the transatlantic slave trade, and the diasporic cultures that came as a result of it. Precolonial
Boys Don’t Read Enough
The Atlantic - Alia Wong
Girls read more than boys in just about every developed country, and it's a big reason they have better educational outcomes. Developed countries like the United States have seen a remarkable transformation
How The Great Gatsby Explains Trump
The Atlantic - Rosa Inocencio Smith
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel is a surprisingly apt primer on the president of the United States. There’s an eerie symmetry between Donald Trump and The Great Gatsby’s Tom Buchanan, as if the villain
Roads
Worry Less About Crumbling Roads, More About Crumbling Libraries
The Atlantic - Eric Klinenberg
America’s social infrastructure is falling apart, and it’s hurting democracy. Every four years, the American Society for Civil Engineers issues grades for the nation’s infrastructure. In the most recent
Hear Langston Hughes Read His Poetry Over Original Compositions by Charles Mingus & Leonard Feather: A Classic Collaboration
openculture.com - by Josh Jones
Have you looked up Charles Mingus lately? You should. Mingus, who died in 1979, has a “lost” album coming out—live recordings made in ‘73, aired on …
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Call to Save America
The Atlantic - Ralph Waldo Emerson
A year into the Civil War, The Atlantic’s co-founder entreated President Lincoln and the Republican-majority Congress to bring slavery to an immediate and permanent end. The Civil War was still young April
A neuroscientist explains what tech does to the reading brain
The Verge - Angela Chen
It’s not a zero-sum game For anyone who has ever been a reader, there’s much to sympathize with in Maryanne Wolf’s Reader, Come Home. The UCLA neuroscientist, a great lover of literature, tries to read
The New York Public Library is using Instagram Stories to bring classic novels to your smartphone
The Verge - Dani Deahl
The New York Public Library is taking classic novels and transforming them into animated Instagram Stories, as reported by Engadget. Through a partnership with New York ad agency Mother, it’s created Novels,”
Who Gets to Claim Kafka?
The Atlantic - Adam Kirsch
A court battle between German and Israeli archives over his manuscripts raised literary, not just legal, questions. Kafka's Last Trial: The Case of a Literary Legacy by Benjamin Balint W. W. Norton An
How Lolita Seduces Us All
The Atlantic - Caitlin Flanagan
A new book about a terrible crime sheds light on the novel’s enduring allure. The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World by Sarah Weinman Ecco Let us now the
Culture
James Joyce’s Crayon Covered Manuscript Pages for Ulysses and Finnegans Wake
openculture.com - by Colin Marshall
Even the most avid James Joyce fans surely have times when they open Finnegans Wake and wonder how on Earth Joyce wrote the thing. Painstakingly, it …
This app will send you tiny short stories via push notification
The Verge - Andrew Liptak
Serial Box is experimenting with super-short fiction with Microfiction Mondays A couple years ago, startup publisher Serial Box launched with an aim to publish stories in a slightly different way: tell
Zora Neale Hurston’s story of the last Middle Passage survivor is in print, 90 years later
Vox - Constance Grady
Barracoon tells the story of a man who survived Middle Passage, slavery, and the Jim Crow South. At the beginning of Barracoon, the previously unpublished book by Zora Neale Hurston that has at last been
The striking, uncomfortable, poetic Yellow Negroes And Other Imaginary Creatures is a must-read comic
The A.V. Club - Shea Hennum
The first story in Yellow Negroes And Other Imaginary Creatures (New York Review Comics) is titled “Love,” and in a few brief pages establishes the …
Intellectual Property
How an author trademarking the word “cocky” turned the romance novel industry inside out
Vox - Constance Grady
“Some would call it trademark bullying.” Gentle reader: Before we delve into the long tale that lies ahead — a tale of hubris, furious romance novelists, and intellectual property law — I ask you to take
A Landslide of Classic Art Is About to Enter the Public Domain
The Atlantic - Glenn Fleishman
For the first time in two decades, a huge number of books, films, and other works will escape U.S. copyright law. The Great American Novel enters the public domain on January 1, 2019—quite literally. the
List: Most-Liked Tweets of Famous Poets
mcsweeneys.net - CHRIS LINDSAY
@FrostRob st00pid horse got lost in the woods & now it’s snowing. kill me@ee_nocaps carrying bae’s <3 in my <3@EmmyD im nobody. ‘sup, nobodies in my …
Great Books
Ulysses turns 100 this month, and you should totally read it
The A.V. Club - Clayton Purdom
This month marks the 100th anniversary of the first appearance of James Joyce’s Ulysses, originally serialized in The Little Review between March 1918 …
The 17 Dirtiest Excerpts From James Joyce's Letters
BuzzFeed - Alex Naidus
"I am still in a fever-fit of animal desire." No kidding, dude. H/t to Open Culture
Mueller’s Russia indictment is full of bad English.
slate.com - Mary Wilson
The FBI special counsel’s Friday indictments against 13 Russian nationals and three companies including a notorious online troll farm did a few …
Why it could be revolutionary to package the Bible as a novel instead of a textbook.
slate.com - Ruth Graham
I’ve owned eight or 10 Bibles over the course of my life, including a children’s illustrated New International Version, a handful of small gilt-edged …
There is no better metaphor for Instagram’s shallowness than the people posting “backwards books.”
slate.com - Heather Schwedel
It’s long been said that books furnish a room, but the maxim ended there. I guess no one ever mentioned what direction those books should face when …
Fire and Fury is out of stock everywhere. Blame a Depression-era publishing policy.
Vox - Constance Grady
Publishing industry norms combined to lowball print runs. Since its early release last Friday, Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury has become the hottest book in the country. The book, which purports to reveal
The CDC’s language policy isn’t just politics as usual. It’s Orwellian.
Vox - Constance Grady
On December 15, the Washington Post reported that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was striking certain words from the budget reports it creates for the Trump administration, including fetus,
Why Did a Texas School District Ban the Year’s Most Popular YA Book, The Hate U Give?
slate.com - Kat Rosenfield
This article originally appeared in Vulture.In the age of social media, only the most foolish and digitally un-savvy censor would attempt to …
The Sonny Bono Memorial Collection fights copyright creep.
slate.com - Jennifer Howard
The internet has made it easier than ever to access information that you once had to dig through stacks and archives to find. You don’t have to have …