Pulitzer Prize 2019 Pulitzer awards: Fairview wins for best dramaVox - Constance GradyJackie Sibblies Drury’s drama is brilliant — and unsettling. The recipient of the 2019 Pulitzer for Drama has been announced, and the winner is both odd and terrific. Fairview, written by Jackie Sibblies
Native Son Gets the James Baldwin EditThe Atlantic - A.T. McWilliamsSuzan-Lori Parks’s adaptation of Richard Wright’s famed 1940 novel reframes some of the book’s most controversial details through a critical lens. This article contains spoilers for Native Son. Selling
Play buttonSan Francisco, CALawrence Ferlinghetti Turns 100: Hear the Great San Francisco Poet Read “Trump’s Trojan Horse,” “Pity the Nation” & Manyopenculture.com - by Josh Jones It has been a season of mourning for literature: first the death of Mary Oliver and now W.S. Merwin, two writers who left a considerable imprint on …
Poetry W. S. Merwin’s Poems of Ethical CareThe Atlantic - Walt HunterThe Pulitzer Prize–winning poet, who died last week at 91, found an enduring language to express his anguish at what human exploitation has done to the world. W. S. Merwin, who died last week at age 91,
Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman” is one of the greatest speeches in American rhetoricVox - Constance GradyStart Black History Month by giving it a read. Google is kicking off Black History Month this year by celebrating the legacy of Sojourner Truth, the subject of today’s Google Doodle. Which means that time
On Langston Hughes’s 115th birthday, read his ambivalent ode to AmericaVox - Constance Grady“Let America Be America Again” is the perfect rejoinder to cries of “Make America great again.” Friday is Langston Hughes’s 115th birthday. That means it is a perfect time to remember that in 1936, Hughes
Is Marie Kondo Wrong About Books?Lifehacker - Nick Douglas There’s been a lot of backlash to Marie Kondo’s attitude toward books, thanks to her new Netflix show. In her book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying …
The eternal adolescent voice of The Catcher in the Rye, in one passageVox - Constance GradyAuthor J.D. Salinger’s 100th birthday just passed. It’s become a truism that if you read A Catcher in the Ryeat 14, you love Holden Caulfield, and if you read it at 20, you hate him. But when I reread
These 1923 Copyrighted Works Enter the Public Domain in 2019Lifehacker - Nick Douglas For the first time in twenty years, as the Atlantic points out, a whole year’s worth of copyrighted works will enter the public domain in the U.S. on …
Public Domain Day Is Finally Here!: Copyrighted Works Have Entered the Public Domain Today for the First Time in 21 Yearsopenculture.com - by Josh Jones Earlier this year we informed readers that thousands of works of art and entertainment would soon enter the public domain—to be followed every year …
Play button Alice Walker’s controversial endorsement of David Icke, explainedVox - Constance GradyThe beloved activist and author of The Color Purple is under fire for promoting an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory in an interview with the New York Times. Alice Walker, the beloved activist and author
Philosophy Growing Up Surrounded by Books Has a Lasting Positive Effect on the Brain, Says a New Scientific Studyopenculture.com - by Ted Mills Somewhere in the annals of the internet--if this sprawling, near-sentient thing we call the internet actually has annals--there is a fine, fine quote …
You can unzip this tiny image on Twitter to reveal the complete works of ShakespeareThe Verge - Dami LeeShakespeare 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
How Instagram Saved PoetryThe Atlantic - Faith HillKaren YuanSocial 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 KerouacThe Atlantic - Brian MerchantA 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 NarrativesThe Atlantic - Torry ThreadcraftIn 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 EnoughThe Atlantic - Alia WongGirls 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 TrumpThe Atlantic - Rosa Inocencio SmithF. 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
Worry Less About Crumbling Roads, More About Crumbling LibrariesThe Atlantic - Eric KlinenbergAmerica’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
Play buttonHear Langston Hughes Read His Poetry Over Original Compositions by Charles Mingus & Leonard Feather: A Classic Collaborationopenculture.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 AmericaThe Atlantic - Ralph Waldo EmersonA 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 brainThe Verge - Angela ChenIt’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
Play button The New York Public Library is using Instagram Stories to bring classic novels to your smartphoneThe Verge - Dani DeahlThe 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 KirschA court battle between German and Israeli archives over his manuscripts raised literary, not just legal, questions. An admirer of Franz Kafka’s once presented him with a specially bound volume of three
How Lolita Seduces Us AllThe Atlantic - Caitlin FlanaganA new book about a terrible crime sheds light on the novel’s enduring allure. Let us now reread the old texts, examining them with a cold eye to determine what they reveal about the #MeToo transgressions
James Joyce’s Crayon Covered Manuscript Pages for Ulysses and Finnegans Wakeopenculture.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 notificationThe Verge - Andrew LiptakSerial 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 Barracoon review: brings Middle Passage to lifeVox - Constance GradyBarracoon 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 comicThe A.V. Club - Shea HennumThe first story in Yellow Negroes And Other Imaginary Creatures (New York Review Comics) is titled “Love,” and in a few brief pages establishes the modus operandi of the collection’s author, Yvan Alagbé.
