Syms, nominated for two BAFTAs, was a hit with her first major role in 1956, playing a young delinquent in My Teenage Daughter. Nominated for two BAFTAs, she later played Margaret Thatcher and, memorably, Queen Mother to Helen Mirren in The Queen. - The Guardian (UK)
The personal literary archives of Didion and her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, contain 240 linear feet of material - including her research for The White Album and Slouching Towards Bethlehem, drafts of screenplays, and even her footprint as a newborn. - The New York Times
Oliver James, a 34-year-old TikTok star, was functionally illiterate - until he joined forces with TikTok's book-loving community, BookTok. Now he's got a plan to read 100 books in 2023. - NPR
The new All Quiet on the Western Front "has been at the receiving end of a critical drubbing, with critics complaining that it turns a beloved literary classic into a spectacle 'horny for an Oscar'" - one or more of which it may well receive. - The Guardian (UK)
Garbriela Mistral, the first Latin American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, "is being reclaimed by a new generation of feminist and L.G.B.T. activists as an anti-establishment icon — and igniting a debate about how we appropriate literary figures from the past." - The New York Times
Barrymore and an wider backlash on the internet led to permanent changes: "Razzies organisers have apologised and introduced an age limit for the awards." - BBC
There's the obvious - cap the prices, end hidden fees - and then some less-obvious, but useful, ideas, like upgrading ticket-buying software to eliminate those hellish queues. - BBC
A hundred years post-Dada, Corecore "confronts viewers with an onslaught of media tidbits stitched together and overlaid with melancholy orchestral (or piano) compositions and pseudo-deep talking points that waver between encouraging defeat and sparking a revolution." - Hyperallergic
Mia Hansen-Love is used to her semi-autobiographical, or perhaps semi-memoirish, movies being "described as autofiction." Her new film about a woman dealing with a dying parent and a new lover walks that same line. - The New York Times
Her path, forged at Bard College and the Ojai Festival, and a lot of work with Peter Sellars, hasn't been exactly conventional - but she's an essential voice in, and for, the 21st century. - Los Angeles Times
It’s clear that copyediting as it’s typically practiced is a white supremacist project, that is, not only for the particular linguistic forms it favors and upholds, which belong to the cultures of whiteness and power, but for how it excludes or erases the voices and styles of those who don’t or won’t perform this culture. - LitHub
When you see more people who look like you onstage, it makes you want to go and it makes you want to bring people with you. If there are people who look like you, it’s more inviting. - Seattle Times
The relationship between sleep, dreaming, and creativity has been the subject of conjecture for hundreds of years. Reports of creative inspiration and discoveries made by artists, inventors, and scientists while dreaming suggest these states of mind are intimately bound together. - Nautilus
In-person author appearances are back in local bookstores, after a long pandemic absence. And for every standing-room-only reading featuring a massively well-known name, there might be a quiet event, with empty chairs outnumbering occupied ones. - Seattle Times
