Ali Hazelwood wrote one of last year's bestselling books, a romance called The Love Hypothesis, but the scientist author won't give away her real name. "Pen names are common in the romance genre, which has historically been stigmatized and minimized." - Washington Post
Jana Harper: "The thing about community-engaged work is that it takes an actual community for it to work. ... I feel like I just introduced the seed, but everyone else planted, watered, and now, are hopefully sowing the results. This work now belongs to the community." - Glasstire
And that means audiences have been thin on the ground. "Fewer than half as many people saw a Broadway show during the season that recently ended than did so during the last full season before the coronavirus pandemic." - The New York Times
"Varvara Logvyn might look like any other open-air artist working in Kyiv’s historic Independence Square ... except she doesn’t direct her attention to a canvas, but to a large, steel antitank obstacle known as a hedgehog." - Washington Post
In 1871, a mob murdered 18 Chinese people and looted every Chinese building in what's now downtown LA. "A bronze plaque embedded in the sidewalk outside the Chinese American Museum on Los Angeles Street stands as a rare memorial. It’s smaller than a pizza box." - Los Angeles Times
"Ernest Hemingway and F Scott Fitzgerald, Saul Bellow and Ken Kesey – their women were inexplicable. They were often childish, petty and shallow, yet desirable. My bewilderment just seemed to be something I had to put up with until Lessing showed me I didn’t." - The Guardian (UK)
"Steadily growing in size and prestige since incubating 20 years ago in the Brooklyn apartment of co-founders Stephanie and Floyd Rance, the Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival sits enviably at the confluence of Black culture, industry sea change and everyone’s dream vacation." - Washington Post
Michael Heizer's megasculpture in the Nevada desert is called City and is a mile long, half a mile wide, and the artist's masterpiece. "It had become the art-world version of ancient Atlantis, a chimera. Art-world Atlantis will shortly be accepting reservations." - The New York Times
By replacing vinyl with a different plastic, can this Dutch company get records playing again - without all of the delays, and without as much plastic waste? - BBC
"Sorting through this morass might seem too overwhelming to even consider—unless we shift how we think about the purpose of organizing information: What if the end goal was not efficient retrieval? What if, instead, the sorting process itself was imbued with meaning?" - The Atlantic
"The writers included Gay Talese, Kiran Desai, Roya Hakakian, Colum McCann, Amanda Foreman, A.M. Homes and many others; their remarks were sometimes calls to action, and sometimes highly personal." - The New York Times
No hero's journey narrative could possibly fit the times. "Writers choose to believe in the power of stories because it gives us hope. ... The problem is that some of the most urgent and lethal challenges our society is facing are too giant and unwieldy to fit." - The Guardian (UK)
Maggie O'Farrell, author of Hamnet, knows - as did one of her COVID companions, Virginia Woolf. "Perhaps we all develop methods to survive the knocks of significant illnesses, ways to pick ourselves up and face the next day and the next." - The Guardian (UK)
