"I cannot expect to have a good death if my life did not accomplish certain specific things. And these things are not material." - Los Angeles Review of Books
"This was a question I also grappled with: could my creative prostitution involve high art, be the literary equivalent of Belle de Jour (1967), stylish and sexy, or would I have to roil in whorish filth, using cheap metaphors and knocked-off cliches?" - Aeon
The manuscript was unfinished but well underway when Emily died at age 30. The legend has been that Charlotte, envious and conservative, threw it in the fireplace. Scholar Emily Zarevich considers whether this could be true and what might have been in the lost work. - JSTOR Daily
Translations exist only in their own time. While literature is out of time, translations are always, in the hapless plod of linear time, out of joint. - The Walrus
When Jeff Lowenfels began writing for the Anchorage Daily News in 1976, he had not expected that one day one of his readers would grow okra there. (The pod is native to Africa.) - The New York Times Magazine
The 3,500-year-old artifact, covered with cuneiform writing from the "dream" section of The Epic of Gilgamesh, is part of the enormous collection of objects acquired by Hobby Lobby founder Steve Green that turn out to have been illegally looted. - Artnet
Such disputes reflect a growing recognition across the publishing industry that the prestige and attractiveness of working in and adjacent to creative and cultural sectors – and the passion of its workers – can also form the preconditions for low wages and insecure work. - The Guardian
Mohammed Rezuwan is himself one of the hundreds of thousands of Rohingya driven out of Myanmar by that country's military and mobs. He now travels around the refugee camps at Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, recording and translating his people's traditional stories. - PRX's The World
The much-praised new branch of the New York Public Library, across 5th Avenue from the famous flagship, wasn't supposed to happen. The NYPL board was bent on selling the branch property — until The Nation reported on the plan and advocates set furiously to work. - The Nation
From the early Middle Ages, various European languages adopted and adapted the Latin alphabet. So why did English end up with a far more inconsistent orthography than any other? - Aeon
In the 19th century, French schools were forbidden to teach in Breton, Basque, Provençal, Corsican, etc. Starting in the 1970s, interest revived and some schools started to use them. Now a new law has forbidden immersive education in regional languages; activists are furious. - Global Voices
Jonathan Kozol: "There’s nothing wrong with treating children or yourself to a bit of whimsy and wonderment and unimportant foolishness in a world that’s all too full of tears." - The New York Times
Theoretically, things are different in a post-#MeToo Hollywood from when Mena Suvari was a young star. She thinks they should be, and adds, "If I can shave off a summer of suffering for someone, I want to.” - Los Angeles Times
