-- Vogue published a glowing profile of Syrian First Lady Asma al-Assad in March 2011 -- just before the regime began its (ongoing) brutal crackdown on pro-democracy protesters.The 3,200-word profile praised al-Assad for being "glamorous, young, and very chic," and Vogue has gone to great lengths to make it disappear. It refuses to even talk about it.
-- Theodore Dreiser was thisclose to being a passenger on the Titanic.
-- Vica Miller loves the fiction of Ludmila Ultiskaya.
-- Novels are not the only books: Audrey Bilger went looking for Jeannette Winterson in London.
-- Planned Parenthood has a new Tumblr: "Ask us anything. No judgments."
-- Journalists, take note: this is a fearfully common reporting error. Via Salon.
-- Katha Pollitt is dead-on in her column in The Nation: "When performed by married women in their own homes, domestic labor is work—difficult, sacred, noble work. Ann says Mitt called it more important work than his own, which does make you wonder why he didn’t stay home with the boys himself. When performed for pay, however, this supremely important, difficult job becomes low-wage labor that almost anyone can do—teenagers, elderly women, even despised illegal immigrants. But here’s the real magic: when performed by low-income single mothers in their own homes, those same exact tasks—changing diapers, going to the playground and the store, making dinner, washing the dishes, giving a bath—are not only not work; they are idleness itself."
-- Deadline Detroit, a new online publication, debuted with a soft launch this week. Tagline: "Homegrown Media Revolution."
-- "Two Years of Longform: What the Hell Did We Just Read?" In brief: sex, murder, and sad sports stories.
-- Kwani? has launched a one-off literary prize as it searches for outsanding African novels to publish. "The work should be in English or variations of English ('Englishes')..."
-- Ben Okri is now the vice-president of the Caine Prize.
-- How are the novels of Alain Mabanckou, the Congolese novelist who writes in French, faring in English translation in the U.S.? Pretty well, it seems.
-- The Port Huron Statement at 50: a Boston Review forum with contributions from Tom Hayden (fellow alum of The Michigan Daily), Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dorn, and others.
-- "No Ordinary Place: Writers and Writing in Occupied Palestine."
-- "Why Afghan Women Risk Death to Write Poetry." Via The New York Times. And what have you done today, hmmm?
-- Sandra Fluke is interviewed in Marie Claire.
-- The new issue of Foreign Policy is triggering lots of hot conversation. It is "The Sex Issue," by which it means an issue that examines the differing politics of being men and being women.
-- Qatari author Amal al-Malki talks with al-Jazeera about how the Arab Spring has failed to fight for gender equality.
-- Wendell Berry is my hero too.
-- Poet Rose McLarney is featured in Orion's "the place where I write" series. You must check out McLarney's new book.
-- "Bullying the Nuns." Via the New York Review of Books. I swear to goodness, there are few things that inspire me more than radical nuns. See also: "Vatican Reprimends U.S. Nuns and Plans Changes."
-- Steven Weinberg is thinking a lot about the crisis of big science.
-- NPR on the new wave of legislation -- in Tennessee, of all places, site of the Scopes trial -- that is undercutting the teaching of evolution and climate change.
-- The University of Pittsburgh suspends admissions to its graduate programs in classics, German, and religious studies. All in response to state funding cuts.
-- Here's what it looks like when official censors get involved with an international book fair.
-- Dan Chaon: "The question for the professional fiction writer is how far outside your own world you can reach."
-- In Guernica, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Nilo Cruz is interviewed about Lorca, American directors, and the cross he won’t bear.
-- Twenty years after Rodney King, this is South L.A.
-- Behold: a primer on the anti-trust lawsuit targeting (quite mistakenly, I believe) publishers.
-- You can now submit to the wonderful Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. Past winners include Lori Ostlund, Ha Jin, and Antonya Nelson.
-- Novellas -- and Melville House's wonderful "Art of the Novella" series -- get love from The Atlantic, which calls the form "the original #longread."
-- Michael Kimball in conversation with Sheila Heti.
-- So much for the notion that left-handed people are precociously creative.
-- E.O. Wilson on "the origins of the arts."
-- A Scottish author of crime novels is compelled to change her name from "Shona MacLean" to "S.G. MacLean" in order to better appeal to male readers. I wrote about this sad and long tradition (see: E. Nesbit, J.K. Rowling, Isak Dinesen, P.D. James, George Eliot, George Sands, James Tiptree, Jr. ...) before.
-- Wow: here is the first English translation of only extant interview with poet César Vallejo. It had been lost for more than four decades. Via The Literary Saloon.
-- The Rumpus interviews the inimitable Elif Batuman, most particularly about the Mike Daisey debacle.
-- Judith Thurman profiles Alison Bechdel in The New Yorker.
-- Know a wonderful young writer? Invite them to submit to the One Teen Story Fiction Contest.
-- The Golden Calf by Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, the Open Letter version translated by Konstantin Gurevich and Helen Anderson, is a finalist for the Rossica Translation Award. I loved the book a whole lot.
-- Can't we just love them both? The Millions hosts a forum on "who's greater: Tolstoy or Dostoevsky?" I hate false debates like that, but, immersed as I am in re-reading The Brothers Karamazov, I simply can't resist.
-- Adam Thirlwell (who is my beloved) writes about "genocide and the fine arts" in The New Republic: "Ever since Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, the grand and modern wish has been for a separation of the aesthetic and the ethical."
About the Image: A rendition of the cover of Pinocchio by Alan Hynes.
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