-- Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, who were Jewish American lesbians, chose to stay in France during World War II rather than return to the safety of America. Both of them survived without significant incident. Truthout has a profile of Stein's "Vichy years" -- and they are not altogether heroic.
-- Speaking of Stein: "When Gertrude Stein toured America." The Smithsonian looks at the journey of the modernist writer in 1934-35, a highly-publicised visit when she gave 74 lectures in 37 cities in 23 states before returning to France. The famously obscure writer became a celebrity and, according to the article, humanized the mystique surrounding the Modernist movement.
-- Lovers of the work of Dorothy Parker are trying to save her early childhood home in the Upper West Side of New York City. Related: "A Skeptic's Guide to Writers' Houses."
-- "North American books I read in Castro's Cuba." José Manuel Prieto accounts for it in a blog post for The Paris Review.
-- Revisiting Bartleby, the story of perhaps the first disgruntled occupier of Wall Street.
-- "Reading Joan Didion on any subject is like tiptoeing across a just-frozen pond filled with beautiful sharks." From the New York Magazine profile of the writer and her new stricken book.
-- "The landscape of (Tomas) Tranströmer’s poetry has remained constant ... the jagged coastland of his native Sweden, with its dark spruce and pine forests, sudden light and sudden storm ...." Robin Robertson writes about our Nobel laureate.
-- An alarming number of charities and nonprofits became unlikely telecom consolidation lobbyists when organizations ranging from the NAACP to a Louisiana homeless shelter -- all receiving money from AT&T -- came out to swing on behalf of the AT&T merger with T-Mobile. The Center for Public Integrity tells the story.
-- The New Yorker profiles Jill Abramson, the new top chief of The New York Times and, in the newspaper's 160-year life, the first woman in the role.
-- "It would be hard to exaggerate the intellectual laziness of this book." ::whew:: This absolutely skewering book review by Evgeny Morozov in The New Republic shows how a lethal review can serve good purpose. In "The Internet Intellectual," Morozov not only calls to account the failings of the book, but he puts it in context of the greater conversation on publicness and privacy. I asked the very smart Deanna Zandt for her feedback on this provoking story, and she pointed me to another important perspective: Danah Boyd "making sense of privacy and publicity" at SouthxSouthwest.
-- Ben Okri sees a connection between the Internet and African spiritualism.
-- Vivian Gornick on "what Emma Goldman would do" in The Boston Review.
-- Salman Rushdie is interviewed by Haaretz about fear, writing, and activism.
-- Te-Nahisi Coates on "the great schism" between abolitionists and suffragists: "I don't need my personal pantheon to be clean. But I need it to be filled with warriors."
-- The redoubtable Dahlia Lithwick pieces out why the millennial generation cares more about gay marriage equality than about reproductive rights (oh, all right: specifically, the right to get an abortion).
-- Collective action is curbing the practice of female genital cutting in Senegal.
-- Glenna Gordon's beautiful photos capture voting day in Liberia.
-- "Do you think the ideal poetic voice is something polyphonous? Would you rather be the Ramones of poetry or the PJ Harvey of poetry?" Here are two great people in conversation: poet Justin Bigos interviews poet Laurie Saurborn Young in the American Literary Review.
-- Poet Marie Howe on "what the living do."
-- Here is how to make your own laundry soap detergent.
-- The ever-creative Tammy Strobel, a prominant minimalist blogger, is experimenting with letter-writing as a form of micropatronage. You can participate.
-- NPR has another look on Catch-22 turning 50.
-- ... and Joseph Heller's novel has company. John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me is also meeting the half-century mark.
-- Among the 1Q84 reviews and profiles pouring in, here is "The Fierce Imagination of Haruki Murakami."
-- The current "Read This Next" is Karaoke Culture by Dubravka Ugresic, which I am hungry to read.
-- Comics creators discuss their medium's relationship with female super-hero characters and sex.
-- LaToya Peterson on diversity and ComicCon.
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