-- Along with many, many people, I am shaken by the death of Anthony Shadid at age 43 in Syria, where he had been covertly investigating the resistance to the brutal rule President Bashar al-Assad. The longtime New York Times foreign correspondent was one of the most essential reporters throughout the Arab Spring; he was one of the four Times journalists kidnapped in Libya last year. (See Shadid's NPR interview about being one of the narrators of the Arab Spring here.) Shadid won two Pulitzer Prizes for his work as "a gatherer, an observer, a listener." One of his last stories, on the rise of Islamism in Tunisia, was published after his death. Just a couple weeks ago, Mother Jones ran an interview with Shadid, where he discussed growing up Lebanese in Oklahoma City and his understanding that "I don't think there's any story worth dying for, but I do think there are stories worth taking risks for." Longform collects his greatest dispatches. Shadid's book, House of Stone, was to be published in March. It has since been scheduled for an earlier release.
-- Ahdaf Soueif on "Cairo, Hers Again" in Guernica: "A month before, a week before, three days before, we could not have told you it was going to happen."
-- The poetic legacy of the Chicago Defender, an African-American newspaper founded in 1905.
-- Gish Jen (whose title story in Who's Irish? is a favorite of mine) talks up Linsanity in the New York Times.
-- Author Sara Levine, interviewed: "No one asks this of male narrators, to be likable.”
-- Bookforum interviews Sergio González Rodríguez, the journalist whose work on female homicides in Mexico's Ciudad Juarez inspired Roberto Bolaño and Javier Marias.
-- Jonathan Franzen appears to think that readers have trouble loving Edith Wharton's novels because she was both privileged and, according to him, unattractive. I beg to differ, but Steve Donoghue has the best response (albeit one that is far harsher in the overall assesment of Franzen's character than seems fair -- the new incarnation of Norman Mailer he is not). (Thanks to Chris M. for the initial link.)
-- Chattanooga, Tennessee, and the influence of fonts in urban development.
-- The Houston Chronicle looks at the role of "snitches" in journalism, or the "a legacy of secret government informants." See also, in The New York Times, "a high-tech war on leaks."
-- While I'm partial to The Michigan Daily, Roger Ebert is right to champion The Daily Illini as one of the greats in campus reporting for 140 years. And it needs our help.
-- Roxane Gay's extended comment in response to "On Getting Paid: Literary Magazines and Remuneration" in The Millions is the best part of the article.
-- Andre Dubus III on "love in a class-riven America." A lot of this rung true for me.
-- Second-grade field trip to the parking garage: a fascinating New York Times article on the value of field trips in education, particularly in, as Dubus would put it, a "class-riven America."
-- A new book examines the survival of beauty, pattern, mimicry, and camouflage in nature.
-- "The trials of Greg Mortenson." That's the Three Cups of Tea guy, and that's Outside magazine doing the rigorous follow-up to the case of literary fraud.
-- MacArthur awards for "creative & effective institutions" have gone to The Moth for its dedication to the art of storytelling. Detroiters, hit up Cliff Bell's the first Thursday of the month to experience it live (Theme: "Gangs, Cliques, and Crowds"). There's also an upcoming Moth in Ann Arbor this month. (Theme: "Bosses.") Other notable MacArthur winners include the Center for Investigative Reporting and the National Juvenile Defender Center.
-- What is the impact of Hollywood success on Michael Chabon's fiction? Tablet investigates.
-- The decline of the arts has been greatly exaggerated, says Jed Perl.
-- Poet Mary Oliver is seriously ill. The new blog Dear Mary is collecting letters from her readers.
-- "The new world of William Carlos Williams."
-- "The unsung maestro of East African literature."
-- Vladmir Putin is proposing a new Russian "great books" program.
-- From one of the most recent Three Percent podcasts: "on books and being alone."
-- It's an honor to give writer Cheryl Strayed credit for her wonderful work as the Dear Sugar columnist, which she wrote passionately and anonymously up through Valentine's Day. The New Yorker profiles Strayed after her coming-out. See my posts provoked by Dear Sugar, including: "There isn't a thing to eat down there in the rabbit-hole of your own bitterness except your own desperate heart" and "Whatever it was that wouldn't let us go: On Writing and Necessity."
Image Credit: The New York Times
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