Marvel’s Miles Morales – the star of Into the Spider-Verse and a lot of comics, books, animated series, and a game – needed help as the decade went on. See, “despite Marvel’s financial interest in expanding the diversity of its characters during and after the election of President Barack Obama, they initially charged very few writers and editors of color with the creation and development of these characters.” (Things have been improving, but there’s a ways to go.) – Los Angeles Review of Books
Category: words
When You Hear That Your Book Just Made The Bestseller List
It’s rare that a book hitting the list is a total surprise, but there are nail-biters and books that hit higher than we expected and that’s a beautiful thing … but not as beautiful as making that call to an author who has worked so hard to make her book a reality and telling her that she is an official NYT best seller. – The New York Times
Is Walt Whitman The Writer We’ll Need In 2020?
“Watch clips of fevered crowds, from today or the past, chanting against ‘enemies of the people’; they are malignant scenes, but ones that in no small part mimic religious revivals. … Human beings are meaning-making creatures. A politics that is unable to translate its positions into some sort of transcendent language, pointing to something greater than the individual, is a politics that will ultimately fail. Whitman understood this.” – The New York Times
T.S. Eliot’s Love Letters To A Woman Not His Wife Are Being Made Public — And He Left A Bitchy Note To Posterity To Go With Them
The poet fell in love with Emily Hale in 1912, while he was a graduate student at Harvard. She did not reciprocate at the time, though they corresponded until 1956, when she announced that she would be donating his letters to her to Princeton, to be opened 50 years after both were dead (i.e., Jan. 2, 2020). Eliot was more than a little irked at Hale’s decision (he had her letters to him destroyed), but, since he couldn’t stop her, he left a statement of his own that “is also revelatory in its own way.” – Slate
Who’s Still Reading The Supermarket Tabloids?
Though their circulation has been decimated — the once-mighty National Enquirer, which approached 8 million in paid circulation at one point and reached millions more, is down under 180,000 as of June, according to industry monitor the Audit Bureau of Control — tabloids still occupy a unique place in American culture. – Los Angeles Times
‘The Four Horsemen Of Asian-American Literature’
That was Ishmael Reed’s nickname for Frank Chin, Jeffery Paul Chan, Shawn Wong, and Lawson Fusao Inada, who (on top of their own writing) put together the first major anthology of Asian-American fiction (titled Aiiieeeee!) and thereby began a canon. “The Four Horsemen had no interest in being loved,” writes Hua Hsu in this essay, “especially by white people. … When an editor asked [Chin] to tidy some grammatical errors, he called her the ‘great white bitch goddess priestess of the sacred white mouth.'” – The New Yorker
Eleven Publishing Trends That Shaped The 2010s
For years, the promise of instant book publishing hovered just over the horizon, like the promise of flying cars. This decade, it finally came true. – Washington Post
What John Dos Passos’s ‘1919’ (And The Rest Of The ‘U.S.A.’ Trilogy) Got Right About 2019
“We’re often told, in hand-wringing tones, about the growing differences between red and blue states, and about our increasingly divisive political and social rhetoric. But, in Dos Passos’s view, division has been the rule in American life, not the exception; he considered it to be authentically American. The U.S.A. novels plumbed the depths of our rifts, and explored how they might be widened by a media-saturated age, and by the fragmentation of information and the latent social hysteria that come with it.” – The New Yorker
What A Crossword Created By A Computational Linguistics Researcher Looks Like
“There’s a similar mixture that goes into being a computational linguistics researcher,” with lots of coding, math and empirical work. It certainly helps to have a love of language and be interested in the quirks of language.” – Washington Post
UNESCO And The Fight Over “World” Literature
UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary shows how, when confronted with people across the globe who perceived their own lives “in ways radically antagonistic to the requirements of capitalist production,” UNESCO’s cultural programming was developed to “acknowledge, integrate, manage, and assuage” that antagonism. – Los Angeles Review of Books