Lit Hub Daily: February 10, 2021

• Janna A. Zinzi on the dual role of writer-activists, and the dilemma of Black journalists tasked with objectivity when their lives are at stake. | Lit Hub Politics
• “Becoming a parent is the only decision that comes with a biological deadline, the only one that cannot be reversed.” Nell Frizzell chronicles The Panic Years of a woman’s life and the mother of all questions. | Lit Hub
• As Gabriel Byrne watches his father’s decline, he wonders if it’s ever possible to be truly honest with himself. | Lit Hub
• Mira Ptacin on the ambitions of Victoria Woodhull—teenage medium, free love advocate, and the first woman to run for president (before women could even vote). | Lit Hub History
• “Never did such mental agitation distract my bosom! I felt that I lived only to be tormented.” Christine Leigh Heyrman on doomed romances of the 19th century. | Lit Hub
• Lonnie Wheeler celebrates Negro League superstar James Thomas “Cool Papa” Bell, who pursued “integration, rather than adoration.” | Lit Hub Sports
• The Lover, Don Quixote, Lord of the Flies, and more rapid-fire book recs from Quan Barry, author of We Ride Upon Sticks (out now in paperback!) | Book Marks
• “Our daily lives are interrupted constantly by apparitions.” Katie Lowe looks at the rise of the digital gothic. | CrimeReads
• What do the humanities have to teach us about the Anthropocene? | Public Books
• “Robinson’s success did not render ‘whites, white privilege, and racist institutions invisible.’ It blatantly exposed the baseball moguls’ racism.” What White Fragility gets wrong about Jackie Robinson. | Boston Review
• “Trying to recover our lineage can be a process of chasing history through a cloud of smoke.” Clint Smith on preserving Black history and the need for a new Federal Writers’ Project. | The Atlantic
• You can have it all (at least when it comes to punctuation); Lauren Oyler makes the case for semicolons. | The New York Times Magazine
• “What other nuances of biracial experience do we lose to a culture most interested in our trauma?” Yasmine Ameli on writing while biracial. | Ploughshares
• The end is nigh: Will Preston contemplates apocalypse burnout and how our culture is fixated on dystopian futures. | Full Stop
• “The literature is a lot better when you’re speaking within the group and everybody else can keep up.” Torrey Peters on a writer’s relationship to their audience. | Hazlitt

Also on Lit Hub: Richard Thompson Ford on the time a top hat scandalized London • George Perec’s ode to Ellis Island • Read from Dorothe Nors’ newly translated novel, Wild Swims (trans. Misha Hoekstra)