Lit Hub Daily: February 16, 2021

• Finally, a reason behind all those email typos: a comic strip by Pardis Parker and Andrew Hamm. | Lit Hub
• “So much of Vietnam is forever lost to me, until I’m enveloped with the taste of home.” Abbigail Rosewood’s recipe for cooking Thịt Kho. | Lit Hub Food
• Adam Grant wants us to get in the habit of forming second opinions, because some “mental fossils” are best abandoned. | Lit Hub
• “Like many writers today, I believe writing in the voice of someone outside my subject position surely crosses a line, but which one, exactly?” In a letter to a student, Paisley Rekdal considers appropriation. | Lit Hub
• Gina Apostol talks to Sabina Murray about empathic fiction, what America can learn from the Philippines, and choosing better illusions. | Lit Hub
• “I was the kind of failure who had discovered, fully and unequivocally, that she is not a secret genius.” Maria Adelmann on writing a novel—and learning Danish—during quarantine. | Lit Hub
• In the archives of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Wendy Lower asks herself what a person should do about a photograph that documents a murder. | Lit Hub History
• White Teeth, A Visit From the Goon Squad, Letters to a Young Poet, and more rapid-fire book recs from Emily St. John Mandel. | Book Marks
• “I’ve never met a woman who did not at some point, in those first early weeks of motherhood, break down.” Lynn Steger Strong on considering Britney Spears as a new mom. | Romper
• Viet Thanh Nguyen on the power of Amanda Gorman’s inaugural poem, and what it teaches us about the “greatness of our unfinished country.” | TIME
• “Without the internet I’m Emily Dickinson’s little ugly daughter, probably.” Read a profile of Patricia Lockwood. | Vulture
• The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation has awarded $1.6 million in grants to help digitize Indigenous oral histories. | AP
• “Here is the space where the syllabus remains to be decolonized—not through substitution, but addition.” Sumana Roy rethinks the postcolonial syllabus. | The Chronicle of Higher Education
• Lavaille Lavette, who honored EBONY Magazine’s 75th anniversary with a book of its covers, picks her favorites. | Chicago Tribune
• The complexities of queer spaces: Ilana Masad interviews Gay Bar author Jeremy Atherton Lin. | Hazlitt

Also on Lit Hub: Your week in virtual book events, featuring Gabriel Bump, Brontez Purnell, Rita Dove, and more • Tracy Clark-Flory on assignment at the Adult Entertainment Expo • Read from Roberto Bolaño’s newly translated novellas, Cowboy Graves (trans. Natasha Wimmer)