Lit Hub Daily: February 27, 2020

• “I try to hide how unreal those two deaths are to me. No, not unreal. It’s just I can’t make them matter.” Elizabeth Tallent on death, silence and the intimacies of sadness. | Lit Hub Memoir
• Pod Save America’s Dan Pfeiffer lays out a plan for the future of democracy. | Lit Hub Politics
• “It’s a comforting idea to some that success for marginalized people means leaving behind their culture and community.” Mikki Kendall on the neoliberal misunderstanding of black education. | Lit Hub Politics
• Ida Tarbell vs. Rockefeller: When America’s most famous monthly took on its most famous tycoon. | Lit Hub History
• How the 1980s soap opera craze changed the entertainment industry forever. | Lit Hub TV
• “It was the practical, the focused, the human, the concrete which grabbed Steinbeck. And me as well.” Marcus Mumford reflects on John Steinbeck’s lessons in justice and power. | Lit Hub
• How Isaac Hayes’ soundtrack to Shaft ushered in an era of iconic Blaxploitation cinema. From Ashawnta Jackson. | CrimeReads
• Alexandra Harris on Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light, Parul Sehgal on Hilary Leichter’s Temporary, and more of the Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
• “I have lost faith in the idea that there might be anything any individual can say or write that will change the minds of people who, consciously or subconsciously, believe that women matter less than men.” Emily Gould on shame, fame, Gawker, and the Kimmel debacle. | The Cut
• “I’m not shy. I have had sex with so many men I literally cannot count. I once estimated it must be about fifty thousand.” Samuel Delaney and Jeremy O. Harris walk (and talk) through Times Square. | The Paris Review
• Katie Hill, the former Democratic congresswoman who resigned last fall after a sex scandal, will publish a book this year described as “part memoir, part gender-equity battle plan.” | The New York Times
• Blogger Tangerine Jones coined the term “rage baking” to describe a specific response by black women to racism. A new anthology with the same name has been accused of whitewashing the term. | Be Latina
• Filmmaker Dee Rees discusses the challenges of adapting Didion for the screen. | Elle
• When literary classics appear on film, the task of many costume designers is to “amplify the social substance of the work” with clothes. | Los Angeles Times
• A new cinematic retelling of Peter Pan was a massive undertaking with very little payoff to show for it, writes David Sims. | The Atlantic

Also on Lit Hub: Pod Save America’s Dan Pfeiffer lays out a plan for the future of democracy • Read an excerpt from Jeet Thayil’s new novel Low.