Lit Hub Daily: March 22, 2017

TODAY: In 1832, writer and statesman Johann Wolfgang von Goethe dies.

• How many books will you read before you die? Let this handy table help confirm all your fears about mortality! | Literary Hub
• Art Spiegelman knows a fascist when he sees one… The creator of Maus talks Trump, despair, and the forgotten genius of Si Lewen. | Literary Hub
• The persistent myth of objectivity: John Kaag on biography-memoir hybrids. | Literary Hub
• How a dictionary waded in to the same-sex marriage debate (in which the words borborygmus and hootamaganzy appear in earnest). | Literary Hub
• Camille Paglia on Robert Mapplethorpe’s iconic cover art for Patti Smith’s Horses. | Literary Hub
• How libraries and universities are working to improve digital literacy and combat fake news. | VICE
• On his second day of confirmation hearings, SCOTUS nominee Neil Gorsuch invoked David Foster Wallace, who “has quietly become a favorite of many archconservatives over the last decade.” | The New Republic
•  This isn’t a literary trend. This is an issue of our time: A spate of recent YA and children’s books confront police brutality. | The New York Times
• “This is the best thing about poems. They get to be visual and flexible in a way prose can’t.” Tracy O’Neill interviews Morgan Parker. | Electric Literature
• On Walt Whitman’s secret stint as the pseudonymous author of a “Manly Health and Training” advice column. | The New Yorker
• From disco to art rock, 10 books that chronicle the music of the 1970s. | Signature
• “This truth I hold as self-evident: there is no such thing as freedom of speech. Each word we utter has a price.” Mitchell S. Jackson on the n-word. | The Author’s Guild

Also on Lit Hub: Refuge as a moral act: on the lessons of 20th-century displacement · Airea D. Matthews on life, craft, and texting with Anne Sexton · Writers on the NEA: a gallery of postcards to Washington in defense of the arts. 

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