TODAY: In 1975, Soviet poet Olga Fyodorovna Bergholz, most famous for her work on the Leningrad radio during the city’s blockade, dies.
- “The robber barons offered their daughters, styled ‘dollar princesses,’ in transactional wedlock.” Caroline Weber on new money’s Gilded Age search for old world respectability. | Lit Hub
- “Then up the stairs she’d come, moth-footed, / owl-eyed, wailing / like a tiny, fuzzy steam train.” Here comes… “Ghost Cat”! (A poem by Margaret Atwood.) | Lit Hub
- “History, undeniably, can find no explanation for anything.” Revolution and memory in the diaries of Imre Kertész. | Lit Hub
- “I knew the interview would reverberate, that it was volatile. Kobe actually wanted it to be more so.” Jim Gray looks back at the superstar rift between Shaq and Kobe. | Lit Hub Sports
- “How do you convince someone their storyteller is wrong, after all, when you are the monster in their tale?” Gabrielle Bellot on the dark legacies of this Trump presidency. | Lit Hub Politics
- “The Greeks were quick to accept the sacred nature of cats and declared us to be companions of Artemis.” It’s Friday so here is a history of feline Europe as narrated by a cat. | Lit Hub
“That’s what it means to be a food person—that it is normal to find an onion in your pocket.” Deborah Madison tells her foodie origin story. | Lit Hub Food
- “That it is a literary character who has come to embody the grifter archetype seems right; self-authorship is, of course, all about creating a convincing character within the narrative structure of one’s own aspirational thinking.” How The Talented Mr. Ripley foretold our era of grifting. | T Magazine
- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was voted the “winner of winners” of the UK’s Women’s Prize for fiction. | The Guardian
- How does President Barack Obama’s new book, A Promised Land, rank alongside other presidential memoirs? | Smithsonian Magazine
- What role did African-American thought leaders like James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, and George Padmore play in the anti-fascist struggles of the mid-20th century? | JSTOR
- Need a break? Please enjoy these title cards for classics of Russian literature as reality TV shows. | The New Yorker
- “I have never written a poem that began with an idea — not a single one.” Christian Wiman talks to Ilya Kaminsky about language and time in poetry. | McSweeney’s
- The Burbank Unified School District is pausing the teaching of several books that have been challenged by parents for racism, including titles by Mark Twain and John Steinbeck. | Los Angeles Times
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