TODAY: In 1885, Ezra Pound is born.
- Science vs. Religion: Dinty W. Moore travels the great American divide in search of the (mythical?) middle ground. | Literary Hub
- What could be better for a midlife crisis than a shot of natural hallucinogenics? | Literary Hub
- Against the “melting pot” metaphor: Mike Wallace examines a history of misguided attempts at “Americanization.” | Literary Hub
- Tis the season for novels of eerie and abstract horror: here are 6 particularly good ones. | Literary Hub
- How to write a scathing review: French writer and critic Eric Chevillard serves up a new classic of the genre. | Literary Hub
- Pepe isn’t the only amphibian taking over the internet: Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad have also become memes (though thankfully not for the alt-right). | The New York Times
- “Do you really know about the birds and the bees?” A look back at Singles News, a 1970s newspaper for New Yorkers looking for a date. | Atlas Obscura
- How Helen DeWitt’s Lightning Rods, a satire of workplace sexual harassment, has come to read “like a work of credible realism.” | The New Yorker
- “Work . . . is a limitless fluid; it will flow into and fill every container, every life, if given the chance.” On three books about our era of overwork. | Literary Review of Canada
- “The carnage in Walker’s work asks white people: What’s so pretty about you?” Darryl Pinckney on the artist Kara Walker. | The New York Review of Books
- Controlled confession. Strategic revelation: How the new Joan Didion documentary takes a few pages out of her own book. | The Atlantic
- “Who knows how someone chooses to do something they have so far chosen not to.” Short fiction by Lynn Steger Strong. | Vol. 1 Brooklyn
