Lit Hub Daily: September 19, 2022

• How should educators handle teaching troubling but worthwhile texts? Deborah Appleman offers some alternative approaches. | Lit Hub Teaching

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• “When I look hard at Lisa Frank’s yellow dogs, bright as highlighter pens, I feel unsettled in a way I can’t pinpoint.” How the Trapper Keeper became the most popular school supply of all time—and shaped a generation of writers. | Lit Hub

• From Anne Boleyn to Kamala Harris, a brief history of (men) calling women witches. | Lit Hub History

• “Joe as Nominee, Barack as Backstage Guru.” Gabriel Debenedetti on the latest chapter in Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s long alliance. | Lit Hub Politics

• “I remember the feel of these rooms much more than I even remember the people in them.” Akiko Busch on the ambiguities of home. | Lit Hub Memoir

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• Neither submissive princess nor nefarious witch: Olesya Salnikova Gilmore in praise of Baba Yaga and other powerful women of Slavic fairy tales. | Lit Hub

• “Attempts to ban books are accelerating across the country at a rate never seen since tracking began more than 20 years ago.” An overview of recent censorship efforts. | The New York Times

• Suzanne Trimel on PEN America’s centenary and the attack on Salman Rushdie. | PEN America

• Larissa Diakiw considers ecological grief. | Hazlitt

• “Astor’s future was the end-point of the inexorable march of progress.” Iwan Rhys Morus on John Jacob Astor’s “high-voltage scientific romance,” A Journey in Other Worlds. | Public Domain Review

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• What a letter purportedly authored by Sherlock Holmes reveals about the early, avid Sherlockian fandom. | Atlas Obscura

• Some of the best books set in (or about) New York. | Time Out

• Ashawnta Jackson on the feminist art roots of fan-made videos. | JSTOR Daily

Also on Lit Hub: Rachel Aviv discusses diagnoses, introspection, and writing about real people • Stories where nothing happens in the middle of nowhere • Read an excerpt from Jamila Rowser and Robyn Smith’s graphic novel, Wash Day Diaries