TODAY: In 2001, film critic Pauline Kael dies.
- “If you’re woke, it’s because someone woke you up.” Rebecca Solnit on the hard work behind progress. | Lit Hub
- “Why does the worst have to happen for us to believe it could happen at all?” Jennine Capó Crucet political disaster in her home state of Florida. | Lit Hub
- Is Goodnight Moon Freemason propaganda? (And more important questions raised by these one-star Amazon reviews of the children’s classic.) | Lit Hub
- On dark tourism: Murder, hauntings, and the serial killer capital of Australia. | Lit Hub
- Tegan and Sara’s memoir, The Handmaid’s Tale sequel, and more books you should read this month. | Lit Hub
- “Medicine practiced with the narrative competence to recognize, absorb, and be moved by the stories of illness.” On narrative medicine and finding new ways to talk about pain. | Lit Hub
- R.D. Rosen on Sid Luckman, who moved beyond the shadow of his mafia hitman father to revolutionize the NFL. | CrimeReads
- Contoras author Carolina De Robertis recommends five great novels of revolution, from James Baldwin’s Another Country to Miriam Toews’ Women Talking. | Book Marks
- A profile of Malcolm Gladwell, polarizing, badly reviewed, but perennially popular, and now, with his new book, ”at something of a professional tipping point.” | The New York Times
- “There are 7 billion people, can anybody change the world?” Nell Zink has her doubts. | The Guardian
- Téa Obreht on the moment in The Old Man and the Sea where Ernest Hemingway “shows you, in the briefest of maneuvers, the whole scope of how humanity works.” | The Atlantic
- “It’s hard for the culture to get its head around this idea of shared hearts”: on the pleasures and pitfalls of collaborative novel writing. | The New Yorker
- Elizabeth Warren’s 2005 personal finance book (which she wrote with her daughter) holds up pretty well, right down to the throwaway Trump burn. | Bloomberg
- On Phillip K. Dick and the “psychonauts” of the 1970s—people who mixed “different systems of religion, science, and imagination into unique assemblages of concept and symbol.” | Longreads
- The library system in Washington D.C. has long been a vital resource for the city’s homeless population. One of the main benefits has been its formerly homeless volunteer community liaisons. | The Washington Post
