Thread by @doctorow

After the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Act extended copyright by 20 years, putting existing public domain works back into copyright, we endured a two-decade-long public domain drought. That ended in 2018, and since then, each Jan 1 is a new public domain day.

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This year's public domain day was a doozy, with a flood of works from the 1925 entering the public domain, including vast swathes of the Harlem Rernaissance and F Scott Fitzgerald's classic Gilded Age/coming-of-age novel The Great Gatsby.

pluralistic.net/2020/12/16/fra…

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It's only been weeks and yet there have already been a slew of Gatsby remixes: whimsical, serious, trenchant. You'd be hard pressed to find a better fit for our day - a tale of grifting and impending collapse amidst grotesque inequality.

bnet.substack.com/p/the-greater-…

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These remixes are best savored with the taste of the original Gastby still in your mouth. For that, I recommend turning to @npr's @planetmoney free reading of the entire novel, with each host reading a chapter.

npr.org/2021/01/14/956…

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Total running-time is 4h, 28m. Here's a direct link to the MP3:

edge2.pod.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/n…

eof/