Hemingway as a journalist in France during WW2 is insane! Random village girls approach him thinking he’s an officer to tell him 3 Germans are hiding in a cellar so he goes and shouts a warning then drops 3 grenades inside! The townsfolk reward him with 2 magnums of champagne!
He just summarily killed three men while reporting!
He then moved into the Ritz with his soon-to-be fourth wife and took a picture of her absent husband, put it in the toilet bowl, and “shot it to pieces with a machine pistol” 😩
These anti-Asian hate crimes are despicable beyond words. The casualness and gratuity of the violence is like nothing I've really seen before. People are going to need to find a new vocabulary for this evil beyond "white supremacy."
I wrote about Viet Thanh Nguyen's op-ed calling on writers to take up overt activism in their work. Nguyen is a novelist who is often said to have been inspired by Ralph Ellison, but I show here where I think Ellison––and Baldwin––would vehemently disagree harpers.org/archive/2021/0…
Were this simply an idiosyncratic campaign by one decorated writer, it would be less disturbing. But Nguyen’s argument is related to a wider push to reset American literature entirely by conflating art with social science.
In fact, Ellison—the author of one of the greatest novels in American literature, Invisible Man, which is written from an exquisitely rendered black perspective—refuted exactly this line of thinking over a half-century ago
Devastating reporting at Smith College. God help you if you’re a janitor with poor eyesight or a cafeteria worker with lupus—merely following instructions and stuck in your material reality—and you happen to collide with a student’s personal truth.
If I found out my child attending a $78k/year school pulled social rank on a janitor and a chronically sick kitchen worker to the point that the latter was being mobbed and unable to find employment a year later, I would be so ashamed I couldn't sleep until it was rectified.
And if I were the president of @smithcollege, I would not be able to sleep until these economically marginalized workers were made whole.
Some people are paywalled out of this. The argument is Bernie subtly expressed privilege by showing up to the inauguration so casually dressed. What the author implies he should have done to avoid showing his privilege is to show up more luxuriously dressed, like Michelle Obama!
The man just ran two highly competitive presidential campaigns, sparked a generational movement, recovered from a heart attack and still seems genuinely more focused on substance than performance, but she would have appreciated if he tried to look a little more nouveau riche...
The tweets were deleted, but this needs to be seen and understood. People still say this is a made-up issue. How can accumulated actions like this *not* have an effect on our intellectual and artistic culture?