At the London Review of Books blog, Charles Hartman reflects on what it feels like when a poet discovers that one of his poems has been plagiarized.
The Library of Congress is expected to announce this week that Natasha Trethewey will spend another year as the national Poet Laureate. According to the New York Times, in addition to working on a memoir and also serving as the poet laureate of her home state of Mississippi, Trethewey will spend the year travelling around the country and writing “a series of reports exploring societal issues through poetry that are to appear on ‘The PBS NewsHour.’”
We have been deeply enjoying the Los Angeles Review of Books’s awesome video interview section, which has recently featured conversations with poets Mary Jo Bang and Stephen Burt.
In an essay for Vogue, Sheila Heti writes about the particular role Judy Blume played in her childhood.
Tin House has run an excellent conversation between Parul Seghal and Americanah author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who talks about writing fiction in the U.S. versus Nigeria, and why discussions about race make Americans so uncomfortable.
In case you haven’t been following the NSA leak case, here’s a roundup of recommended reading. In the Guardian, Glenn Greenwald has a long piece about whistleblower Edward Snowden (who’s currently camping out in a hotel room in Hong Kong), while the Washington Post wonders, “Has the US become the type of nation from which you have to seek asylum?” To learn more about the machinations of government spying vis-a-vis technology, we also recommend Sarah Resnick’s interview with privacy advocate Jacob Appelbaum for the OCCUPY Gazette; and for a general overview of the Obama administration’s complicated relationship to transparency and spying, read Sarah Leonard on the subject in the New Inquiry.
