Pre-Revolutionary Russia… In Living Color

"'Tuya' means 'graffiti' in Chinese—the name is recent—and this street, three-quarters of a mile long, may be the longest stretch of public art in the world. It’s also a government-sanctioned 'art district,' centered around the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, which was established in 1940...I noticed that every artist I spoke to referred to 2005 as the year everything changed. 2005 was the year the government became interested in art." Art in Chongqing.

Ayobami Adebayo is interviewed by Abigail Bereola for Hazlitt and it's fantastic. They discuss proverbs, romantic love, sickle cell anemia and writing your first book. "At the risk of sounding very narcissistic, I’m going to say I write for myself ultimately. And maybe my sister. I think that when I’m working, it’s very difficult for me to think about an audience, perhaps because sometimes it gets a bit overwhelming. I’m trying to figure out so many things that I really don’t start thinking about the idea that other people might read this thing until, 'Oh my God, it’s publication day' and I have a panic attack like 'Oh my God, what have I done?' I think the awareness of an audience is something I’m just coming into because this is a first book."

What does Jonathan Franzen think of the cover for Freedom? What about Charlotte Strick, the book's designer? Or the photographers that took photos of those trees, of that blue warbler? Talking Covers has collected their thoughts, and plays host to other cover-related conversations besides. Check out this one The Flame Alphabet.

Sarah Howe’s debut poetry collection, Loop of Jade, has been awarded the T. S. Eliot prize. “Howe’s work – the first debut poetry collection to win the British prize since it was inaugurated in 1993 – triumphed over a particularly strong shortlist, which featured some of poetry’s biggest names, including Don Paterson, Claudia Rankine, Sean O’Brien and Les Murray.” If poetry isn’t for you, try our own Nick Ripatrazone’s ten poems for people who hate poetry.

Despite your lifelong aversion to robots and crash-test dummies, the Uncanny Valley might not actually be real. At Boing Boing, Maggie Koerth-Baker looks at the evidence that unsettling dolls are just that, unsettling.

Also the name of a beautiful book of poetry by Jake Adam York, a group of starlings is known as a "murmuration." One could make the case that the birds are America's most literary. Each of the hundreds of millions of European starlings currently inhabiting North America is a descendant of the approximately 100 birds released in New York City's Central Park in the early 1890s. They were released by a society intent on populating America with each of the birds mentioned in Shakespeare's plays.