Finish that book. Finish that burrito.

"The hijacking of public language, as is happening now, is a way to shift perception—to bend and control thought—and must be resisted." Summer Brennan pens a powerful first entry for her twice-monthly column about language and power at The Literary Hub. Read also our own Lydia Kiesling, who tells us, "I have to believe that literature can be a weapon of a sort — it explodes comfort even while it delivers comfort; it reveals hypocrisy in a way that the mere presentation of facts often cannot."

"I don’t know anymore where I begin and Obama ends." Go and check out this fascinating profile of Ben Rhodes, the "Boy Wonder of the Obama Whitehouse," who dropped out of his second year at NYU's M.F.A. program after witnessing the attacks on September 11th to take up a life of international affairs and foreign policy. When asked about whom he would choose write the story of his work life, Rhodes picked novelist Don DeLillo: "He is the only person I can think of who has confronted these questions of, you know, the individual who finds himself negotiating both vast currents of history and a very specific kind of power dynamics. That’s his milieu. And that’s what it’s like to work in the U.S. foreign-policy apparatus in 2016."