Though everyone is tired of the online critics are too nice/ do critics even matter debate cropping up everywhere as of late, Daniel Mendelsohn’s “Critic’s Manifesto” may be the best thing to come out of the conversation yet: a clear formulation of what it means to be a critic and why that matters.
“The serious critic ultimately loves his subject more than he loves his reader”
“Tough, Funny, and Sophisticated”
Sam Sacks of Open Letters Monthly offers an encomium to Pauline Kael, "one of the best movie critics - or critics of any kind - of the past century."
Not Your Usual Book Report
Tired of assigning that regular ol' book report? Take queues from the New York Times "Lesson Plan" on how to go beyond.
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The Book Prisons Fear
The New York Times dives into why prisons fear the New Jim Crow certain states have gone to great efforts to allow their prisons to ban it and in other states it's fairly difficult to obtain if you're a prisoner. We're big fans of the New Jim Crow here; it was a Millions staff pick and extremely popular on Year in Reading lists back in 2013.
Opinions… In Verse
From now until August 16th, the editors of the Los Angeles Times’s Opinion section will accept poetry submissions. Their favorites will be published in the August 25th edition of the paper.
Chernobyl’s Literary Legacy
When Belarusian investigative journalist Svetlana Alexievich won the Nobel Prize earlier this year, her horrifying and poetic book Voices From Chernobyl exposed a great many readers to the Chernobyl disaster. Now, this piece from The Atlantic takes a look at Chernobyl's literary legacy over the past three decades.
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