Kickstarters for creative projects run the gamut from endeavors like Star Citizen to requests for food or rent money to let a writer finish a novel. In between those extremes is this, a charmingly eccentric children’s book titled Pete Peanut and the Trouble with Birthdays, which needs help covering the costs of its ambitious design. You can also buy tailor-made birthday invitations or the title character’s own furniture.
Featuring Jimmy Carter
Remembering Marinetti
The Smithsonian has a good reminder about the links between design and history, about how time can seemingly erode the politics behind an aesthetic movement, about the relationships between images and texts, about how Italian futurism may still look cool but came from a group of sexist and at least partially fascist men.
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Maya Angelou Has Died
Maya Angelou, poet and author of many memoirs — most famously I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings — has died at 86. This video of Angelou reading her poem “And Still I Rise” may serve as a good start to a celebration of her life.
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More of the Little Prince
Unpublished pages from Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince have been unearthed, and they contain clues to a political reading of the children’s classic.
Youth Movement
A somewhat startling headline: “Amelia Lester, 26 Year Old Former Fact Checker, is the New Managing Editor of The New Yorker.” Another interesting tidbit: The New Yorker has been exempt from meeting with the consultants who are currently scrutinizing the rest of Conde Nast’s titles.
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Amazon Plans for Zombies
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Full Stop Blogger Call
Know some talented writers in need of a great platform? Full Stop is looking for bloggers to cover literature, film, music, politics, and a host of other topics.
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“Fight Club 4 Kids”
There are some charming children’s books, some really bad ones, and then finally there’s Fight Club 4 Kids, which somehow manages to be both. Watch Chuck Palahniuk read the (fake) children’s version of his classic novel in this video from Mashable.
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