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This content contains affiliate links. When you buy through these links, we may earn an affiliate commission. Welcome to Today in Books, where we report on literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more. It’s Friday. The sun is out. Baseball is back. March Madness has begun. And I’ve got a case
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Marjane Satrapi’s graphic memoirs Persepolis and Persepolis II—and the Oscar-nominated film adapted from the books—tell the story of the author-illustrator’s coming of age in 1980s Iran. Her new work is concerned with the life of another young Iranian woman, 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who died in police custody after being arrested, detained and severely beaten because
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When Sarah McCammon was growing up in the Midwest in the ’80s and ’90s, every aspect of her life was governed by her family’s evangelical faith, a faith underscored at her sprawling nondenominational church and her Christian school with expectations of an obedient childhood and “pure” young adulthood that forbid sex and, essentially, dating until
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The new documentary Are You a Librarian: The Untold Story of Black Librarians aims to show a new, pioneering perspective on Black librarians, and the great influence they’ve wielded, which reached outside of libraries and into moments like the Civil Rights Movement. Rodney E. Freeman Jr. is the executive producer of the documentary, and a
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With bylines in publications that include the London Review of Books, Harper’s and The New Yorker, Lauren Oyler has established herself as a cultural critic whose fresh, and often contrarian, assessments are well worth reading. Her first nonfiction book, No Judgment, comprises eight previously unpublished essays that will please Oyler’s admirers and serve as an
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Participation is pretty straightforward: both public schools and libraries are able to take part by registering by the end of February; making available at least 12 of the 20 master list books to students; participants must read or listen to at least three of the titles on the master list; then opening up rules and
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A little black box appears on health care and employment forms, census surveys and other official documents, requiring respondents to confine their racial identity to a single space that allows no fine distinctions. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. points out in his eloquent and powerful The Black Box: Writing the Race, such boxes are metaphors
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In her first novel since her National Book Award-longlisted debut, The Leavers, Lisa Ko explores memory, art, technology and consumption through the eyes of three childhood best friends. Jackie, Ellen and Giselle meet at Chinese school in suburban New Jersey in the 1980s. Though they come from different backgrounds and have divergent interests, they’re drawn
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An astonishing 30-40% of food goes to waste in the U.S. “As well as being financially foolish, wasting food damages the planet because it accelerates climate change,” notes food writer and cookbook author Sue Quinn in her latest cookbook, Second Helpings: Delicious Dishes to Transform Your Leftovers, which aims to keep food from our own
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