Explore Black literary NYC with this map of 100 important spots – Literary Hub

Explore Black literary NYC with this map of 100 important spots.

By James Folta, February 10, 2026

This year is the 100th anniversary of Black History Month, and the bookstore McNally Jackson put together a list of 100 places in New York’s five boroughs that were significant for Black literary culture.

It’s a pretty comprehensive list of culturally important locations in literature, music, and art. It’s worth clicking around, but the list includes Akwaaba Mansion, the former home of Minton’s Playhouse, Strivers’ Row, The Schomburg Center, and the spot where “The Dinner Party that Started the Harlem Renaissance” was held in 1924.

The research here spans a century, and includes the locations of some of the oldest Black communities in the US, abolitionist sites like the underground railroad stop where Frederick Douglass passed through, the church where Sojourner Truth preached, and the HQs of publications like The Crisis, The Freedom’s Journal, and the New York Amsterdam News.

There are also lots of spots where writers lived and worked, including the homes of Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Colson Whitehead, bell hooks, June Jordan, and Zora Neale Hurston. You’ll also find a whole swath of contemporary libraries, bookstores, and event spaces on the list.

The weather’s warming in NYC, so if you’re looking for a rambling afternoon, this is a great tool to get you started.

Image from www.officiallangstonhughes.com

black history literary history maps McNally-Jackson New York City

By James Folta

James Folta is a writer and the managing editor of Points in Case. He co-writes the weekly Newsletter of Humorous Writing. More at www.jamesfolta.com or at jfolta[at]lithub[dot]com.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Literary Hub » Explore Black literary NYC with this map of 100 important spots.

The Radical Power of a Bookstore: On Lawrence Ferlinghetti and City Lights – Literary Hub

The Radical Power of a Bookstore: On Lawrence Ferlinghetti and City Lights

Gioia Woods Reflects on the Life of a Literary Icon, Via The University of Nevada Press

By Gioia Woods, February 6, 2026

I discovered City Lights Bookstore in 1983. I was a high school sophomore in east Los Angeles on a campus so diverse that you would be just as likely to hear kids speaking Spanish or Vietnamese as you would English. Most of us were the children or grandchildren of immigrants. The school was poorly funded, riven by gang violence, and deeply segregated by race and class. We read Hemingway and Shakespeare in English class, literature that meant little to us. It was the place I fell in love with language.

My drama teacher Mr. Heap surfed every morning just south of the nuclear plant at San Onofre before coming to work. We’d see him in the upper parking lot before class, settling his board in his VW van and balancing stacks of books in his arms to bring into class.

One day among the stacks on his desk I noticed a staple-bound, signed copy of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s 1979 poem “The Old Italians Dying.” I picked it up and was shocked to see people I recognized. In a poem! There they were, “the old Italians in faded felt hats… the old Italians in their black high button shoes… the old ones with gnarled hands / and wild eyebrows / the ones with the baggy pants with both belt & suspenders… the ones who loved Mussolini / the old fascists.” My own nonno was a fascist, a Mussolini man, a pilot who had been shot from the sky while flying an imperial mission over Ethiopia. As a kid I was perennially embarrassed by him, and by my immigrant mom. Mama said “engine fire” instead of “fire engine” and kept a pot of minestrone on the stove as an afterschool snack.

This singular act of reading the “Old Italians” produced in me what I now understand (thanks to literature scholar Derek Attridge) as an event that moved me “beyond the possibilities pre-programmed by a culture’s norms.”

I asked Mr. Heap about this guy Ferlinghetti. He owns a bookstore in San Francisco, Heap said. And that was it. As soon as I got my driver’s license, I made the first pilgrimage to City Lights Bookstore.

Decades later, in June 2015, I met Lawrence Ferlinghetti in his North Beach walkup. At his kitchen table he recalled a Pier Paolo Pasolini tribute reading in Ostia where the crowd was shouting for minestrone. I read some of his mail out loud to him (his sight was significantly diminished), mostly from journal editors requesting reprint permissions for his paintings. Before I left, I helped him roast a chicken he’d prepped for dinner. He was fretting over his new oven and an NPR interview he’d just recorded. The next day I asked him about the interview and the chicken: “The chicken turned out just right,” he responded, “nice and juicy… The NPR interview was cut to the bone, not much left to it.”

How could a short interview possibly capture Ferlinghetti’s capacious curiosity and commitment to literary activism? As the co-founder of what may be the most famous independent bookstore in the country, how could an interview fully describe the impact of his work and the ongoing, vibrant impact of the institution he helped establish?

City Lights helped democratize reading; it promoted what Attridge describes as an “accumulation of individual acts of reading and responding” which causes “large cultural shifts.”

Ferlinghetti was an orphaned child of immigrants, a self-proclaimed anarchopacifist, and a GI-Bill funded doctoral student at the Sorbonne. From his arrival in San Francisco in 1951 to his death on February 22, 2021, he was a poet, painter, critic, editor, activist, translator, and business owner. He was one of the most important public intellectuals of his day, an uncompromising champion for literature’s power, freedom of expression, and the necessity of both to democracy.

Even as our civic institutions suffer, independent bookstores like City Lights have become stronger. And we need them now, more than ever. Universities are under threat of government interference, book banning has reached unprecedented levels, journalists and artists and media outlets and attorneys are being punished, silenced, and doxed, and dissent everywhere is being criminalized.

How, against all odds, has City Lights managed to remain a vital symbol of literary dissent and free speech? How, after more than seventy years, has City Lights survived economic and industry changes? How, decade after decade, has it managed to respond to the forces that threaten to silence us? How, decade after decade, did it confront the Cold War, the suppression of civil rights, various ecological crises, American intervention in Latin America, the AIDS epidemic, mass incarceration, consumer capitalism, and the global rise in tyranny? These are the questions I take up in my book City Lights: Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Biography of a Bookstore. 

The bookshop was co-founded in 1953 by Ferlinghetti and Peter Martin. Martin was the son of an assassinated Italian labor organizer. He worked part-time as a sociology instructor while editing a little magazine called City Lights. Martin had recently published three poems by a fellow named Lawrence Ferling. Ferlinghetti, who had not yet adopted his immigrant father’s original name, was an aspiring painter, poet, and freelance art critic.

With a handshake and a $1,000 investment, City Lights became the first all-paperback bookstore in the country. Stocking only paperbacks was a radical choice. Bookstores were still, in many communities, elite institutions carrying hardbound books for wealthy customers. “One of the original ideas of the store,” Ferlinghetti explained, “was for it not to be an up-tight place, but a center for the intellectual community, to be non-affiliated… We were open seven days a week till midnight, and we literally could not close our doors at closing time. We seemed to be responding to a deeply felt need.” City Lights helped democratize reading; it promoted what Attridge describes as an “accumulation of individual acts of reading and responding” which causes “large cultural shifts.”

Martin left San Francisco in 1955, and Ferlinghetti launched City Lights Press and its signature Pocket Poets Series. His own Pictures of the Gone World became number one in the series. It was not until 1957 when he published Number Four, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems that Ferlinghetti began making a name for himself as a canny editor, courageous publisher, and fiercely independent advocate of freedom of expression.

The results of the subsequent Howl obscenity trial are well known: San Francisco Ninth Circuit Judge Clayton Horn ruled that the poem, despite its crude language and allusions to homosexuality, possessed “redeeming social importance.” Judge Horn wrote,

The first part of “Howl” presents a picture of a nightmare world; the second part is an indictment of those elements in modern society destructive of the best qualities of human nature; such elements are predominantly identified as materialism, conformity, and mechanization leading toward war.

As a poet, publisher, and public intellectual, Ferlinghetti spent the rest of his career resisting the very torments Judge Horn said haunted the post-war world.

True to its founding fight over censorship and book banning, the institution remains a bastion dedicated to the transformative power of the book. When she accepted the National Book Critics Circle Toni Morrison for Achievement Award on behalf of City Lights in 2022, executive editor Elaine Katzenberger described a current “atmosphere of intimidation and the attempt to control what we are able to read.” Katzenberger invoked City Lights’ history as well as its ongoing commitment to freedom of expression: “[T]his is not the first time that those who seek power have attempted to gain it by limiting access to knowledge and ideas.”

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Literary Hub » The Radical Power of a Bookstore: On Lawrence Ferlinghetti and City Lights

The Washington Post is gutting its books coverage – Literary Hub

The Washington Post is gutting its books coverage.

By Brittany Allen, February 4, 2026

Earlier today, Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post laid off hundreds of its employees, in what one staffer called “an absolute bloodbath.”

As The Guardian reported this morning, editor-in-chief Matt Murray told his masthead that the paper was due for a “strategic reset.” Citing flagging subscriptions and grim growth, Murray announced that the Post would be laying off a third of its workforce, and sundowning several popular sections—including the sports desk, the daily news podcast, most of the “international reporting operation,” some local coverage, and the books desk.

Going forward, the paper will pivot to prioritizing news concerning “national security,” and topics like science, health, medicine, technology, climate and business.

The Post’s book coverage—chiefly via the beloved Book World section—has long been a gold standard in the industry. Critics like John Williams, Becca Rothfeld, Jacob Brogan, Michael Dirda, and Ron Charles have shaped the literary landscape. For decades, in some cases.

Book World originated in the aftermath of Watergate. In a fond 2022 reflection, editor Dirda described the section’s early days, during which he nurtured and commissioned many literary greats—like the polymath Guy Davenport, the novelist Angela Carter, and David Remnick, who’d go on to edit The New Yorker.

It’s critical voices like these who will be first affected by the section’s sunsetting. But authors and publishers should also worry about what the end of Book World means for national press.

At least Charles, who learned of his firing while eating “eating one of the two remaining Harry & David pears that the Post sent to celebrate [his] 20th anniversary at the paper,” is determined not to go gentle. He is starting a Substack.

In his first missive to readers, the unleashed critic quipped: “Honestly, the worst aspect of this impoverishing, family-wrecking, confidence-crushing ordeal is that it will inspire David Brooks to write an essay about the hubris of American media.”

Meanwhile, the paper’s long term strategy remains unclear. As the Times reported, the Post is “far from alone” in the battle to stay relevant in a downward-trending media ecosystem whose traffic is increasingly threatened by AI summaries. But it is possibly the only outlet where the bottom line is meaningless, given the owner is richer than Satan.

Bezos, whose personal wealth is estimated at $261 billion, could not be reached for comment about any of the cuts his team architected.

Post employees who have been laid off will continue to be on staff through mid-April, though “they will not be required to work.” Health insurance coverage will continue for six months.

A union-led protest to denounce the cuts is scheduled for tomorrow.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Literary Hub » The Washington Post is gutting its books coverage.

The Washington Post is gutting its books coverage – Literary Hub

The Washington Post is gutting its books coverage.

By Brittany Allen, February 4, 2026

Earlier today, Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post laid off hundreds of its employees, in what one staffer called “an absolute bloodbath.”

As The Guardian reported this morning, editor-in-chief Matt Murray told his masthead that the paper was due for a “strategic reset.” Citing flagging subscriptions and grim growth, Murray announced that the Post would be laying off a third of its workforce, and sundowning several popular sections—including the sports desk, the daily news podcast, most of the “international reporting operation,” some local coverage, and the books desk.

Going forward, the paper will pivot to prioritizing news concerning “national security,” and topics like science, health, medicine, technology, climate and business.

The Post’s book coverage—chiefly via the beloved Book World section—has long been a gold standard in the industry. Critics like John Williams, Becca Rothfeld, Jacob Brogan, Michael Dirda, and Ron Charles have shaped the literary landscape. For decades, in some cases.

Book World originated in the aftermath of Watergate. In a fond 2022 reflection, editor Dirda described the section’s early days, during which he nurtured and commissioned many literary greats—like the polymath Guy Davenport, the novelist Angela Carter, and David Remnick, who’d go on to edit The New Yorker.

It’s critical voices like these who will be first affected by the section’s sunsetting. But authors and publishers should also worry about what the end of Book World means for national press.

At least Charles, who learned of his firing while eating “eating one of the two remaining Harry & David pears that the Post sent to celebrate [his] 20th anniversary at the paper,” is determined not to go gentle. He is starting a Substack.

In his first missive to readers, the unleashed critic quipped: “Honestly, the worst aspect of this impoverishing, family-wrecking, confidence-crushing ordeal is that it will inspire David Brooks to write an essay about the hubris of American media.”

Meanwhile, the paper’s long term strategy remains unclear. As the Times reported, the Post is “far from alone” in the battle to stay relevant in a downward-trending media ecosystem whose traffic is increasingly threatened by AI summaries. But it is possibly the only outlet where the bottom line is meaningless, given the owner is richer than Satan.

Bezos, whose personal wealth is estimated at $261 billion, could not be reached for comment about any of the cuts his team architected.

Post employees who have been laid off will continue to be on staff through mid-April, though “they will not be required to work.” Health insurance coverage will continue for six months.

A union-led protest to denounce the cuts is scheduled for tomorrow.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Literary Hub » The Washington Post is gutting its books coverage.

Literary Hub – Letter From Minnesota: Finding Reverence in the Face of Brutality

Letter From Minnesota: Finding Reverence in the Face of Brutality

E. Bok Lee on the Courage the of Alex Pretti and His Fellow Minnesotans

By Ed Bok Lee, January 29, 2026

So far this year, in Minneapolis, there have been three homicides, two of them by ICE.

Eat Street in the Whittier neighborhood, where Alex Pretti was gunned down Saturday morning, is historically the closest thing to a “Chinatown” in the city, though really, it’s much more diverse. Mexican, Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, Jamaican, Greek, German, Irish, East African, Mediterranean, Malaysian, Tibetan, etc. restaurants, grocers, and other businesses reflect some of the best aspects of Minneapolis, on many levels of community—the rawness of its arts, music, and culture; the diversity and hungry American bustle; the high number of transitional housing units, shelters, churches, non-profit agencies.

As one the most diverse neighborhoods in Minneapolis, Whittier is home to some 25 languages from 30 countries. For a good decade, I lived, worked, and had a writing office all right on Eat Street (Nicollet Avenue).

If one word had to describe the feeling on this first night of the new year’s second killing by ICE in South Minneapolis, it would be this: Reverence.

You could say the future lives in Whittier. Literally, aside from being one of the most racially and economically diverse, it’s a Midwestern neighborhood with one of the highest populations of folks 18 to 34 in the city. On the night after Alex Pretti’s brutal and brutalizing killing, long into night, amid -9 F cold (with a -20 F windchill), many hundreds of folks (coming and going), mostly zillennials, kept vigil late into the night, setting up tables for hot soup and coffee, chanting, holding space for Mr. Pretti’s and one another’s spirits, and keeping shops open. Resale, a women-owned, LGBTQ-friendly curated secondhand clothing boutique, stayed open so the vigil keepers could sit and thaw, or get a free, extra pair of tube socks, or hand warmers, or bottles of water. Meanwhile, next door at Glam Doll Donuts, right across the street from the scene of the killing, mourners warmed up with free coffee and hot chocolate.

For the hour I could lay a flower down and pay my respects at the memorial site on the sidewalk in front of New American Development Center before my toes in my heavy boots went numb, our call and response never ceased:

“Say his name!”/“Alex Pretti!”/“Say his name!”/“Alex Pretti!”

Near the memorial site of hundreds of flower bouquets and candles, a few controlled fires raged, warming fingers, noses, and lips. The mood was somber, glowing, and peaceful. But if one word had to describe the feeling on this first night of the new year’s second killing by ICE in South Minneapolis, it would be this: Reverence. Reverence for Mr. Pretti’s intentions and actions. Reverence for all the others in recent—and distant—memory gunned down by the law, or, in one recent murder of the state’s DFL Speaker of the House of Representatives, Melissa Hortman and her husband, gunned down in their pajamas this past summer by someone impersonating the law.

Amid the call and response on Eat Street last night, many names began to mix in my head.

“Say his name!”/“Alex Pretti!”
“Say her name!”/“Renee Good!”
“Say her name!”/“Melissa Hortman!”
“Say his name!”/“George Floyd!”
“Say his name!”/“Amir Locke!”
“Say his name!”/“Daunte Wright!”
“Say his name!”/“Philando Castile!”
“Say his name!”/“Jamar Clark!”
“Say his name!”/“Fong Lee!”

And the list goes on.

Yes, it’s true. Minnesota, and especially Minneapolis—in recent years, the nation’s epicenter of violence—is deeply traumatized. There are layers and layers of trauma here. From the very beginning with the government’s brutal policies toward Indigenous peoples, to Dred Scott, to a bloody history of labor crackdowns, to vigorous redlining, to uncommonly high Korean adoptee and Southeast Asian, Somali, and other refugee populations leading to anti-Asian and anti-African sentiments, to being a sanctuary city, to some of the highest levels of racial, economic, and educational segregation in the US to this day, there is no shortage of collective traumas to reckon with.

Since Covid, the traumas have outpaced many of our personal capacities to productively process this history and our present society. To this day, you see and feel it in the still-shuttered storefronts in the once lively Uptown area, and well beyond; the still-closed, burnt-down Third Precinct Police Station; the ongoing, ever-shifting human encampments; the many struggling restaurants; the long carlines outside at the food shelves; the curtains drawn in conspicuously ICE-monitored neighborhoods; and, yes, the shuttered day cares and other services, some of which are, or were, as is repeated over and over by the right, run by immigrant and refugee business people currently under investigation for wide-scale fraud by the government.

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Literary Hub » Letter From Minnesota: Finding Reverence in the Face of Brutality

Public libraries in TX, LA, and MS are no longer protected by the First Amendment – Literary Hub

Public libraries in TX, LA, and MS are no longer protected by the First Amendment – Literary Hub

By Drew Broussard, December 8, 2025

Six months ago, Anthony Aycock wrote a piece for this website called “How a Single Court Case Could Determine the Future of Book Banning in America” in which he detailed a case working its way through the American judicial system: Little v. Llano County. Aycock’s piece (and his subsequent appearance on The Lit Hub Podcast with lead plaintiff Leila Green Little) detailed the history of the case but the basic facts are these: in 2021, a group of residents in Llano County, Texas, began to challenge books in their public library system—books like Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen and the sex-ed book It’s Perfectly Normal. After seventeen books were removed, several other residents sued on First Amendment grounds, arguing that these books were being banned for content and thus represented a restriction of the freedom of expression. The case expanded and was then brought to the Fifth Circuit, which at first ruled with the plaintiffs, but shortly thereafter that ruling was vacated and a new judgement brought down that ruled against the plaintiffs. It was then brought to the Supreme Court.

Today, the Supreme Court denied the writ of certiorari in the case, meaning that they will not hear arguments in the case and the lower court’s ruling will stand.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Literary Hub » Public libraries in TX, LA, and MS are no longer protected by the First Amendment.

#BannedBooks #FirstAmendment #FreeSpeech #Libraries #LiteraryHub #Louisiana #Mississippi #NoFirstAmendmentProtection #PublicLibraries

Hubo un tiempo en que se creyó que #internet podía ser una plataforma para la #literatura. Pero esa #idea parece haber caído en desgracia. ¿Qué sucedió?
Escribí del asunto (y otros aledaños) en #LiteralMagazine.
https://literalmagazine.com/autopsias-de-la-escritura-en-linea/

#EscrituraCreativa #Twitter #X #tuiteratura #LiteraturaMexicana #LiteraryHub #polémica #PolémicasLiterarias #LaTempestad

In Praise of Librarians in Dangerous Times – Literary Hub

– The Keynote address at the American Librarian’s Association annual convention, June 28th, 2025

Sarah Weinman

Sarah Weinman is the author of three nonfiction books: The Real Lolita, Scoundrel, and Without Consent (Ecco, November 2025). She is also the editor of several anthologies, most recently Evidence of Things Seen: True Crime in an Era of Reckoning. Weinman writes the Crime & Mystery column for the New York Times Book Review and lives in New York City.

Sarah Weinman on the Awesome Responsibility of the Seekers and Keepers of Truth

By Sarah Weinman, November 3, 2025

Librarians are on the front lines of history and current events, when news and change arrive at a furious clip that only quickens every day.

And without libraries, my work would simply not exist.

I was a child who read books. There’s a picture of me, not quite a year old, in a blue sailor suit and a red ribbon tied around my neck, staring avidly at a picture book. I couldn’t have been reading yet—that wouldn’t happen until I was close to three, still plenty precocious—but the devotion was already there, the calling always present. I would always prefer reading to pretty much anything, whether it was practicing piano, doing homework, playing sports, and chores.

Books were everywhere as I grew up, and I know how fortunate I was. All around the house, because my parents and older brother were avid readers, too. In the sprawling home of my great-uncle, who spent many years as a sales representative for Harper & Row—before it was absorbed into HarperCollins, now my own publisher—and the duplex townhouses of my grandparents.

Going to the library was special, though. The elementary and high school ones, staffed by people who understood what books meant to kids because they’d never lost sight of what books meant to them. The local branch, a few minutes’ drive from my home, where I borrowed countless books at every age and had my first formative experience with microfilm—and no matter how many times I have used it, I still need to ask a librarian for help. The flagship location in my hometown, with its brutalist architecture, piles of newspapers threatening to burst out of the shelves, and the abundance of books in every genre—particularly crime fiction, my first and still greatest love.

The university one, where not only could I request any book I needed for research—for class, and also my own—but I discovered the almighty power of the Lexis-Nexis database. And, when I moved to New York more than two decades ago, the magisterial 42nd Street Public Library, those twin lions beckoning visitors to climb up the stairs and partake of its treasures.

The wonder and thrill of the library hasn’t gone away for me, not at all, but it has certainly evolved in adulthood. I have come to know so many archive repositories, sifting through collections of authors, editors, and other luminaries as part of my research for three nonfiction books, several anthologies, and other journalism projects. Some of the institutions whose work I have benefited from enormously, visiting in person or requesting digital reproductions, include the Sterling Library at Yale University; the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; the New-York Historical; city and state archives in New Jersey, Oregon, Maryland, New York, and right here in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library.

The wonder and thrill of the library hasn’t gone away for me, not at all, but it has certainly evolved in adulthood.

And it was at Columbia University’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Library in early 2016 that I experienced one of the most transcendent experiences of my working life. I’d arrived to look at a selection of letters by the book editor and translator Sophie Wilkins, and what I thought would be anodyne correspondence between an editor and her author—the convicted murderer Edgar Smith—turned out to be anything but, altering the scope and trajectory of the project that would become my second book, Scoundrel. The excitement I felt at reading what perhaps three others—Sophie, Edgar, and the librarian cataloging the material—that I could not express in public, but could convey in book form, was like nothing I’d ever experienced.

Libraries and archives hold so much knowledge within their sacred confines. I will never lose sight of the awesome responsibility for those tasked with curating, maintaining, and presenting the information so that researchers and authors like me can make meaning of these documents. The librarian is a seeker and keeper of truth, and that makes her a dangerous figure in the eyes of those who fear the fullest, most comprehensive, and most uncomfortable truths emerging.

The librarian is a seeker and keeper of truth, and that makes her a dangerous figure in the eyes of those who fear the fullest, most comprehensive, and most uncomfortable truths emerging.

This is as precarious a moment as I’ve experienced in my own lifetime. Book bans accelerating at a pace that beggars belief. The unjust firing of Dr. Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress. The onrush to embrace generative AI without considering the consequences. And just yesterday, a terrible Supreme Court ruling that threatens to upend what books are taught in schools and available in their libraries.

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Literary Hub » In Praise of Librarians in Dangerous Times

#Books #CarlaHayden #ChildrenReading #CurrentEvents #DangerousTimes #History #Librarian #LibrarianOfCongress #Librarians #LiteraryHub #News #SocietyChanges #TaughtInSchools

When We Devalue Art (Books!) We Devalue the Future – Literary Hub

When We Devalue Art (Books!) We Devalue the Future

Maris Kreizman on the Dangers of the AI Content Churn

By Maris Kreizman, November 6, 2025

Maris Kreizman

Maris Kreizman hosted the literary podcast, The Maris Review, for four years. Her essays and criticism have appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Esquire, The New Republic, and more. Her essay collection, I Want to Burn This Place Down, is forthcoming from Ecco/HarperCollins.

When you’ve spent your whole adult life working in and around book publishing you get used to hearing that people don’t read anymore and that the industry is on its last legs. There is always a crisis. In August it was reported that reading for pleasure has declined by 40 percent over the last 20 years. But pleasure reading has been on a decline for ages: the Victrola, then the talkies, then TV and Nintendo and the internet, have all cut into our reading time. Yet still, people continue to read.

Which is why I felt a different kind of existential dread for the industry last week when I came across a Slate article entitled “The Case for Whole Books” by Dan Sinykin and Joanna Winant. As a childless person who doesn’t teach I’ve been happily unaware that, due to standardized testing requirements that favor close reads of excerpts over whole books, there’s an entire generation of students who have very little contextual framework for the literature they’re being taught in school. Last year I wrote about the way that the tech industry has been trying to transform books into easily uploadable Blinkist-style digests, but I don’t think I understood that children are also being fed less than enriching knowledge pellets.

In that same week a piece for The Baffler by Noah McCormack called “We Used to Read Things in This Country” contained a passage that stopped me in my tracks: “It is AI that has given the American ruling class the final impetus to more or less abolish education. As primary and secondary schools prepare to push AI on students, higher-education funding is basically being eliminated.”

Maybe this is another form of catastrophizing. People are still buying books, young and older readers alike. Certainly there are some high schools that are still assigning and engaging with The Great Gatsby in full. But with the rise of Big Tech and AI I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that our values as a society appear to be changing for the worse.

We have more content than ever, but fewer opportunities for art and artists to thrive.

When I was in college in the late 1990s I was told time and time again that employers of all sorts love a job candidate with a degree in the humanities because a liberal arts education fosters critical thinking skills, the ability to learn. Not everyone has to be a lifelong reader of books, certainly, but studying them, I thought, set people up to be strong communicators and critical thinkers. It’s devastating to look at the job market and see the denigration of so many qualities that I always thought were non-negotiable: reading and writing skills, human interaction, and creativity overall.

At the risk of moving into old man yelling at cloud territory, I grew up with a subscription to Entertainment Weekly. I took it as a given that its subjects—books and music and film and theater and yes, even TV—enrich our lives. In fact, I wrote a book about the interconnection between high and low(er) forms of popular culture and how we’re all better for it. Now Entertainment Weekly exists as a scaled-down website, and media spaces for cultural criticism continue to dwindle.

 Editor’s Note: Referred by Library Link of the Day
http://www.tk421.net/librarylink/  (archive, rss, subscribe options)

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Literary Hub » When We Devalue Art (Books!) We Devalue the Future

#ai #americanSociety #bigTech #books #contentChurn #devalueArt #devalueBooks #future #literaryHub #marisKreizman #society #theFuture #weUsedToRead