LitHub – Emily Temple: “…So for the fifth year in a row, I surveyed a group of professional book cover designers (this year it was 29 of them) about their favorite covers of the year. They came back with an astounding 89 different book covers that impressed, delighted, and inspired them, representing work by 54 designers for 44 different publishers.
Late-Night TV’s Trump Problem
Trump has been a singular challenge for writers in the late-night landscape. An obvious target as a candidate—with his verbal gaffes, body language, and appearance contributing to facile impressions and shallow punchlines—he killed the joke when he won the White House. As president, he placed traditional late-night shows in “a rock-and-a-hard-place situation. – The Atlantic
Ebooks - 8 Best eBook Hosting Platforms for Digital Publishing
On Poetry: Folklore brings light, tradition in history's dark times | Lifestyles | record-eagle.com.
The best poems are always contemporary. They articulate a timeless center of human feeling, beyond doctrine, beyond dogma, beyond local circumstance, beyond the individual speaker.
… The Oxen.
For Twain and Woolf, little was as tedious as discussing the weather. And yet such conversation continues — implacably, abysmally weather
The New York Times – “2020 has changed the way we shop. As more and more people commit to online purchasing for items big and small, the unfortunate truth is that you’re far more likely to run into scammers and scalpers. And the last thing you want after spending your hard-earned money and dealing with numerous shipping delays is to open your package and find a Phony StayPlation instead of a PS5. While Amazon and other retailers have taken better steps towards mitigating the damage of scammers and shady resellers, your first line of defense is becoming a smarter shopper. Here are some of the tips and tricks the Wirecutter Deals Team uses to validate and verify every item and merchant we recommend on our deals page…”
See also BuzzFeedNews – Here’s One Way To Tell If An Amazon Product Is Counterfeit. “It’s easy for counterfeiters to swoop in on a company’s legitimate Amazon product listing and take over the “Buy” button…”
What Writing a Pandemic Newsletter Showed Me About America Wired – Patrice Peck: “In April, I started Coronavirus News for Black Folks. It gave me a kind of second sight. I could see where the country is headed—and how blind it’s been….I shut myself in my Brooklyn apartment, binge-reading about virology and venturing out only for groceries and a brisk walk now and then. And what I read keeps making me worry in a particular way: When I learn that people with heart and kidney disease, sickle cell disease, diabetes, and other preexisting medical conditions are at a higher risk of severe illness from Covid-19, I know those conditions are especially prevalent in the Black community.
When I start to read about the “essential workers” who will have to stay physically on the job while everyone else locks down—nurses, social workers, home health aides, grocery store and fast food workers—I know those professions are heavily made up of Black and brown women, like my own mother. Plus, well, I’m all too familiar with the wisdom in the ancient Black proverb “When white folks catch a cold, Black folks get pneumonia”—and the chronic social and economic inequities that affect Black health, and the distrust that many of us harbor for a health care system after generations of demonstrated racism.
Every now and then, I send the articles I’m reading about the virus to friends and family—almost all of whom have yet to understand the severity and urgency of the pandemic. Even experts know so little about the virus at this point….Mostly, though, what I’m doing is curating. I spend hours poring over the internet, trying to find the most reliable and relevant news about the plague for Black people; each edition of the newsletter contains dozens of links and summaries. I start by publishing every couple of days, then settle into a roughly once-a-week rhythm.
I carefully scan Black publications. I run search terms like “African American” + “Black” + “pandemic” + “Covid-19.” And then I present what seems like the most important stuff in one place. It’s pretty straightforward, but there’s something powerful and terrifying about it: To run those particular search terms day after day is to stare down the barrel of all the biggest things coming for America in the summer of 2020. It’s to be a sentinel…”