Chicago -
By SIU Press
“Organizing Freedom is a riveting and significant social history of black emancipation activism in Indiana and Illinois during the Civil War era,” SIU Press says.
“By enlarging the definition of emancipation to include black activism, author Jennifer R. Harbour details the aggressive, tenacious defiance through which Midwestern African Americans – particularly black women – made freedom tangible for themselves.
Posted on May 30, 2020
By Andy Soth/WisContext
Many people have heard of Typhoid Mary, but far fewer know the name Mary Mallon. For those familiar with the story of the actual person who would become known as an infamous spreader of disease, though, the name Judith Walzer Leavitt might also ring a bell.
Leavitt’s 1995 book, Typhoid Mary: Captive to the Public Health, tells the story of Mallon, an Irish immigrant cook in New York and asymptomatic carrier of typhoid fever who was involuntarily quarantined and spent years in isolation during the early 20th century. The questions raised through Leavitt’s examination of the media, the legal system and public health officials’ reactions to a woman charged with being a “Menace to the Community” remain to this day.
Posted on May 28, 2020
By The Electronic Frontier Foundation
As part of EFF’s response to the COVID-19 crisis, we’ve edited and compiled our critical thoughts on digital rights and the pandemic into an e-book: EFF’s Guide to Digital Rights and the Pandemic.
To get the e-book, you can make an optional contribution to support EFF’s work, or you can download it at no cost. We released the e-book under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits sharing among users.
No matter who you are, this collection will likely be relevant to your understanding of the pandemic and society’s response to it.
Posted on May 26, 2020
By Elizabeth Svoboda/Undark
To hear some experts tell it, science denial is mostly a contemporary phenomenon, with climate change deniers and vaccine skeptics at the vanguard. Yet the story of Galileo Galilei reveals just how far back denial’s lineage stretches.
Years of astronomical sightings and calculations had convinced Galileo that the Earth, rather than sitting at the center of things, revolved around a larger body, the sun. But when he laid out his findings in widely shared texts, as astrophysicist Mario Livio writes in Galileo and the Science Deniers, the ossified Catholic Church leadership – heavily invested in older Earth-centric theories – aimed its ire in his direction.
Posted on May 25, 2020
By The U.S. Postal Service
With a nod to the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, the U.S. Postal Service today is issuing new postage stamps honoring the lives and legacies of four of the movement’s greatest voices: novelist Nella Larsen; writer, philosopher, educator and arts advocate Alain Locke; bibliophile and historian Arturo Alfonso Schomburg; and poet Anne Spencer. These stamps will be available for sale at Post Offices nationwide and online.
Posted on May 21, 2020
By PEN America
PEN America on Tuesday released the inaugural PEN America Freedom to Write Index, its first annual global count of writers and public intellectuals unjustly detained or imprisoned worldwide.
Covering calendar year 2019, the inaugural Freedom to Write Index shows that at least 238 writers, academics and public intellectuals were imprisoned or held in detention in 2019, facing often brutal treatment and baseless charges. The Index includes novelists, poets, playwrights, songwriters, biographers, memoirists, essayists, bloggers, and other genre writers. Nearly 60 percent were being held by just three countries: China, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey.
Posted on May 20, 2020
By Meng Xia/The Conversation
Starting on January 25, novelist and poet Fang Fang has posted 60 daily diary entries about life and death in her hometown of Wuhan to WeChat, China’s most popular social media platform.
Born in 1955, Fang has a long and respected career as a writer of poems, novels and novellas. She won the prestigious Lu Xun Literary Prize in 2010, and was elected president of the government-funded Writers Association of Hubei Province in 2007. But her work has rarely been translated into English.
Her diaries were read widely in China but their reception was mixed. Some readers celebrated Fang for voicing people’s struggles in lockdown, others criticized her viewpoints. In her diary, Fang wrote* about her persistence: “I’m never too old to lose the strength of criticizing.”
News of publication of her translated diaries in English and German only the inflamed debate in China. But in any language, Fang Fang’s unfolding recording of the pandemic will be valuable for the globe’s understanding of our shared memories of this time.
Posted on May 19, 2020
By Rory Mir/The Electronic Frontier Foundation
Responding to the threat of COVID-19, science advisers from 12 countries have signed on to an open letter urging scientific publishers to make all COVID-19 research freely available to the public through PubMed Central or the World Health Organization’s COVID Database.
This is an emergency call for open science, the movement to make tools, data, and publications resulting from publicly funded research available to the public. Among the signers of this open letter was the director of the United States Office of Science and Technology Policy, Kelvin Droegemeier, who is reportedly shaping an executive order to require similar availability for all federally funded research starting on the first day of publication.
Posted on May 14, 2020
By SIU Press
“Barry B. Witham reclaims the work of Manny Fried, an essential American playwright so thoroughly blacklisted after he defied the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1954, and again in 1964, that his work all but completely disappeared from the canon,” the SIU Press says.
“Witham details Manny Fried’s work inside and outside the theatre and examines his three major labor plays and the political climate that both nurtured and disparaged their productions.
“Drawing on never-before-published interview materials, Witham reveals the details of how the United States government worked to ruin Fried’s career.”
Posted on May 12, 2020
By Dan Falk/Undark
Aside from the U.S., few countries have been hit as hard by COVID-19 as Italy, where nearly 30,000 people have died since the first cases were reported at the end of January.
As his country went into lockdown in March, Italian physicist and novelist Paolo Giordano began to think about how the pandemic was altering society. His essay “How Contagion Works: Science, Awareness, and Community in Times of Global Crises,” composed as the pandemic unfolded day by day, has now been published as an e-book by Bloomsbury.
Giordano, 37, is the author of four novels, including the international bestseller The Solitude of Prime Numbers, and is the youngest novelist to win Italy’s prestigious Strega Prize for fiction. (Previous winners have included Primo Levi and Umberto Eco.)
For this installment of the Undark Interview, I spoke with Giordano about his perspectives on the pandemic, which range from the mathematical to the personal, as we struggle to come to terms with our new reality. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Posted on May 8, 2020
