Hudson River Railroad Station, with a View of Manhattan College, c. 1860. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Edward W.C. Arnold Collection of New York Prints, Maps, and Pictures, bequest of Edward W.C. Arnold, 1954.
• Meet Li Lu, who survived the cultural revolution, led protests at Tiananmen, was granted asylum in New York, and then made a fortune “as an investor in the Buffett mold.” (Financial Times)
• Picture postcards: a “theory about our skewed recollections.” (The Baffler)
• The long life story of one of the catchiest songs of the century. (99 Percent Invisible)
• Considering the legacy of Black Lives Matter and the 2020 protests. (Hammer & Hope)
• The 1979 film that “liberally transposes Daniel Defoe’s eighteenth-century novel A Journal of the Plague Year to the context of a modern developing nation.” (Inverse)
• How English became a South Asian literary language: “If colonialism took English from provincial to global, then these writers took English from global to local.” (Literary Hub)
• On the 1941 Disney animators’ strike: “It made Hollywood pretty much wall-to-wall union town.” (Washington Post)
• Listen to Patti Smith read Sylvia Plath. (The Marginalian)
• Found: the artist behind the striking cover art of a 1976 paperback edition of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. (New York Times)
• “We were, it seems to me now, doing our best to preserve postwar youth culture (and even interwar youth culture, as we’ve seen) against the rising force that would, soon enough, cast us into whatever came next: the world whose most important narratives are shaped by algorithms, and in which the horror of selling out no longer has any purchase at all, since the ideal of authenticity has been switched out for the hope of virality. We tried, and we failed, to save the world from our parents—that is, to reverse or at least slow down the degeneration of the hopes that they themselves had once cherished. And because we failed, we have been written out of history.” (Harper’s)
This week in obituaries: Edith Grossman, Nancy Buirski, Nathan Louis Jackson, Bill Richardson, Jimmy Buffett, Gary Wright, Steve Harwell, Ruschell Boone, Gloria Coates, Franne Lee, Sarah Wunsch, Gayle Hunnicutt, Lawrence Lacks, Sr., Marilyn Lovell, Bill Pinkney, Norman Pfeiffer, Giuliano Montaldo, Ferid Murad, Douglas Lenat, Shabtai Shavit, K.C. Hwang, Mohamed al-Fayed, and Richard Locke.