The first Nobel peace prize for journalists since 1935 shouldn’t obscure the fact that record numbers are in prison, facing intimidation or murder. A piece by Joel Simon in ‘The Guardian’:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/dec/11/truth-lies-journalists-nobel-prize-prison?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

 

FROM MY EXPERIENCE of holding the sign again and setting the alarm to get up and moving around with purpose to get ready to go in the morning, making sure I have my mask and my gloves and my phone and my subway card, it’s great to go out. The staying home bit got old. Depressing in its seclusion and routine. Today a guy I have seen frequently while I’m downtown on the sidewalk with my sign as he walked by flashed me a peace sign and said Happy Friday! For almost two years I wasn’t sure what day it was.

• 

The ‘1619’ Project and the Demands of Public History

The ambitious ‘Times’ endeavor, now in book form, reveals 

the difficulties that greet a journalistic project when it aspires 

to shift a founding narrative of the past. In ‘The New Yorker’:

https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-1619-project-and-the-demands-of-public-history

 

Malcolm X’s former prison cell becomes first of 1,000 planned ‘freedom libraries’

The first of the planned amenities for US prisoners opens in the Massachusetts jail where the campaigner was incarcerated in the 1940s:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/dec/07/malcolm-x-former-prison-cell-becomes-first-of-1000-planned-freedom-libraries-?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

 

Poems from Amanda Gorman’s released-this-week collection Call Us What We Carry:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/13/from-call-us-what-we-carry-poetry-by-amanda-gorman