In the New York Times, Sophie Pinkham writes about the intellectuals and political dissidents leaving Russia. Pinkham compares this exodus to the emigration from the Soviet Union in the 1970s: “It has been less than a month and the situation is evolving fast, but new émigrés do not expect to be greeted as warmly as their Soviet predecessors once were by the West.”
Tonight, the National Book Critics Circle will hold its award ceremony and reading for its 2022 prizes. The event starts at 5:30pm with a reading by award finalists hosted by Ophira Eisenberg.
At Jstor Daily, Olivia Box looks at a study by scientists at Brown university who are using Thoreau’s notebooks to better understand climate change.
In the Chronicle of Higher Education Review, Drew Daniel remembers theorist and critic Leo Bersani, who died in February. Daniel writes, “Amid the warm flood of memorials and testimonials from Bersani’s former students, collaborators, and friends, the question of his vexed relationship to queer theory—a field to which his work was casually annexed but whose insights and key thinkers he frequently critiqued—seems ripe for reconsideration.”
In a diary for the London Review of Books, Patricia Lockwood writes about Kafka: “ If Kafka lived today he would not have to be a bureaucrat, or whatever the hell it was he was. He could be, instead, one of the men in a panda suit she had seen in the old town square, soliciting international coins from children.”