How To Kill a Mockingbird Got Banned and Became a Pulitzer-Winning Classic
“Happy anniversary, To Kill a Mockingbird! Harper Lee’s classic turns 66—explore the story behind its lasting power and timeless relevance.”
In this article from July 2025, Millie Ramm celebrates the anniversary of the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird by asking, “why has this story of a small Southern town, racial injustice, and one extraordinary father stood the test of time?”
Ramm asserts that the book’s power comes from its focus on morality and the questions, still applicable today, it raises around issues of racism, justice, inequality, and empathy. The novel raises “tough but important questions about how we teach history and literature. Which voices get heard?”
Ramm calls the anniversary of the book’s publication “a moment to celebrate the power of literature.”
You Have Permission: Elizabeth-Jane Burnett on Creating Space for Experimental Writing
I often seek out books that are described as experimental, ground-breaking, or genre-bending. Here Elizabeth-Jane Burnett writes about finding support for her efforts in experimental writing.
Words, words, words
“Strong resistance to AI among writers is understandable. But it obscures what we share with the machines: language itself”
Over the past three years, I’ve experimented with AI and have come away a cautious optimist. AI may well be terrible news for software engineers, but I think it’s an intriguing development for people who care about language and ideas – precisely the people who currently reject it the most.
Martin Puchner, professor in drama, English, and comparative literature at Harvard, discusses what he calls the Creative Resistance, a movement by (mostly) writers who insist that machines are incapable of “the things they cherish the most: the creative use of images, words, and ideas.”
In this heavily philosophical essay Puchner writes about his experience creating AI bots that he then trains with written texts to explore specific ideas and questions. He concludes: “we have at our disposal theoretical and historical tools to help us figure out what AI is and how we should interact with it. Let’s use them.”
Brown University Professor Horrified to Discover Largest AI Cheating Scandal in Ivy League History
“The empirical evidence of fraud is overwhelming.”
Award winning economist and Brown University professor Roberto Serrano says he has detected what appears to be the largest AI cheating scandal in Ivy League history.
I suggest reading this article after Puchner’s, above.
How to Research for Narrative Storytelling: 5 Takeaways from ‘You Are A Writer’
Pen America’s “You Are a Writer” series offers workshops for emerging writers. In this article Julia Goldberg offers five nuggets of knowledge from a workshop on researching for narrative storytelling.
The one that I particularly need to take to heart is #3: Beware of research transforming into a procrastination method. At some point you need to stop doing research and start actually writing.
Book Prizes Don’t Work How You Think
Author Rebecca Makkai writes, “authors and readers (and even editors) tend to have enormous, if understandable, misconceptions of how the prize-judging process works, and I’m happy to clear some of them up.”
An Ordinary Mind on an Ordinary Day
“What novelists can teach neuroscientists about consciousness.”
This article is adapted from Michael Pollan’s latest book, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness. Here Pollan examines consciousness as the process not only of thinking, but also of analyzing how we think, how one idea, concept, or image leads to another, which in turn leads to another, and so on.
This process of how we think often appears in fiction.
[Virginia] Woolf and [James] Joyce and the other modernists did not “discover” consciousness; novelists have been writing about it since at least the birth of the novel. It’s pretty much what novels do—take us into the minds of characters to satisfy our deep human curiosity to find out what, but also how, other people think. . . . Third-person omniscient narrators can penetrate the consciousness of characters quite deeply (think of those created by Gustave Flaubert, Jane Austen, or Leo Tolstoy), and first-person narrators can directly share the contents of a fictional mind, rendering it more or less transparent.
Seven Books to Read When You Have No Time to Read
If you want to get more reading done, Bekah Waalkes has some suggestions for you: “All you need is a willingness to dedicate a few minutes a day, and maybe a few new habits—packing a paperback for the waiting room, queuing up an audiobook for your commute.”
But, she emphasizes, what works best for her “is choosing just the right book.” She offers a list of books that “may help a harried reader pick up something they actually want to finish.”
© 2026 by Mary Daniels Brown
