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Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.
A Star-Studded Twelfth Night Broadcast
Fans of the Bard, rejoice! A Twelfth Night production starring Peter Dinklage, Lupita Nyong’o, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, and Sandra Oh is coming to your living room. PBS will broadcast the Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park production on November 14, so mark your calendars for 9 PM ET. The in-person show is free, in the SITP tradition, but it sounds like getting into the show is a challenge even if you live down the street from the Central Park theater. With a cast like this one, I wouldn’t be surprised to run into the line here in North Carolina. Saheem Ali will direct the 90-minute production, which will be streamable from PBS.org. Also, as Playbill points out, if you love what PBS does, give it some support by contacting your senators to prevent the current administration from defunding the organization.
The Kids, Apparently, Have Never Been Alright
Is reading literacy among the youth declining, or isn’t it? Is the problem that they literally can’t read, or is it that they can’t comprehend texts at a college level? These questions are enduring, confounding, and the answer, which has tended toward “kids are incompetent” since time immemorial, is often vibes based. Constance Grady dissects the exhausting reemergence of the “kids can’t read” discourse at Vox, writing, “On the one hand, I am aware that every generation complains that the kids who come next are doing everything wrong and have gotten stupider and less respectful. I fear falling into this trap myself, becoming an old man yelling at cloud.” Read all about what academics, psychology professionals, and the data have to say about the assumptions we make, the history of this question, and what is actually impacting test scores and reading comprehension.
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The Rarified Mess of Writers Breaking Up
When a writer experiences a big, life-changing event, what do they do? They write about it. But what happens when the event is a divorce and two writers are processing through pen and paper? In the case of Hannah Pittard and her ex-husband, Andrew Ewell, they both write about it from their perspectives, and then write about the ex writing about it. My head is spinning… Pittard wrote her newest, an autoficition novel, If You Love It, Let It Kill You, in response to Ewell’s satirical novel, Set For Life, which was written after the publication of Pittard’s memoir, We Are Too Many, all drawing pretty explicitly from the couple’s divorce. This prompts the fascinating question of who gets custody of a story when writers break up, explored in a profile of Pittard by The New York Times. The whole thing gives me hives but, of course, makes for a great read.
Pride is Disappearing in Libraries Across the U.S.
Pride is dying in libraries.
Make no mistake: a smaller number of stories about pushback related to LGBTQ+ displays, programming, and other events in US libraries during June isn’t something to celebrate. In an era of heightened scrutiny and legitimate fear over safety, more and more libraries have thrown in the towel on celebrating Pride. What felt like a quiet censorship of Pride in 2024 has gotten much more obvious in 2025. We can thank fear as much as we can and should be shamed by the ways LGBTQ+ people have simply been pushed aside in a moment where championing their voices, stories, experiences, and existence is more crucial than ever.
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