Weekend Bites: David Shields, Required Ayn Rand, Orwell Essays, Jill Soloway, and More

A bill has proposed in Idaho to make it required that every Idaho high school student to read Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” and pass a test on it to graduate from high school.

“The language of political commentary is far simpler today, and yet we are seemingly no nearer to rehabilitating political journalism.” – Houman Barekat at The New Inquiry on Orwell’s 1945 essay Politics and the English Language.

“That literature can serve many masters—that it can be escapist or entertaining, that it can tell us something about how other people live, particularly in foreign cultures, or that there can be joy in decoding a great writer’s artifice—doesn’t seem to have occurred to him.” – Jacob Silverman on How Literature Saved My Life by David Shields at The Daily Beast.

The Rumpus talks with Jill Soloway.

“They like riding them. They like racing them. They bet on them, hunt on them and patrol the streets on them.” – NPR reports on all the things the British love about horses, and the one thing they don’t. That thing? Eating horses.

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