What We Are Reading Today: Names for Light

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Updated 23 March 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: Names for Light

What We Are Reading Today: Names for Light
  • While her family’s stories move into the present, her own story ― that of a writer seeking to understand who she is―moves into the past, until both converge at the end of the book

Author: Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint

“Names for Light” traverses time and memory to weigh three generations of a family’s history against a painful inheritance of postcolonial violence and racism.
In spare, lyric paragraphs framed by white space, Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint explores home, belonging, and identity by revisiting the cities in which her parents and grandparents lived. As she makes inquiries into their stories, she intertwines oral narratives with the official and mythic histories of Myanmar, according to a review on goodreads.com.
While her family’s stories move into the present, her own story ― that of a writer seeking to understand who she is―moves into the past, until both converge at the end of the book.

 


What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Fetters of Rhyme’ by Rebecca M. Rush

What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Fetters of Rhyme’ by Rebecca M. Rush
Updated 29 April 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Fetters of Rhyme’ by Rebecca M. Rush

What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Fetters of Rhyme’ by Rebecca M. Rush

In his 1668 preface to Paradise Lost, John Milton rejected the use of rhyme, portraying himself as a revolutionary freeing English verse from “the troublesome and modern bondage of Riming.”

Despite his claim to be a pioneer, Milton was not initiating a new line of thought—English poets had been debating about rhyme and its connections to liberty, freedom, and constraint since Queen Elizabeth’s reign.

“The Fetters of Rhyme” traces this dynamic history of rhyme from the 1590s through the 1670s. 


What We Are Reading Today: ‘Stem: Poems’ by Stella Wong

What We Are Reading Today: ‘Stem: Poems’ by Stella Wong
Updated 28 April 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Stem: Poems’ by Stella Wong

What We Are Reading Today: ‘Stem: Poems’ by Stella Wong

In “Stem,” Stella Wong intersperses lyric poems on a variety of subjects with dramatic monologues that imagine the perspectives of specific female composers, musicians, and visual artists, including Johanna Beyer, Mira Calix, Clara Rockmore, Maryanne Amacher, and Delia Derbyshire.

Whether writing about family, intimate relationships, language, or women’s experience, Wong creates a world alive with observation and provocation, capturing the essence and the problems of life with others.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘Rare Tongues’ by Lorna Gibb

What We Are Reading Today: ‘Rare Tongues’ by Lorna Gibb
Updated 27 April 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Rare Tongues’ by Lorna Gibb

What We Are Reading Today: ‘Rare Tongues’ by Lorna Gibb

Languages and cultures are becoming increasingly homogenous, with the resulting loss of a rich linguistic tapestry reflecting unique perspectives and ways of life.

‘Rare Tongues” tells the stories of the world’s rare and vanishing languages, revealing how each is a living testament to human resilience, adaptability, and the perennial quest for identity.

Taking readers on a captivating journey of discovery, Lorna Gibb explores the histories of languages under threat or already extinct as well as those in resurgence, shedding light on their origins, development, and distinctive voices.


What We Are Reading Today: The Teacher in the Machine

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Updated 26 April 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: The Teacher in the Machine

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  • Scholars at Stanford, MIT, and the University of Illinois in the 1960s and 1970s were encouraged by the US government to experiment with computers and AI in education

Author: Anne Trumbore

From AI tutors who ensure individualized instruction but cannot do math to free online courses from elite universities that were supposed to democratize higher education, claims that technological innovations will transform education often fall short.

Yet, as Anne Trumbore shows in “The Teacher in the Machine,” the promises of today’s cutting-edge technologies aren’t new. Scholars at Stanford, MIT, and the University of Illinois in the 1960s and 1970s were encouraged by the US government to experiment with computers and AI in education.

 


What We Are Reading Today: All the World on a Page

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Updated 25 April 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: All the World on a Page

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  • “All the World on a Page” gathers 34 poems, written between 1907 and 2022, presenting each poem in the original Russian and an English translation, accompanied by an essay that places the poem in its cultural, historical, and biographical contexts

Author: Andrew Kahn and Mark Lipovetsky

The Russian cultural tradition treats poetry as the supreme artistic form, with Alexander Pushkin as its national hero. Modern Russian lyric poets, often on the right side of history but the wrong side of their country’s politics, have engaged intensely with subjectivity, aesthetic movements, ideology (usually subversive), and literature itself. 

“All the World on a Page” gathers 34 poems, written between 1907 and 2022, presenting each poem in the original Russian and an English translation, accompanied by an essay that places the poem in its cultural, historical, and biographical contexts.

The poems, both canonical and lesser-known works, extend across a range of moods and scenes: Velimir Khlebnikov’s Futurist revolutionary prophecy, Anna Akhmatova’s lyric cycle about poetic inspiration, Vladimir Nabokov’s Symbolist erotic dreamworld, and Joseph Brodsky’s pastiche of a Chekhovian play set on a country estate.