How Albert Woodfox survived solitary

One week after joining the Black Panthers, Alfred Woodfox was arrested for robbery. Implicated in the murder of a prison guard, he spent 41 years in solitary confinement, longer than any American in history. His story, documented by Rachel Aviv, is one of extraordinary strength of mind —  and the willful persistence of independence despite unbelievable social and physical constraints.

On February 19, 2016, his sixty-ninth birthday, Woodfox packed his belongings into garbage bags and put about a hundred letters in a cardboard box. He put on black slacks and a black bomber jacket that a freed Angola prisoner had sent him.

Not until he was outside did he believe that he was actually going to be freed. It was a warm, clear, sunny day. He squinted and held the hem of his jacket. When he reached the front gate, he raised his fist and gave a closed-lip smile to a small crowd of supporters.

Michael led him to his car, a blue Corvette. Woodfox shuffled when he walked, as if shackles still connected his feet. Biting his lip and crying, Michael helped his brother into the passenger seat and showed him how to fasten the seat belt.

How ‘Sherlock of the library’ cracked the case of Shakespeare’s identity

Robert McCrum has a delightfully bookish profile of Heather Wolfe, whose contribution to Shakespeare scholarship should but probably will not close the age-old question of who wrote the most celebrated plays in the English language. Among her other work is “Project Dustbunny,” which analyzes hair, dust, and skin to trace the habits of 17th century readers. Dr. Wolfe, we are at your feet.

Dr Wolfe is a willowy, bright-eyed manuscript scholar, a paleographer specialising in Elizabethan England who in certain moods of candour might put you in mind of Portia or perhaps Cordelia. She’s also a Shakespeare detective who, last year, made the career-defining discovery that is going to transform our understanding of Shakespeare’s biography. In the simplest terms, Wolfe delivered the coup de grace to the wild-eyed army of conspiracy theorists, including Vanessa Redgrave and Derek Jacobi, who contest the authenticity, even the existence, of the playwright known to contemporaries as Master Will Shakespeare.

Richard Prince Just Showed Artists a Way to Fight Trump

Petty pleasure or genuine act of defiance, there’s something viscerally satisfying about Richard Prince’s decision to disown his own creation after its purchase by Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump. Prince has been called a flim-flam man and worse for selling art based on images lifted from Instagram, but like the artists who have refused to perform at the inauguration on January 20  —  and unlike Silicon Valley’s tech elite  —  he’s hitting Trump in the only place that seems to hurt: the president-elect’s delicate ego.

Jerry Saltz on learning to fight on a new cultural and political battlefield.

Even if this en masse disowning is only an isolated action, limited to those artists lucky enough to live off their work, just a drip in the middle of this building shitstorm of a presidency, I gleaned an artist trying to take back his name, his work, do something, anything. To do this in a time that is calling to us all to take action rather than to simply default, using our energies to criticize how others use their energy.

Prince's act of disownership opens up an incredible window of resistance.

A message to my doomed colleagues in the American media

In the wake of Donald Trump’s first press conference as president-elect, a cautionary tale for American media from Russian journalist Alexey Kovalev.

This man owns you. He understands perfectly well that he is the news. You can’t ignore him. You’re always playing by his rules  —  which he can change at any time without any notice ... Your readership is dwindling because ad budgets are shrinking  —  while his ratings are soaring, and if you want to keep your publication afloat, you’ll have to report on everything that man says as soon as he says it, without any analysis or fact-checking, because 1) his fans will not care if he lies to their faces; 2) while you’re busy picking his lies apart, he’ll spit out another mountain of bullshit and you’ll be buried under it.

How I Got My Attention Back

If you can set aside the irony of yet another online essay railing against the Internet — which is gutting our attention spans, killing our ability to experience the sublime, and probably kicks puppies when nobody’s looking — Craig Mod has some good reminders about what happens when we turn on the content spigot and why we should occasionally turn it off.

Today, I could live on Twitter all day, everyday, convincing myself I was being productive. Or, at least inducing the chemicals in the mind that make me feel like I’m being productive. Read more news. Send more replies. Start more threads. Each incoming reply activating a corresponding dopamine pop. Largely pushing nothing in the world forward.

Maybe I lost my attention because I’m weak, lonely, pathetic. Maybe everyone else has total control; they can resist all the information spun by algorithms — all the delicious dopamine hits in the form of red circles. Bing! Maybe it’s just me.

But … I want my attention back.