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‘We are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe,’ new study says

If you know people still in denial about the crisis of American democracy, kindly remove their heads from the sand long enough to receive this message: A startling new finding by one of the nation’s top authorities on foreign civil wars says we are on the cusp of our own. Read more

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Joan Didion, ‘New Journalist’ Who Explored Culture and Chaos, Dies at 87

Joan Didion, whose mordant dispatches on California culture and the chaos of the 1960s established her as a leading exponent of the New Journalism, and whose novels “Play It as It Lays” and “The Book of Common Prayer” proclaimed the arrival of a tough, terse, distinctive voice in American fiction, died on Thursday at her home in Manhattan. She was 87. Read more

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What Did Dallas Learn from Rediscovering a Suppressed Book?

Dallas, Schutze argues in The Accommodation, has always been “much more Southern, with stronger roots in slave culture,” than most residents know or care to admit. His book traces how the city’s white “business oligarchy” was able to achieve a relatively smooth transition into legal desegregation during the Civil Rights era — it’s an oft-cited source of civic pride that Dallas in the 1960s avoided the racial unrest of cities such as Little Rock and Los Angeles — while finding “informal ways to maintain actual and total separation” of the races into the present day. Read more

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Famed for Fiction, Jim Harrison Was Also a Poet of Prodigious Appetites

His first published book was a poetry collection, 1965’s “Plain Song”; his last book of poems during his lifetime, 2016’s “Dead Man’s Float,” was published about two months before he died. In between he published a dozen or so other collections, adding up to a massive and bounteous body of work that would have made Harrison a significant American writer even if he had never published in any other genre. Read more

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Roanoke author Macy’s “Dopesick” series nominated for Golden Globe

The eight-part series is based on Roanoke author Beth Macy’s bestselling book “Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America.” It tells the true story of how one company, Purdue Pharma, and its drug OxyContin triggered the worst opioid epidemic in America. Read more

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Cuomo Is Ordered to Forfeit Earnings From $5.1 Million Book Deal

The extraordinary directive is the latest development in a fall from grace for the former governor, who in the span of just four months lost his job and reputation, and who is now facing a criminal trial after being accused of groping an aide in the Executive Mansion. Read more

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