Ann Kjellberg

1 month ago | books.substack.com | Ann Kjellberg

“I began to collect the dreams that the Nazi dictatorship had as it were dictated”: this is how Charlotte Beradt (1907–1986) describes the subversive and dangerous project she undertook in 1933. A Jewish journalist and Communist Party member, she had been barred from publishing soon after Hitler’s ascent to power, but managed to survive under the new regime until she was able to get out of Germany in 1939.

1 month ago | books.substack.com | Ann Kjellberg

On Thursday, veteran Washington correspondent April Ryan reported on efforts she had heard about from sources to transport the Greensboro, North Carolina, Woolworth’s lunch counter exhibit out of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and on a letter that Dr. Amos Brown, pastor of Third Baptist Church in San Francisco, had received informing him that a Bible and a volume of an early work of African American history were being returned to him by the museum.

1 month ago | books.substack.com | Ann Kjellberg

Editor’s note: Today’s post on Rebecca West became unexpectedly timely as Bill Owens, the executive producer of CBS’s “60 Minutes,” resigned yesterday after being pressured by CBS’s parent company to vet the show’s stories ahead of airing them.

1 month ago | books.substack.com | Ann Kjellberg

Susana Monsó is a Spanish philosophy professor who has written a book, Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death. It has a bright pink cover and has received an inordinately respectful amount of attention.

1 month ago | books.substack.com | Ann Kjellberg

I sometimes write on the top floor of an old Vermont woolen mill near its once necessary river. I fell for the space because I grew up in a New England factory town and my strongest ties connect to such buildings. I am always drawn to them, to what their emptiness holds still. I learned about the power of absence from my father, an industrial laborer who became a union organizer for the Chemical Workers Union.