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A night school for working kids in Pakistan

Founded by Mohammad Rohayl Varind in 2016 Slum School (Slum cleverly stands for Students Learning Under the Moon) is Pakistan's first solar powered night school. There are 23 million kids that do not go to school in Pakistan, many of whom work during the day! Varind's goal is to educate the underprivileged in hopes of one day winning the war against poverty, illiteracy & terrorism. The entire experience is solar powered with classes starting after sunset. Varind teaches the kids English, Urdu, math, and science with a little ethics and etiquette mixed in. Slum School does not purport to take...

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Reading Jane Eyre: All 594 translations in 57 languages

The project is called Prismatic Jane Eyre and is the brain child of University of Oxford professor Matthew Reynolds. In collaboration with an international team of more than two dozen scholars they dove deep into the publishing history of Charlotte Brontë’s classic 1847 novel, Jane Eyre. Why Jane Eyre? Says Reynolds: The more I thought about and re-read Jane Eyre, the more it came to seem the perfect book for the kind of exploration I wanted to make. It was full of contradictions that were likely to play out differently in different places, times and tongues.  It was a powerfully...

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Here comes Bookshop.org!

Have we reached the tipping point? Could this finally be the viable independent alternative to Amazon? Have we accepted the reality that cheap and fast does not equal healthy and does little to foster community sustainability? A tall order for sure but the timing might be a bit better than past efforts to compete against the Godzilla of bookselling. Enter Bookshop.org: Bookshop is an online bookstore with a mission to financially support independent bookstores and give back to the book community. We believe that bookstores are essential to a healthy culture of readers and writers. They’re where authors can connect...

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RuPaul visits the library

  RuPaul hosted Saturday Night Live this past weekend and one of the skits featured him visiting the San Diego Public Library for a little reading time. He tackles such children's classics as Madeline, Corduroy, Eloise,  James and the Giant Peach and Harriet the Spy. Absolutely hilarious. I'm still laughing at his take on the dust jacket illustration for Madeline which he says "I have bad news child, the Eiffel Tower is not in the woods. You better draw France right, bitch."  Watch: [youtube]https://youtu.be/r1xA7B4SY6A[/youtube]

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A celebration of the life and work of Gabriel García Márquez

photo by Maria Mendez In 2014 the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas acquired the archive of the Nobel Prize winning Latin American literary superstar Gabriel García Márquez. In 2015 the archive was opened to researchers and quickly became one of the Ransom Center's most accessed collections. Passport, 1955-1991 In 2017 an online archive of over 25,000 items from the collection was released into the world and now, for the first time, an exhibit of almost 300 items from the momentous archive, including some that have never been seen in public, are on display in the exhibition Gabriel...

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