Steve Salaita spent 21 years in academia, a committed and passionate professor. Then he got fired. Now he drives a school bus, “one of the few institutions in the United States that protects the powerless from the depredations of commerce. “

Online mag gal-dem sits down with writer and cultural critic Roxane Gay: “Bodies rarely follow rules. We all live in bodies that are complicated, and we should create space for that unruliness instead of always trying to discipline it.”

Start planning your 2019 reading schedule with Literary Hub’s exhaustive list of exciting future releases — including numerous titles by women writers and writers of color.

“The Interdependency, humanity’s interstellar empire, is on the verge of collapse.” At Tor.com, read the prologue from acclaimed sci-fi author John Scalzi’s upcoming “epic space-opera novel,” The Consuming Fire.”

Avid traveler and photographer Heather Bean shares a collection of detail- and texture-rich photos from the Greek and Roman galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Sometimes it takes a touch of darkness (from the “glandular sacs of dead musk deer” to particularly putrid flowers) to create something alluring.

Do you ever feel a tad claustrophobic here on Earth? At Book Riot, Jenn Northington recommends 50 works of speculative fiction set in space “in all its mystifying, occasionally terrifying, really freaking huge glory.”

If you ever wondered what an opera singer’s daily life looks like, you’ll love Charlotte Hoather’s blog, where the British soprano invites visitors and fans behind the scenes (and occasionally on stage, too).

Celebrate the pop icon’s 60th birthday by diving into the rich archives of all about Madonna, where you’ll find news, interviews, magazine stories, and other materials going back decades. 

Austin Kleon on the need to gain a sense of ownership over our online lives: “Back [in 2013], the worst I felt social media did was waste your time. Now, the worst social media does is cripple democracy and ruin your soul.”

Journalist Iain Akerman follows Mona El Hallak, a Lebanese architect and activist, as she tries to reconstruct facets of the city’s past through the archive of a long-defunct photographer’s studio.

“Can we all agree that there is no such thing as a girl or a boy book?” Teacher and parent Pernille Ripp writes on the toxic effects of defining books by the gender of their supposed audience.

Why do we love (and fear, and kill) polar bears with so much intensity? At Longreads, Michael Engelhard, a wilderness guide and anthropologist, looks into the Arctic predator’s grip on our imagination.

Librarian Deb Baker rejects a recent op-ed calling for Amazon to replace public libraries: “Libraries are often the only egalitarian spaces in American communities, radically welcoming of everyone who comes through their doors.”