On January 1, 2021, Daphne Gottlieb sent me a message on LinkedIn.  “Happy New Year!,” it read. “I will make this shortish and sweetish. My first novel is coming out on Valentine’s Day. It’s a mix of anonymous sex, po mo theory, Scheherazade and 1001 Nights, and the search for

I had promised myself I wasn’t going to do an end of the year list, but sometimes it’s important to acknowledge our low points in culture so that we may never repeat them again. 2009 had a lot of highs and lows, and of course Twitter and other social media