Good evening readers. Here's your round-up of today's must-read literary news, commentary and fiction.

Obama's farewell speech called on "we the people" to remember that yes, we still can LSP
Mother tongues and "mother-in-law language": Talking to in-laws can be complicated, but in some languages a whole host of ordinary words becomes taboo in their presence The New York Times
Scratch, an anthology about writers and money that doesn't always do much more than scratch the surface Slate
Roxane Gay interviews an iconic "difficult woman": Madonna Harper's Bazaar
Intellectual magazines and the CIA's Cold War puppeteering of American culture The Los Angeles Review of Books
Frantz Fanon is remembered as an advocate for resistance by any means necessary, but rarely as a scholar, a psychiatrist, a doctor, a humanist The London Review of Books
Riddle by Jericho Brown: "We do not know the history of our selves on this planet because we do not have to know what we believe we own." The Georgia Review
Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib, author of The Crown Ain't Worth Much, on poetry as witnessing, on reckoning with grief and investing in joy Hazlitt
Fiction by Mary Helene Bertino: "Is there a patron saint for everything?... Turnips? Socks you can’t find? And outlet malls?" Electric Literature

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