It’s 4 p.m. on a Monday afternoon and Anna Sorokin is blasting Drake from her quaint apartment in the East Village of Manhattan. When I arrive at the top of her five-floor walk-up, she doesn’t come out, instead yelling from the bathroom to let myself in.

“Sorry, I’ll be right out. I can’t figure out what to wear! What’s the vibe?” she asks, in that iconic European accent that Julia Garner mastered in her portrayal of the fake German heiress in “Inventing Anna.”

The Netflix series created by Shonda Rhimes details the real-life story of 31 year-old Sorokin, who throughout the 2010s took the name Anna Delvey as she scammed her way through Manhattan, using an invented trust fund to persuade the city’s power brokers to invest in a members-only arts club. In 2019, she was convicted with grand larceny, among a slew of other financial crimes, for stealing more than $200,000 from investors, banks and friends, and ultimately destroying the lives of many in her innermost circle. She spent the majority of her two-year sentence in Rikers prison.

The rap music playing from a shoddy Bluetooth speaker, a messy display of outfit choices splayed out on her bed: it feels as if we’re getting ready for a night of clubbing in Downtown Manhattan. But of course, nightlife is no longer an option for Sorokin, who after being released from prison in February of 2021, was detained by immigration authorities for overstaying her visa. Now, she’s on house arrest with an ankle monitor and an agreement to stay off social media, meaning her photo shoots for the foreseeable future will have to take place from home. And she seems to have a lot of them. She’s been on a packed press schedule since her release last month, usually the sign of some sort of promotional campaign for a new product release or the announcement of a book or show. But now that she’s out of jail, Sorokin is back to promoting more of the same: herself.

Her ad-hoc home (she signed onto a temporary six-month lease) is small the way all New York apartments are small, but anyone familiar with the New York housing market knows that you need a fairly sizable savings account to land a newly renovated one-bedroom apartment in the heart of the East Village. Four massive prints from Graham Fortgang’s “New York Is Dead” photo series take up most of the real estate on her wall (these cost $2,500 to $8,000 each, but she says she got them for free through a pop-up event she has planned with gallery owner Samara Bliss). One wall is dedicated to her own art, illustrations that she created behind bars and whose copied prints, she says, have already made her a whopping $200,000.

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This holiday season, you might already be looking to the year ahead and considering learning a new skill or brushing up on an old one. But an online art class might just be just the right gift for a creative friend or family member. Below, see our list of some of the best online courses for artists. 

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On June 2, 2021, a noteworthy event took place in the world of online education. On that day, LinkedIn completed its incorporation of the online educational content and thousands upon thousands of video classes that had been part of the website Lynda.com. Lynda.com was one of the first online education websites and one of the most successful. Now, all that content will appear on LinkedIn Learning.

This transition comes more than six years after LinkedIn bought the online education company from its founders, Lynda Weinman and her husband, Bruce Heavin, who started the website in 1995. The price: $1.5 billion.

In addition to being an author and business leader, Lynda Weinman is also an artist. On Lynda.com students all types (including artists) could learn to crop a selfie in Photoshop, produce a funny animated GIF for their grandparents, or edit a graduation video for family and loved ones.

In August, climate change activists glued themselves to the frame of a Peter Paul Rubens painting at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. According to a report in Monopol, the legal consequences of that action have arrived.

The Munich District Court has issued criminal orders against the two activists who stuck themselves to the frame and one against the protestor who filmed the action. The Munich I Public Prosecutor’s Office said in a statement that “a significant” but unnamed fine was applied in each case. “We will of course assert our claims under civil law,” Tine Nehler, a spokeswoman for the Pinakotheken said, suggesting that it would be an expensive number. 

According to the public prosecutor’s office, the demonstration in August resulted in 11,000 euros worth of damage. One of the gluers and the filmmaker have objected to the penalty order, which will be addressed in a trial at the district court on an unspecified date. 

The activists are members of the climate crisis group Letzte Generation, which has orchestrated a slate of actions targeting world-famous artworks at museums across Europe.

Other activists with the group have attached themselves to several masterpieces, including Raphael’s Sistine Madonna (1512–13) at the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden. Similar groups have hurled food at works by Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, Emily Carr, and others.

Climate activists struck again earlier this morning, when members of Ultima Generazione (Last Generation) threw roughly 18 pounds of flour at a BMW art car painted by Andy Warhol at the cultural center Fabbrica del Vapore in Milan.

Women in the group aimed to draw attention to the “collapse of the climate,” they stated. In a video, they can be seen approaching the Warhol-painted 1979 German sports car and dumping packages of flour on it. Security guards then dragged two of the activists out of the room.

“It is useless to have more sustainable materials if governments don’t even do what they have pledged to do to reduce climate-changing gas emissions,” said Maria Letizia, a researcher in science and technology of materials who took part in the protest. “Emissions continue to increase and this leads us towards hunger and wars for water, for food, for survival.

“Staying in the classroom or in workshop with my students without trying everything possible to get governments to do their part has become unbearable to me,” Letizia continued. “These young people with me in action belong to the last generation that can still do something, I want to help them so that they are not the last generation on the face of the planet.”

Members of the group had reportedly planned to stick themselves to the car windows, but were unable to do so.

Read parts one, two, three, and four of “Hello, World!”

After June came July, and then came August. I lay in bed on those hot, still nights, sparks flying from the phone, the resolution bright and breaking.

What do you think reality is?

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This week, PEN America sent a letter to Missouri school boards and the state legislature, demanding a reversal to a spate of book bans enacted thanks to the state’s Senate Bill 775. The bill makes any material with “visual depictions” of “graphic material” illegal for schools to have available. This is why so many graphic novels have been banned across the state.

My book, Body Talk: 37 Voices Explore Our Radical Anatomy is one of the books pulled by a district in the state for “review.” As of writing, it’s been off shelves for months, with no status update. This is the second time I’ve learned of this book being removed from shelves to be assessed for appropriateness to age group. It is a book about the physical and political realities of having a body, written specifically for those 12-18. The Missouri district which has the book in a review hold appears to have removed every book with art within it; if Body Talk is pulled, it will set a state-wide precedent, ensuring that my book is banned at schools across the state. I have, of course, cosigned the PEN letter.

Even though it is 2022, there are still authors who believe having a book banned is a badge of honor. This week, I read an editorial while doing my research for this roundup of book ban news, extolling how the writer hopes to be banned in order to amp up sales. They don’t have much for a marketing or publicity budget, and surely, that would do the job.

Except…it doesn’t.

Body Talk is my third anthology, and it is my poorest performing book to date. My first two anthologies earned out their advance in a year, meaning that the publisher made as much money as they gave me to make the book. That amount? $17,500 (after my agent’s cut, it’s $15,000). That $15,000, paid out in three separate periods, amounts to $5,000 each check, minus the near 40% I set aside from each in order to pay taxes. And since my books are anthologies, each contributor also gets paid from these checks, leaving me as the creator, the editor, and an author of the book to the remaining balance as my money.

A warning: this quiz is not for the faint of heart.

It was made for those who know their covers and to which titles those covers belong to.

It was made for those who can spot a detail and hold it fast in their memory.

It was made for those who like a challenge and are sure they can win it.

But it was also made for those who, like me, keep seeing similar covers in stores thinking it is one book we saw previously, and it turns out it is another.

There are a lot of YA books that feature music. This might be the theme of the book or it might be a motif within the book. It could also be what introduces each chapter or a playlist that comes at the end of the book or as a bonus feature as part of the book’s marketing campaign. And then there’s my absolute favorite way we get music in YA books: through their titles. Welcome to another annual edition of YA book title earworms, this time for 2023.

If you’re scratching your head over what an earworm is, I promise you know what it is. It’s that song which gets stuck in your head and won’t get out. I remember a summer camp legend that, whatever your current earworm is, you can get it out by singing “It’s a Small World” to yourself…knowing once you sing that to yourself, it becomes an earworm itself (and you’ll fall into that Groundhog Day-esque loop).

I’ve been highlighting these YA book title earworms for half a decade now, and I love how they tell a few stories. They highlight nostalgia, they highlight contemporary interests, and they can sometimes even identify a song that is defining in an unexpected way. Let’s take a look at what 2023 YA book titles have to offer us as a soundtrack this year, with a note that because we don’t know yet every book hitting shelves in the coming year, this list is by default incomplete. In some cases, the song and book title are identical and in some cases, you’ll catch part of the song’s chorus as the book’s title. The song may have absolutely nothing to do with the book or story or its inspiration…or it might be quite central to it.

You’ll get the book, it’s description, and, of course, its accompanying song.