“If you are an American,” wrote Kurt Vonnegut in a 1973 letter to a school board head who directed that copies of Slaughterhouse-Five be burned for containing “obscene language,” “you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own.”

Award-winning poet and vocal social justice advocate Adrienne Rich has died at age 82. In declining a National Medal of Arts in ‘97, she said, “Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of the power which holds it hostage.”

Philanthropist and former Star Tribune publisher John Cowles Jr. passed away Saturday at age 82. Known for bringing Tyrone Guthrie to Minneapolis, his generosity, with his wife Sage, helped create the Walker’s Cowles Conservatory.

“A creator always has to be with what’s revolutionary,” says Syrian poet and Goethe prize winner Adonis, “but he should never be like the revolutionaries. He can’t speak the same language or work in the same political environment.”

The surrealist painter and poet Dorothea Tanning died Tuesday at age 101. In addition to paintings that earned her comparisons to Magritte, she wrote poetry, including two books published by Minnesota’s Graywolf Press.

Appropriation, misremembered influences, outright theft: Leading thinkers on intellectual property and copyright offer their nuanced takes on where fair use ends and plagiarism begins.

Aiming to write “with such force and completeness that no other critic will be able to say a word about it,” Stanley Fish says a “desire for pre-eminence, authority and disciplinary power” is “what blogs and the digital humanities stand against.”

John Brockman characterizes Edge.org, the online forum he created with the late performance artist James Lee Byars, as a way for readers to “look over the shoulders of some extraordinarily gifted individuals as they go back and forth in the battle of ideas.”