Venezuela quakes: How will sanctions impact aid operations? — Financial sanctions are known to limit the flow of aid, but political influence is also a concern amid the devastation.
Beyond Cli-Fi: Why Every Story is a Climate Change Story — I started my second novel, The Emilys, with a single sentence: “What did I love about going to get the vaccine?” All I knew was that a mom was leaving her house before dawn. I knew she was so happy…
Girls’ Girl — By Friday, I was back at Margaret’s house with an itchiness between us. I found her to be too pleased with herself. She flitted around her room with authority and half an eye on her phone at all ti…
The Toxic Appeal of “Big-Reveal” Content on Social Media — For well over a century now, families have sported rows of rictus grins for the camera, but the subgenre of family portraiture (and, later, video clips) dedicated to conception, gestation, and birt…
Esther Kinsky on Is Beauty Good, the Novel by Rosalind Belben — Many years ago I spent a summer in southeastern Poland. One day, on a hike, I came upon a gathering in the late morning sun. A group of people had assembled on a meadow just outside a village, an a…
Started fermenting hot sauce in a jar on my kitchen counter, forgot about it for three weeks, opened it expecting disaster. The smell made me understand why people keep doing this.
On Reckoning With the Literary World’s Unacknowledged Class System — When I walk into a room full of writers, I’m often struck by the sense that I don’t belong. I’m an immigrant, first-generation to college; my father was a welder. Swearing was the third language we…
Welcome to Toronto, World Capital of the Urban Raccoon — If you ask anybody in Toronto, they’ll tell you that raccoons, AKA the Procyon lotor (Latin for “before-dog washer,” given their apparent penchant for washing their food), are everywhere. The creat…
Paradise Pawn — When Dad and I went to Dallas for Mom’s funeral, Dad gave me my own disposable camera with twenty four pictures on it. I used up two taking pictures out the window of the plane. I remember thinking…
“Boardinghouse With No Visible Address,” a Poem by Franz Wright — So, I thought, as the door was unlocked and the landlord disappeared (no, he actually disappeared) and I got to examine the room unobserved. There it stood in its gray corner— the narrow bed, the s…
Russian Literature Does Not Belong to the Russian State — The designation of “foreign agent” is used by the Russian government to label individuals and organizations that receive foreign support or are (more nebulously) deemed to be under “foreign i…
Francesca Wade has won the Plutarch Award for Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife. — Today, the Biographers International Organization announced the winner of the 2026 Plutarch Award for Best Biography of 2025: Francesca Wade’s Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife. “Gertrude Stein: A…
‘Hearing’ Review: Vietnamese Slow-Burn Is a Feast for the Senses — Locarno: The second feature from writer/director Lê Bảo makes you enjoy the silence, even if its characters don’t.
Nobody’s a Stranger When You Play “No Letting Go” — To a young d.j. in 2003, Wayne Wonder’s dancehall anthem seemed like a beacon from a better world.
Break to Sing: Seven New Poetry Collections to Read in July — “Elegy, sing the bones to break the cycle. The cycle: Sing to Break. Break to Sing.” –Philip B. Williams’s Lift Every Voice * This month, we see poets collaborating and conversing beyond words on a…
On One of America’s Great Conspiracy Theorists (and His Yankees vs. Cowboys Theory of History) — On November 22, 1963—the day on which President Kennedy arrived in Dallas to lay the groundwork for his 1964 reelection campaign and Richard Hofstadter set off from Oxford to attend…
A lost ancient script reveals how writing as we know it really began — A long-overlooked writing system from 5000 years ago is still largely undeciphered, but could mark the moment humans first represented their speech with written words
Fauna & Flora — Conservation since 1903.
Why We Need More Woman-Centric Retellings of The Odyssey — During a pivotal moment in The Odyssey, Circe sends Odysseus to the Kingdom of the Dead to find the soothsayer who can instruct him on how to return home after more than a dozen years away. But to …
Kurt Vonnegut’s Life-Advice to His Children — Educate yourself, welcome life’s messiness, read Chekhov, avoid becoming an architect at all costs.
What Should You Read Next? Here Are the Best Reviewed Books of the Week — Sigrid Nunez’s It Will Come Back to You, Lauren Collins’s They Stole a City, and Julie Buntin’s Famous Men all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. Brought to you by Book Marks,…
Hedgie (@HedgieMarkets) — 🦔AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books…
Virtual desktops, docks, and tabbed windows—Linux had them first — These '90s experiments were so good even Windows copied them.
Watch the chic, menacing trailer for Bret Easton Ellis’s new FX series. — Oh, Bret Easton Ellis. You old lightning rod. The Gen X nihilist known for anchoring the literary Brat Pack and depicting depraved superficial youth is shifting his talents to television. With the …
Love After Life: Nobel-Winning Physicist Richard Feynman’s Extraordinary Letter to His Departed Wife — Where the hard edge of physics meets the vulnerable metaphysics of the human heart.
Rare 'Super Mario Bros.'/'Duck Hunt' variant discovered, to auction this week — The NES cartridges appear to have come from a previously unknown run of the games.
Ursula K. Le Guin on the Meaning of Life — We are the survivors of immense and minute events — violent cosmic collisions and subtle genetic mutations, the deaths of innumerable suns and the births of innumerable cells, the splitting o…
Jellyfish Can Heal Wounds in Minutes. Scientists Want Their Secrets. | Marine Biological Laboratory — A decade ago this summer, at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Jocelyn Malamy watched jellyfish cells “walk” toward each other to close a wound for the first time. An…
A biologist documented every animal that passes through her backyard camera over five years — the patterns are hypnotic, the rare sightings genuinely unexpected.
On the Duplicitous Heroine in Wilkie Collins’s No Name — Wilkie Collins’s No Name (1862) is, to use its narrator’s own words, a “a narrative of dramatic disasters,” an exercise in building a “dramatic world out of a domestic chaos.” It is the story…
Space Agencies Are Trying to Keep Astronauts From Losing Their Sight — A device currently being used to help octogenarians do self-administered eye exams could be part of future space missions to monitor astronauts’ ocular health.
Rescuers search for survivors of powerful Indonesia earthquake — Officials say a rapid assessment into the impact of the earthquake that destroyed hundreds of buildings and killed 47 is under way.
“The Romantics,” a Poem by Maya C. Popa — In raptures over Chapman’s Homer, Keats forgets who discovered the Pacific—not stout Cortez with eagle eyes but Balboa upon a peak in Darien. Where he withdrew his handkerchief and saw the death wa…
Army drops roses on Syrian crowds in a far cry from war — Syrian army helicopters dropped roses on crowds at Damascus Citadel’s Summer Syria festival.
What it's like to chase solar eclipses around the world — For many, a total solar eclipse is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. But for a dedicated few, it's a deep passion.
Colombia quake: Frantic search for survivors as over 2,700 reported missing — Magnitude 7.4 earthquake kills at least 132 people and causes widespread damage in western Colombia.
Mars Bar from the 1990s found during house clearance — The woman who found the chocolate bar during a house clearance compares it with today's Mars Bars.
Preventing WWIII in Europe’s New Cold War — The cross of the Church of All Saviors is black against a pale winter sky. Inside, between pink stone walls, a young priest swings frankincense in a silver thurible. Fragrant curls of smoke rise th…
Take a Look Inside the GR GT’s Aluminum Chassis—a Toyota First — With no Toyota emblems anywhere to be found, the GR GT is the first car by the automaker to be marketed solely under the Gazoo Racing brand. That’s not the only groundbreaking step for the car; perhaps…
Eight interiors where picture windows frame picture-perfect views — <p>This lookbook collates eight bedrooms and living spaces where slim-framed picture windows help landscapes become art. A picture window is square or rectangular in shape, lacks transoms or crossbeams of any…
Am I the Asshole For Wanting to Switch Writers’ Groups? — Hello everyone! Welcome back to Am I the Literary Asshole?, an advice column that wants to be more than friends. I’m your host, Kristen Arnett, and I’m currently trying to figure out how to talk my…
Browse Standard Ebooks - Standard Ebooks: Free and liberated ebooks, carefully produced for the true book lover — Lovingly produced free classics.
Cinematographer Michael Bauman Looked to His Own Roots for ‘Monster: The Ed Gein Story’ — The Oscar-nominated cinematographer of 'One Battle After Another' discusses his work on the third season of the Ryan Murphy Netflix true crime hit.
Lloyds Bank to cut £2bn in costs as part of AI-powered strategy — Chief executive says the four-year plan will lead to greater efficiency but gives no details of potential job losses
Murder inquiry after man bitten by dog dies — Police appeal for two people who stopped to help the victim in Wakefield to come forward.
Can a MacBook run multiple external monitors? It depends — Most current models support at least two.
Who, Exactly, Were All Those Girls in Renoir’s Paintings? — The Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP) is suspended in the air above the traffic and the trees of the Avenida Paulista. By some architectural wizardry of concrete and glass the p…
Walter Mosley: “A Novel is Not a Machine” — This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. Very often one finds literary editors, critics, and some fiction writers talking about novels as if they were mechanical t…
Announcing tale.fyi: read (or listen) to an entire book from a single link. — Announcing tale.fyi: read (or listen) to an entire book from a single link. by samuel cole, as one long readable page.
Christopher Nolan says people ‘disdain’ AI and the idea it will replace humans is ‘nonsense’ — Odyssey director addresses industry fears over artificial intelligence and says rightwing criticism of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy is ‘irrelevant’
Hermann Hesse on Solitude, the Value of Hardship, the Courage to Be Yourself, and How to Find Your Destiny — “Solitude is not chosen, any more than destiny is chosen. Solitude comes to us if we have within us the magic stone that attracts destiny.”
Meet ‘Likweli’: A new monkey species discovered in the Congo Basin — Yale researchers have helped to describe a new species of Colobus monkey living high in the forest canopies of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The Panasonic L10 won’t fit in your pocket, but with good reason? — The Panasonic L10 is appreciably larger than the LX100 models that came before it. This has caused some people to dismiss it as no longer making sense, once it’s comparable to the size of the smallest ILCs and…
Sperm Whales blow bubbles to achieve restful, vertical sleep — New research from the University of St Andrews and Université de Neuchâtel, has uncovered the mechanism which allows sperm whales to sleep in a unique vertical position, just under the ocean surface. Sperm whales…
5 Classic Chargers (and a Coronet) to Celebrate the Model’s 60th — Today, we know the Dodge Charger—vintage and modern—as a performance car with serious street cred. Did you know that when the concept version debuted in 1965, the Detroit Free Press was most impressed by its…
Watched a live stream of an octopus den for an hour. There's something about seeing it just... exist in its space, rearranging rocks, ignoring the camera.
My Sister Thinks Everything I Write is About Her… Is She the Literary Asshole? — Hey there! It’s time for another installment of your favorite advice column, Am I the Literary Asshole? It’s a place where we can all agree on one thing: people have a lot of questions about blurbs…
What the Taliban achieved and failed to achieve in five years — The Taliban government brought security and stability but is facing increasing alienation of the general population.
Chasing Stocks As Damaging As Selling At Bottom: Wilson — Mike Wilson, chief US equity strategist & chief investment officer at Morgan Stanley, joins Scarlet Fu and Tom Keene on "Bloomberg Money." They discuss how long-term investors should approach their portfolio. (Source:…
Lit Hub Weekly: August 3 – 7, 2026 — Carly Mattox considers Jennette McCurdy’s Half His Age and reckons with the long literary history of age gap relationships. | Lit Hub Memoir Why mothers and their babies are the ultimate flâneurs, …