Beautiful Distance — The azaleas growing by the new hospital’s gates are in full bloom, a bright pink that makes my eyes sore. May is my wife’s favorite month. She’s always said that May evening skies are the most beau…
Macbeth and His Problems | Portico — If you’ve never seen a bad production of Macbeth, you’ve probably never seen a production of Macbeth. Famously cursed, the play has inspired perhaps the gravest superstition in the superstitious…
Ten Great Nonfiction Titles to Read in July — From the world’s wildest places to the origins of American fascism to memoirs of grief and recovery, July’s nonfiction has something for everyone. * The Savage Landscape, Cal Flyn Flyn’s 2021 book,…
Daily Cartoon: Monday, May 25th — A drawing that riffs on the latest news and happenings.
Whichbook | A new way of choosing what book to read next — Fancy something unusual and unpredictable? Funny or sexy? No problem. Use our unique mood and emotion search to find great books with exactly the flavour you've asked for.
A Literary Haunting: What the Ghost of Sylvia Plath Taught Me About Grief — Before the ghost of Sylvia Plath haunted the yellow house on the bluff in my novel White Rabbit, she haunted me. I was a twenty-four-year-old graduate student plagued by the loss of my father’s sec…
Will Turkiye end its military presence in northern Iraq? — Ankara agrees to gradually hand over a base in Sinjar.
Darwin’s Greatest Regret and His Deathbed Reflection on What Makes Life Worth Living — “If I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.”
Translation as a Journey: Jessica Sequeira on Vlady Kociancich’s The Eighth Wonder — Along with her novels, Vlady Kociancich worked on a translation of Joseph Conrad’s The End of the Tether, which according to her obituary by Daniel Gigena in La Nación, “había sido muy…
10 Great New Children’s Books Out in October 2026 — I recently decided to sort through my overstuffed shelves in search of books to give away: the ones I’m not likely to read again, the ones my kids aren’t interested in reading, the ones I was never…
Stokes' England career ends with NZ series defeat — Ben Stokes’ storied England career ends in a series defeat by New Zealand, who wrap up the third and deciding Test on the final day in Nottingham.
Presidential hopeful Melenchon joins France school protest march — Left-wing presidential hopeful Jean-Luc Melenchon has given his support to school protests in France
NHL Tonight: Previewing Blue Jackets-Wild, Hurricanes-Flames — Just two games on the schedule for hockey fans Sunday, but here's what you need to know.
Our A.I. Problem — Why can’t the people who produced the technology, which has already shown that a different world is possible, just do the things that would prevent extinction?
Robert Kolker Motivates Himself By Asking “What if Writing Were Fun?” — Robert Kolker’s new book, The Vanishing Family, is available now from Doubleday, so we asked him a few questions about writer’s block, favorite books, writing practice, and more. * Who do you…
Daily Cartoon: Tuesday, May 12th — See today’s Daily Cartoon.
One of the Best American Backpacking Books Was Written by a Japanese Buddhist Beat Poet — On a rainy San Francisco evening in late November 1959, Albert Saijo, a thirty-three-year-old Japanese American poet, climbed into the back of an eastbound Willys Jeep station wagon. The…
Why PEN America Will Not Defend You Against Anti-BDS Legislation — On July 6, two days before the publication of its report on the cultural boycott of Israel, PEN America made a subtle but important change to its position on boycotts. The organization had develope…
Why Do We Keep Murdering Our Darlings? — Why is everyone killing off their main characters? In the academic year 2021-2022 at the liberal arts college where I teach, I was startled by the trend. A plot contagion. Nothing is off limits, I …
Ten Great Nonfiction Titles to Read in June — If you’re the kind of reader who prefers some heft in your beach reads, than June is the month for you. This month’s picks feature natural histories of American megafauna, domestic memoirs of paren…
A beginning for mathematics · Daniel Litt — A positive vision for the future of mathematics: how our institutions can deepen human understanding as AI transforms mathematical research.
UK sees hottest June day on record as 36.1C recorded in Hampshire — Heat records were broken when temperatures soared across southern England on Wednesday afternoon.
The Absurdity of Albert Camus — For Albert Camus understanding the past and predicting the future may hinge on one fact: history is absurd.
British Book Awards: Virginia Giuffre’s memoir wins top book prize — Nobody's Girl, published last year, detailed Giuffre's encounters with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Eight Books That Puncture the Myths of Silicon Valley — These are strange times for Silicon Valley. “Tech” no longer feels like a discrete industry, or a cluster of upstart companies in Palo Alto riding the optimism of the Obama years. It…
Lit Hub Daily: June 16, 2026 — Sophie Lewis examines the phenomenon of heterofatalism. | Lit Hub Politics If you want a job as an astronaut, you need to nail the interview. | Lit Hub Memoir Erin Maglaque contextualizes her own e…
Lit Hub Weekly: July 20 – 24, 2026 — “Classical culture is a lot of things including, literally, rape culture.” Rebecca Solnit on the Odyssey and the Western literary tradition of silencing women. | Lit Hub Criticism From Dr. Abdul El…
American Heritage — American Heritage | The Leading Magazine of American History
One of My Poems is Literally Going to the Moon — In some sense, I’ve been going to the Moon most of my life. As a child of the space age whose father worked in the space industry, I’ve tracked sometimes closely, sometimes less so with activities …
Paramount settles US states' antitrust lawsuit, clearing the way for its Warner Bros. acquisition — The mega-merger of the year will apparently go forward.
AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible — The problem
A Question of Innocence: On Writing About Real and Imagined Lives In and Outside of Prison — This spring, I read Harriet Clark’s novel, The Hill, about a girl named Suzanna who grows up visiting her mother in a prison on a hill. I had just published a long Mother’s Day essay in…
The thinking was never just mine — Maybe “mine” was never about origin. Maybe it was about what gets carried forward.
Who Are You When You Lose Your Job? And Other Questions You Can Answer by Making Art — After I was laid off, I found myself haunted by the line “Had a dream I was Bartleby.” It had come to me very much like a dream, not thought so much as arrived. I wrote it down on the first pie
“You’ve Told Me This Joke Before” — It started with a toaster and ended with a Maytag washerdryer combo and four new steel-belted radials. In between, the UPS, FedEx, Lowe’s deliverer, or mail carrier set down on my front porch a Cui…
I don't like LLMs — a short post
This Week in Literary History: Ernest Hemingway is Wounded on the Italian Front — This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Literary History newsletter—sign up here. On July 8, 1918, just two weeks shy of his 19th birthday, American Red Cross volunteer Ernest Hemingway was struck by an A…
What Should You Read Next? Here Are the Best Reviewed Books of the Week — Emma Cline’s Switzy, Francis Fukuyama’s In the Realm of the Last Man, and R.F. Kuang’s Taipei all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for…
Where Cities and Oceans Meet - Longreads — "In New Orleans, water is coming. What should we do with the time we have left?"
Al Vigier: Canada's AI strategy shouldn't include secret Palantir bills — Instead, buy domestic product, and out in the open.
Tom Cole on Autofiction, Shame-Based Writing, and Being an Unreliable Narrator — If at all possible, it is best to do whatever Thora Siemsen says. So when she said “Can I send you a copy of this?” about Tom Cole’s forthcoming monologue Chimes published by The Song Cave, without…
Anthropic’s CEO is about to have dinner with President Trump | TechCrunch — This will be the first one-on-one meeting between Dario Amodei and Donald Trump
Nature is "inseparable from daily life" at House K in Vietnam — Blocky volumes in exposed concrete contrast with the lush greenery and rooftop vegetable garden at House K, a home in Vietnam designed by HGAA.
Chelsea Rathburn on the Unexpected Beauty of the “Research Dead-End” — This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. Earlier this summer, our geriatric air conditioner stopped working, bringing an abrupt end to a few years of never-quite-c…
Peloton has made a foldable (treadmill) — The Tread Flex is the company's first fold-up treadmill, and also its cheapest to date.
How the Fanatical Legion of Mary Secreted Young Girls Away to Toil in Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries — Fifteen-year-old Eileen disappeared on a quiet Sunday evening in February 1954. She was at work when it happened. Eileen was a maid at a bed-and-breakfast in a large Georgian…
Idiots: On Munch and von Trier by Karl Ove Knausgaard — June 4, 2026 – “Not direct access to reality, of course, but a different kind of access.”
FIFA pledges to defend Infantino after World Cup rights plan collapses — Infantino has faced leadership crisis as UEFA, AFC and Concacaf threaten drastic actions over commercial rights plan.
This Week in Literary History: America Turns 250 — This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Literary History newsletter—sign up here. This week, the United States of America turns 250. It’s a milestone that brings mixed feelings at best, considering the re…
Read the winning story of the 2026 Caine Prize for African Writing. — This week, the Caine Prize for African Writing, which awards £10,000 annually to the best short story by an African writer living on the continent or in the diaspora, announced the 2026 winner: Zim…
Tom Sachs Channels Chanel — At his downtown studio, the perennially provocative artist makes a lo-fi version of the brand’s flagship Parisian store.
NASA’s SpaceX Crew‑12 Splashes Down, Sets Briefing to Discuss Mission - NASA — After more than seven months aboard the International Space Station, NASA’s SpaceX Crew-12 mission safely splashed down Thursday in the Pacific Ocean off the
Star Trails - NASA — This long-duration image shows star trails above Earth and the blue lights of fishing boats and the yellow lights of Indonesian cities stretching below the
Is Racing in $300 Shoes Cheating? — If it’s wrong, I don’t want to be right.
How Weimar Germany’s Proportional Democracy Put Hitler in Power — “We warn our opponents not to drive us to the uttermost,” he bellowed. “Hunger is preferable to disgrace, and deprivation is to be preferred to dishonor.” And, as it turned out, the harsh terms of …
Eritrea severs diplomatic ties with Ethiopia in row over Tigray — Eritrea has severed diplomatic ties with Ethiopia after Addis Ababa closed its embassy in Asmara
Should the Waters Take Us — CHENIERE DISPARUE, LOUISIANA, 1893 The inhabitants of Cheniere Disparue had a reputation for sloppy living. They ate whatever, married whomever. On Sundays, they sometimes went to sea or danced or …
Lit Hub Daily: August 12, 2026 — When a wealthy university donor can silence one of the world’s leading genocide scholars, it exposes the problem with for-profit higher education. | Lit Hub Politics The best way to get peopl…
How Heated Rivalry Imagines a More Inclusive NHL — “I know there are gay guys in the NHL, because I met one of my teammate’s boyfriends. [But] it’s impossible for a gay hockey player to come out within the next five or even ten years; the media att…
“Dark Horse,” by Sarah Anderson — At least once a day I press the Thought like a bruise, and if I don’t it eventually starts to play anyway.