Claire Fuller on Taking Writing Lessons from Sculpting — This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. I’d been sculpting and drawing since I was sixteen but when, at forty, I started writing short stories and novels, all my …
The Soothing Unsubtlety of UNBROKEN: The Untold Story of Shen Yun — “What a relief, a breath of fresh air, to be reminded what the barest, sloppiest propaganda can look like.”
How Not to Waste Your Life — “Let me not seem to have lived in vain,” the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe whispered on his deathbed, not realizing that the astronomical tables he was leaving behind would become the p…
Happiness and Life Satisfaction — Self-reported life satisfaction differs widely between people and between countries. What explains these differences?
My Partner Lied About His Marriage, Then Dumped Me. Should I Go Quietly? — I no longer know whether his wife ever consented to our relationship, much less encouraged it.
Welcome to What We’re Reading — From the What We’re Reading newsletter: kicking off our new books newsletter with a few recommendations.
Andrea Bajani on the Institution of Family — The author discusses his story “Constellation.”
The Short Story Project – A curated, audible collection of short stories for avid readers. — Curated short fiction.
How to Grow Old: Bertrand Russell on What Makes a Fulfilling Life — “Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life.”
“Hemlock, 1956,” a Poem by Victoria Chang — A wooden door in front of everything. A door on my country. A door in the lake. My poems prefer wooden hunting dogs. If I say there is a door on my heart in the poem, then there is. Now I can open …
Kindness Over Fear: Naomi Shihab Nye Tells the Remarkable Real-Life Story That Inspired Her Beloved Poem “Kindness” — “Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, / you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.”
Lit Hub Daily: June 24, 2026 — Andrew McKenzie-McHarg explores iconic conspiracy theorist Carl Oglesby’s idea of a Yankees versus Cowboys war. | Lit Hub History Maggie McKinley considers Joan Didion’s “future-o…
Google News is just Forrest Gump's shrimp boat now — You know that scene in Forrest Gump where Forrest sees Lieutenant Dan on the shore and is so distracted by him that he jumps off and swims to shore, allowing the boat to crash into the dock? ...
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…
Notes on Complexity: A Buddhist Scientist on the Murmuration of Being — “You are this body, and you are these molecules, and you are these atoms, and you are these quantum entities, and you are the quantum foam, and you are the energetic field of space-time, and,…
This Week in Literary History: The Catcher in the Rye is Published — This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Literary History newsletter—sign up here. In the spring of 1939, one J.D. Salinger—Jerry—took Whit Burnett’s creative writing class at Columbia. That semester, he h…
César Aira’s Art of Not Editing — “A bird, for example, flew into Aira’s café while he was writing, and he worked it into the story.”
American Patriotism Has Always Privileged the Hopes of the Future Over the Sins of the Present — In June 1826, Thomas Jefferson penned his last-ever letter, an essay on the American project. He had been invited to attend a celebration in Washington, to mark the fiftieth anniversa
Life and Death in the American Suburbs — Kid life is fast. More is happening than the mind can hold. You are sitting in a daydream in a chair while outside the window a bird is whistling a tune you never hear. You get lost in your own tho…
The Meaning of Maturity: Ursula K. Le Guin on What It Really Takes to Grow Up — It is not merely a matter of growing bones and growing responsibilities, this business of growing up, this unfinishable project of becoming ourselves. It is less like the evolutionary diagram of th…
TerraMow V1000 review: Camera-powered robot mowing — TerraMow V1000 uses cameras to map and mow your yard without perimeter wires or RTK. Here’s how it performed in weeks of testing.
Once Upon a Farm CEO on Outlook Boost, Consumer Demand — John Foraker, Co-Founder and CEO of Once Upon a Farm, discussed the company's strong 42% sales growth in the recent quarter and expressed confidence in sustaining this momentum due to resilient consumer demand across baby…
Taiye Selasi on How to Survive Perfectionism — The author discusses her story “Firstborn Immigrant Daughter.”
Antidotes to Fear of Death: Astronomer and Poet Rebecca Elson’s Stunning Cosmic Salve for Existential Tremors — “Sometimes as an antidote to fear of death, I eat the stars.”
The Souls of Animals — “They do not sweat and whine about their condition,” Walt Whitman wrote of the other animals, “they do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, they do not make me sick …
What Happens When the War on Drugs Turns Into a Wellness Fad — Around the year 2000 Nick Wallis was sat at a card table at the back of an abandoned docklands shed in Melbourne surrounded by lasers, strobe lighting and loud, thumping bass music. As he sat there…
How a Small-Town Clerk’s Misdeeds Upturned the Murdaugh Verdict — Becky Hill, a court employee possibly trying to maximize sales of her book, pressured jurors to convict the South Carolina lawyer for the murders of his wife and son. Was she acting alone?
How John Reynolds Went from Having $74 in the Bank When Cast in ‘Stranger Things’ to Directing His First Feature — Actor/director/writer John Reynolds talks his Tribeca movie 'Never Change!'
Homepage — A magazine of curiosities.
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.
What Is Poetry? Chelsey Minnis’s Frying Pan Full of Diamonds by Jordan Castro — June 11, 2026 – “For the past twenty-five years, she has waged a sustained assault on the ideology of poetic sincerity.”
5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week — Our flock of fabulous reviews this week includes Scaachi Khol on Jill Biden’s View From the East Wing, Lincoln Michel on Deb Olin Unferth’s Earth 7, Michael Faber on M. John Harrison…
From Mitochondria to Minds: The Illustrated Science of the Psychedelic Dream Called Life — Like consciousness, like music, like love, life itself didn’t have to exist — nothing in the fundamental laws demands it. The universe could have gone on lapping at itself as a horizonl…
“A Person Should Be in Love Most of the Time.” An[other] Ode to Grace Paley — I first started reading Grace Paley in the weeks after my second novel was published, as I sought refuge from refreshing Goodreads, from waiting for the Booker Prize Committee to phone. Reading the…
this library lets you read the margins people wrote in old books hundreds of years ago. seeing someone's actual handwriting react to a sentence from 1743 is weirdly intimate 📖
Memoirs of a Black Cop: Reading Zohran Mamdani’s Newly Appointed Sheriff, Edwin Raymond — Last week, on May 29, New York City Mayor Mamdani fired New York Sheriff Anthony Miranda and appointed Edwin Raymond as his replacement. This caught my eye for a few reasons, the first being
The Old Streets of Athens: On Living and Dying Away From One’s Homeland — “Where’s the water of disappeared rivers?” –Etel Adnan, Sea and Fog * “the morning couldn’t find space to bring its light across to the other side on the riverbank stones one by one open their eyes…
European Cup winner Rimmer dies aged 78 — European Cup winner and former Aston Villa and Manchester United goalkeeper Jimmy Rimmer dies at the age of 78.
There Will Come Soft Rains by Ray Bradbury — The voice-clock sang, breakfast was ejected, but no doors slammed. The garage chimed and lifted its door to reveal the waiting car. The house sat alone in a city of rubble and…
My Mother’s Voice: Messages From Tehran — The walls were cracked, the ceiling collapsing. Ruins underfoot. My manuscript spread haphazardly across the areas untouched by rubble. Pages lifting and settling on top of one another in the early…
On the Public Historians Reminding Us How Easy It Is to Repeat the Mistakes of the Past — A recent essay in The New Republic asks why historians have become such visible public voices during the Trump era. Katherine Kelaidis argues that figures such as Heather Cox Richardson,…
A reparative mini-reading list, in honor of America’s 250th. — Happy (belated) 250th, America! We’re not exactly in the party mood this rainy Monday, but que sera. This weekend brought Washington a militaristic display, and most states a conundrum: how d…
Browse Standard Ebooks - Standard Ebooks: Free and liberated ebooks, carefully produced for the true book lover — Lovingly produced free classics.
Sonos Ace Ultra over-ear headphones show up in FCC filing — Sonos could launch a new pair of headphones called the "Ace Ultra" at its September event.
Lit Hub Daily: July 13, 2026 — How cell phone novels became the iconic genre among young writers on the Y2k internet. | Lit Hub Criticism “To drink is to enter of a labyrinth of romantic, thrilling, even glamorous myths; t…
NYC Economic Head on City-Run Grocery Stores, Biz Outlook — NYC's Head of Economic Justice, Julie Su, sits down with Romain Bostick to cover Mayor Mamdani's plan for city-run grocery stores, developing economic growth, and pied-a-tierre taxes. (Source: Bloomberg)
Surrendering to Subjectivity: In Praise of Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts — As a writer and thinker, my life is divided into a B.N. and A.N.: a before-Nelson and after-Nelson. Before cracking open Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, I’d been all phobic about the first-per…
Inside the Rise of America’s Oligarch Class—And What It Means For All of Us — In early 2014, a pair of political scientists published a striking study on the health, or lack thereof, of American democracy. Authored by Princeton University’s Martin Gilens and Northwestern Uni…
Daily Cartoon: Monday, August 3rd — A drawing that riffs on the latest news and happenings.
Hodgkinson leads home Broeders-Bol to qualify for 800m final — Great Britain's Keely Hodgkinson wins her 800m semi-final leading home Femke Broeders-Bol of the Netherlands.
What We Lost When We Quit Using Crappy Old Web Forums — Old web forums were poorly coded and rough around the edges, but maybe we gave up on them too quickly in the social media era.
Eric Wareheim, Plant Dad — The “Master of None” actor and half of the duo Tim and Eric turned his post-divorce hobby—collecting Dr. Seussian trees and shrubs—into a hipster business, with Martha Stewart and Kelly Wearstler as clients.
How to Put an End to Problem of American Gerontocracy (in the Nicest Possible Way) — A dynamic and innovative society, focused most on launching people into the prime of their lives, depends on taking good care of those aging out of it—if only to keep the threat of gerontocracy…
Evidence that South African special forces murdered top detective shared with BBC — Frans Mathipa was shot while driving - we got access to the prosecution case against eight accused men.
Reading List — Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't
10 Great New Children’s Books Out in August 2026 — When the legendary children’s book editor Ursula Nordstrom, who worked with luminaries like Maurice Sendak and E.B. White, was challenged about her qualifications to publish children’s books, she r…
Tending the Fire: Exploring AIDS Writing of the Last Ten Years — There are countless testimonies, books, poetry collections, plays, visual works and films from queer people amid the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 90s, surviving in the midst of so much death. Many …
Erased No More: A Reading List of BIPOC-Centered Historical Fiction — Through historical fiction, many BIOPOC authors help to reclaim the voices of our past and ensure that these sheroes are finally recognized and celebrated. These works collectively illuminate the m…
The Bible is now required reading for Texas public school students. — You win, Veggie Tales. The Bible is officially making its way into the Texas public school curriculum. This decision comes after the Republican-led State Board of Education approved a new mandatory…
“Drinking the Bees,” a Poem by Christian Wiman — As if in moments lay plummets down which a puttering soul might stunningly plunge to a sun-splashed terrace in Marrakesh: tea so thick with mint it conjures kelp in a cylinder of sea but for the be…