What It’s Like to Be a Panda — “What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?” Stephen Hawking wondered, recognizing the quixotic nature of his quest for a theory of ever…
Are digital cameras still worth buying in 2026? — Yes, so long as you're willing to put in the work (and money) for better photos.
How the Politics of Powerlessness Prevents Real Change — We are living in a time of massive upheaval—of grave crisis and also enormous opportunity. The world is transforming at a breakneck pace and will continue to change dramatically in our lifetime. Th…
How to Be a Lichen: Adaptive Strategies for the Vulnerabilities of Being Human from Nature’s Tiny Titans of Tenacity — When I was a child, little delighted me more than the magical green garlands draping from the pine trees, which I made into wreaths and mustaches to roam the…
bought a 'camping tent' from walmart and the rain fly doesn't actually cover the door. went full soaking wet at 2am and realized it's all marketing! 🤦♂️💀 why would they design it like that
For 50 Years the Major Oil Companies Have Known They’re Destroying the Planet — Near the end of the first century AD, in the highlands of northern Spain, the Roman governor, philosopher, and naturalist Pliny the Elder watched as mining cleaved a landscape. “What happens is far…
Diatoms and the Meaning of Life — In 1703, the world’s most esteemed scientific journal published a surprising letter from an anonymous correspondent. (At the time, until well into the twentieth century, anonymity often meant…
Europe, Canada condemn Israeli plans for new West Bank settlement — The 'unacceptable' E1 plan carries 'legal and reputational consequences' for those participating, European nations warn.
Gwendoline Riley on Mark Van Doren’s Shakespeare — The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast features a series of conversations with past and present Windham-Campbell Prize winners about their favorite books and plays. Hosted by Michael Kelleher. Mike ta…
I Thought I Had Nothing to Write About. Then I Got a Dog. — A contract accepted under duress is typically considered voidable. My wife Helen is a lawyer, so she would understand this better than anyone, and yet when she convinced me to say yes to a puppy af…
When Someone Wants to Publish Your Correspondence With a Famous Writer — For most of my life I didn’t read books of letters. I wanted what I read to be deliberately shaped. I wanted art. And in middle age, I lost some vision. I read more slowly, so every word had to be …
How Do You Write a “Mighty Book” in 2026? — “To produce a mighty book you must choose a mighty theme,” Herman Melville writes in Moby-Dick. In the US, one of the mightiest for the past generation has been the shift from a society dominated b…
Our Buyer ETF Base Has Expanded: AB's Gunts — Julie Gunts, global head of ETFs at AllianceBernstein, joins Scarlet Fu and Eric Balchunas on "Bloomberg ETF IQ." (Source: Bloomberg)
How Leprosy Was Used as a Weapon Against Hawaii’s Indigenous Population — Father Damien was a dirty man. Everyone agreed on that. Dirt would accumulate under his fingernails; he rarely washed his hands. His clothes—his habitual cassock and wide-brimmed hat—were worn for …
A Smart Sisterly Sidekick: What Phoebe Represents to Holden Caulfield — Perhaps every sixteen-year-old boy needs a smart sister like Phoebe Caulfield. Discerning movie critic, reader, author of detective stories, skater and mean dancer, she is a very accomplished ten-y…
A Wealthy Donor to My University Just Silenced One of the World’s Leading Scholars of Genocide — July 2026 was the deadliest month of the last year for Palestinians. The Gaza Health Ministry reported that 152 Palestinians were murdered by Israel, bringing the official death…
Meta is 'pausing' employee tracking program after it let the whole company see sensitive data — This won't make the already-controversial AI training endeavor any more popular.
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…
IVF staff accused of misleading UK parents about sperm and egg donors in northern Cyprus — Multiple children are feared to have been conceived using sperm and egg donors which were not the ones selected by the parents.
Kids explaining their drawings to an AI that takes them completely seriously—the descriptions get weirder than the actual pictures 🎨
Columbia House Is Shutting Down — We, too, were shocked they still existed
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…
Don’t Get Overexcited on Oil Price Moderation, AIB’s Hunt Says — The global economy still faces multiple risks even as the US and Iran agree to halt the war in the Middle East, the head of Irish bank AIB Group Plc warned.
Google's AI is being manipulated. The search giant is quietly fighting back — A BBC investigation revealed a simple way to get AI chatbots to spit out misinformation. Google and other AI companies are now trying to fix the problem.
Blackstone, Blue Owl Private Credit Funds Offer High-Grade Bonds — Two private credit funds are offering investment-grade bonds Monday, following a lull of such deals to start the third quarter.
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, …
An Introvert’s Field Guide to Friendship: Thoreau on the Challenges and Rewards of Candid Connection — “We only need to be as true to others as we are to ourselves that there may be ground enough for friendship.”
How to Help Someone Change: The Samurai Guide to Giving Feedback — Few things in life are more exasperating than seeing the potential in someone you love and seeing them continually fall short of it, stumbling again and again over the same self-erected roadblocks …
Chinese robot Tiangong clocks sub-9-second 100 metres in Beijing — Chinese robot seven-tenths of a second faster than the 9.58-second men's world record set by Usain Bolt in 100m.
Miami votes to restore Hilario Candela's Marine Stadium — <p>Miami voters have approved Denver-based real estate company Oak View Group's bid to take over management of the city's historic Miami Marine Stadium and restore the structure. Built in 1963 and designed by Cuban…
A Tarot Reader Considers Sylvia Plath’s Relationship to the Deck — According to Smithsonian Magazine, Sylvia Plath used the Tarot de Marseille deck, which her husband, Ted Hughes, gifted her on her 24th birthday in 1956. It is believed that she also used the Rider…
Spent three nights in a tent with no lantern — just let my eyes adjust. The stars were so clear I could read my map by them. Now I'm that person who turns off the campfire early.
someone mapped out every maintained fire tower in the US you can actually climb, with the ones that still have someone living in them during fire season 🗺️ 🔥
Building and Shipping Mac and iOS Apps Without Ever Opening Xcode — describe
7 arts and crafts accessories to 3D print for your weekend projects (Aug 14 - 16) — Get crafty this weekend.
Judge nixes Trump lawsuit alleging Harvard did not protect Jewish students — Ruling latest setback in Trump administration response to Gaza war protests that swept college campuses.
Is Moby-Dick the Greatest American Novel? — Near the beginning of his long narrative poem “Letter to Lord Byron,” W. H. Auden writes, “I want a form that’s large enough to swim in.” So too, apparently, did Herman Melv…
Lit Hub Daily: June 8, 2026 — Xiao Hai remembers balancing brutal night shifts on the production floor with writing poetry. | Lit Hub Memoir “We can be demure and brat, sense and sensibility, sometimes in quick succession or al…
Meta wants its AI glasses to seem less creepy. Its AI strategy says otherwise. | TechCrunch — Meta is adding a new safeguard to stop people from secretly recording others with its AI glasses. But the update comes as the company continues to expand how much personal data its AI…
This Week in Literary History: William Shakespeare’s Macbeth is Performed for the First Time (Probably) — This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Literary History newsletter—sign up here. The earliest existing eyewitness account of a performance of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth comes…
The Submitters: On the Literary Economy of Unreadness — For the true beginner, there can be no end. From the moment they sit at the desk, the unemerged writer faces a step-by-step gauntlet of workshopping, applying, contesting; of liking screenshots of …
Galaxy Z Fold 8 is convincing Z Flip owners to switch, Samsung says — Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 is convincing Galaxy Z Flip owners to switch to the Fold, Samsung says, amid record-breaking pre-orders.
What’s It Actually Like to Ski at the Yellowstone Club? I Asked the Dirtbags Who Got In Before Taylor and Travis. — Forget the celebrity honeymoon. Non-billionaire skiers who somehow scored an invitation to America's most exclusive ski community spill the tea.
the library of congress catalogs what words were actually used in each year. watching 'google' jump from zero to omnipresent between 1998 and 2002 is something else
Heated Rivalry DVD: Save 18% on the Collector's Edition on Season 1 — Re-heat the show in 4K on DVD with a hockey puck stress reliever, collectible art cards, and a double-sided poster to admire.
De la alb/negru la auriu | Maria Anistoroaei | TEDxCopou Youth — Maria Anistoroaei folosește șahul ca metaforă pentru viață, vorbind despre alegeri, eșecuri, perseverență și șansa de a face mereu o mutare mai bună. Din propriile victorii și înfrângeri, ea arată că drumul spre…
Lit Hub Weekly: June 8 – 12, 2026 — Round two of our Best of the Best Books Reading Challenge is underway with 50 of the greatest summer novels of all time! | Lit Hub Helen Bain follows in Sylvia Plath’s footsteps from Paris to Wel…
Lowe's Halloween animatronics 2026: Shop the new collection online — The $429 Talking Lighted Skeleton Watcher is the tallest Halloween prop on the market this year.
Real sign Schroeder in 'most expensive' women's transfer — BK Hacken teenager Felicia Schroeder has joined Real Madrid in a deal that makes the 19-year-old forward "the most expensive transfer ever in women's football".
Australia to begin gun buyback scheme in response to Bondi shooting — Australia will begin buying back guns in November, almost a year after a shooting at Sydney's Bondi killed 15 people.
The grieving family who says the coroner's courts aren't working — One man's death highlights the growing strains on the UK's coroner's courts
No One You Love Is Ever Dead: Hemingway on the Most Devastating of Losses and the Meaning of Life — “We must live it, now, a day at a time and be very careful not to hurt each other.”
Moroccan police arrest more than 100 people as they attempt to enter Ceuta — Border security tightened after social media posts call for another mass crossing into Spain’s north African territory
US ICE agency to spend $16.7m on electric shock gloves — The much-criticised immigration agency has agreed a contract for 6,000 pairs of gloves that will deliver painful shocks.
Why Michael Crichton’s Best Novel is the Worst Movie Based on One of His Books — Somebody occasionally points out that vastly more words have been published about Kafka than Kafka himself wrote in his lifetime. Somebody’s probably writing a book about Kafka this very minute. I’…
Music, the Neural Harmonics of Emotion, and How Love Recomposes the Brain — “Who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love.”
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…
August’s Best Reviewed Nonfiction — Claire Stapleton’s Don’t Be Evil, Kimon de Greef’s The Ego Trip, and Dave Ziren’s The People’s Historian all feature among the best reviewed nonfiction titles of the m…
11 Books About Women Who Rewrote Life and Art — I’ve been on the hunt for books by women for as long as I can remember. My favorite stories are usually not romances, but stories of women trying to make sense of how they can be the main character…
A literary map where every book is pinned to where its story actually takes place... and you can see how many novels are crammed into like three city blocks in Manhattan.