Coco Gauff supports 'fairness' in WTA test, not 'animosity' — Coco Gauff said she supports "fairness in women's sports" but criticized how the WTA's gene testing creates "animosity towards the trans community."
László Krasznahorkai Writes Because He Fails — The Nobel laureate on his notoriously long sentences, our estrangement from beauty, and why he would “never voluntarily reread” one of his books.
Why ‘Smart’ Products Have Started to Look Like the Dumb Choice — How Wi-Fi-connecting, app-based tech led to a backlash in the name of simplicity.
In Paris, in Tokyo, in Singapore, in Prague, I Stumble Out, Insane with Coffee — “In the pen barrel was a picture of a ferryboat, which sailed to the other end if you tilted the pen, turning the Mississippi into Niagara Falls.”
The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Fiction — Here are this week’s Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers for fiction, based on sales in hundreds of independent bookstores nationwide, generously provided by the American Booksellers Association. …
Clapback to the Future — PAST: Bodysculpting. PRESENT: Looksmaxxing. FUTURE: Vibeplundering.
Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde, and Ms. Boodle: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Advice on Writing to a Young Woman Aspiring to Be an Author — In late 1884, Adelaide Boodle — talented, timorous, still in her twenties — received news so thrilling she thought she was dreaming: Her favorite author…
Danny McBride Is Not Above a Little Violence (or a Lot of It) — The writer and actor, known for his profane comedic antiheroes, likes to find universal truths in human flaws.
The Literary Film & TV You Need to Stream in August — Every month, all the major streaming services add a host of newly acquired (or just plain new) shows, movies, and documentaries into their ever-rotating libraries. So what’s a dedicated reader to w…
The thinking was never just mine — Maybe “mine” was never about origin. Maybe it was about what gets carried forward.
How the Eternal Pantomime of Love Island Draws Us In — Although I’ve spent more than a thousand hours watching, publishing a book about, reporting on, discussing, and reading Reddit threads about Love Island, it is impossible to imagine myself in the p…
AI fraud costing victims millions of dollars — Deepfake scams are becoming harder to spot as criminals use AI to impersonate officials and public figures.
The Tragedy of Loving Sylvia Plath — My Sylvia Plath fandom dates back to the early nineties, when I was in my late teens and randomly pulled The Bell Jar off the shelf at my local library in suburban Salt Lake City. I had never heard…
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…
The Sound of Imminence: Ruth Ozeki in Praise of the Typewriter — Spring is the time of year I buy typewriters. It must be the change of season—green shoots pushing up through the thawing earth, bulbs budding and blooming, trees leafing out—which has nothing to d…
Five totally plausible reading trends to watch out for this summer. — What’s everyone reading this summer? No, better yet—what do we think everyone else will be reading? Is 2026 the season of the post-trauma plot? Are we reading big books, or novellas? Indoors …
David Baerwald on Taking Writing Lessons from Hans Zimmer — This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. A typical song begins with a brief introduction that establishes space, moves into a verse that advances the narrative, tu…
The OnlyFans Economy of American AI — “The dreamers look skyward with longing. The Internet hums with its usual promise — you will find your people, your myth, your wonder, and maybe your transformation.”
Rescues in eastern Syria after the Euphrates River bursts its banks — Rescue workers have pulled stranded farmers from flood waters in eastern Syria after the Euphrates burst its banks.
What Should You Read Next? Here Are the Best Reviewed Books of the Week — Colson Whitehead’s Cool Machine, Michael Cunningham’s Unsayable, and Claire Vaye Watkins’s Yellow Pine all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s…
Ben Lerner Reads “The Readers” — The author reads his story from the June 29, 2026, issue of the magazine.
Why Does Roast Chicken Taste So Good? Inside the Science Behind the Flavors We Love — When we cook our favorite meals, what happens to the carbo-hydrates, proteins and fats? I confess I am a less-than-average cook, but God loves a trier. I remember being about 23 years old and tr
Charles Brockden Brown Declares Independence — Frequently claimed to be the first novel published in the United States, the book begins with a religious iconoclast who spontaneously combusts while worshiping in a temple.
Lit Hub Weekly: May 25 – 29, 2026 — Spend your summer reading with Lit Hub! Welcome to the Best of the Best Books reading challenge, where you’ll have the chance to meet your reading goals, win prizes, and prove you’re better than yo…
Let Maggie Gyllenhaal Adapt The Bell Jar, You Cowards — This essay began as a plea which turned out, as desires sometimes do, to be a little psychic (“That woman, I conjured her,” says Gwyneth Paltrow’s overwrought Plath in the failed 2003 biopic Sylvia…
P.C. Verrone Recommends Essential Texts of Afro-Surrealism — I was introduced to the term “Afro-Surrealism” through an interview in which Phillip B. Williams called it his preferred way to describe his novel Ours. The phrase was coined by Amiri Baraka in 197…
The Most Important Thing to Remember About Your Mother — “It is not easy to give closeness and freedom, safety plus danger.”
Sonia Feldman Recommends Books About the Thrilling Dynamics of Girls’ Friendship — Internet rumor holds that manga artist Naoko Takeuchi created the beloved classic Sailor Moon about a group of girls she wished were her friends because she was lonely. Memes periodically circulate
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…
The Satire and Style ofVanity Fair is as Relevant as Ever — In the summer of 2024, burning with anger about my place in Hollywood, where I felt I was regarded as a diversity project and not a person with believable talent, I picked up Vanity Fair by William…
Tato Architects uses silver-painted ceilings to draw light into Kyoto home — <p>Skylights, an internal light well and silver-painted ceilings pull light deep into House in Shichiku, a home in Kyoto designed by local studio Tato Architects. Designed for a couple and their cat,…
Algorithms on billion-scale graph using 10GB RAM: I love DataFusion! — In a previous post, I was sceptical about using Apache DataFusion for graph analytics. However, after some thought and experimentation, I changed my mind. I have reconsidered my approach and now have a…
“Dreams in Nightmares” Turns the Art Life Political — Struggles for personal and creative freedom fuel Shatara Michelle Ford’s second feature, about three women’s search for a friend gone missing.
Did American-Style ‘Gentle Parenting’ Spoil French Children? — As positive parenting takes over France, one psychologist’s call for a return to discipline has set off a furious debate.
Marcus Aurelius on the Good Luck of Your Bad Luck: The Stoic Strategy for Weathering Life’s Waves and Turning Suffering into Strength — “What happened could have happened to anyone, but not everyone could have carried on.”
Life with hazard ratios — How to discount your expectations
I’m a Normie. Can Normies Really Vibe Code? - Longreads — "Apparently anyone can vibe code anything these days. So Claude and I tried to make a database for tracking the petty grievances of the masses."
Lit Hub Daily: June 12, 2026 — If literacy is in decline, why are bookstores booming? “Bookstores are filling a social void.” | Lit Hub Bookstores Korean poets and their translators pair poetry collections with K-pop…
Will Scottish Premiership return to two-team title tussle? — A new Scottish Premiership season begins on Friday, but will anyone match Heart of Midlothian from last term and challenge Celtic and Rangers for the title?
What Should You Read Next? Here Are the Best Reviewed Books of the Week — Paul Yoon’s Etna, Dave Zirin’s The People’s Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn, and Chris Bohjalian’s The Amateur all feature among the best reviewed books of the w…
Insomnia and the Secret Life of Ideas: Kafka on the Relationship Between Sleeplessness and Creativity — Where we go when we go to sleep and why we go there is one of the great mysteries of the mind. Why the mind at times refuses to go there, despite the pleading and bargaining…
COMPULSION: The Writers Who Wrote The Most in History — I've been writing publicly every day for seven months, and I wanted to know what that looked like for other compulsive writers. From Chesterton dictating past midnight, to Chinese web fiction authors racing through 10,000…
Panama Canal to reduce shipping as ‘extreme’ El Nino approaches — Panama Canal will cut daily transits from 40 to 32 vessels by September 15, risking slower shipping and higher costs.
No Return - Longreads — "Did an experienced alpinist leave his girlfriend to die at the top of a mountain?"
What It’s Like to Interview For the Job of “Astronaut” — The following is from Leroy Chiao’s Dinner with an Astronaut, and describes one step in Chiao’s late 1980s journey to becoming astronaut. * What was the astronaut interview like? I flew to Houston …
Engadget Podcast: Xbox resets with layoffs — This week on the Engadget Podcast, we dive into Microsoft's brutal Xbox layoffs with Mike Futter of the Virtual Economy Podcast.
Trump is being sued for charging for faster access to Truth Social posts — A new lawsuit claims the Truth API violates the First and Fifth Amendments.
Claire Vaye Watkins on Writing a Love Letter to the Mojave Desert — The Mojave Desert is in Claire Vaye Watkins’s DNA. She was born in Bishop, four hours away from Tecopa, the town in Death Valley where her parents lived, which had no hospital, raised in Tecopa and…
Lit Hub Daily: July 27, 2026 — D/Annie Liontas, Sara Nović, Chet’la Sebree and Maria Adelman discuss the literary word’s unacknowledged class system. | Lit Hub In Conversation On that time Johnny Cash almost started a riot…
June’s Best Reviewed Fiction — Maggie O’Farrell’s Land, Ann Patchett’s Whistler, and Andrew Sean Greer’s Villa Coco all feature among the best reviewed fiction titles of the month. Brought to you by Book …
10 Great Nonfiction Titles to Read This August — From the hard, hard courts of professional tennis to the mean screens of social media to the life and times of an iconic indie rock songwriter, this month has something for everyone. * Matthew Futt…
Lit Hub Daily: July 14, 2026 — “I usually just write my way into things.” Eric Olson profiles Sigrid Nunez on the release of her collection, It Will Come Back to You. | Lit Hub Craft Angela Flournoy explores why Jean…
The Powerful Freedom of BDSM — The specific terminology varies across the world, but generally, BDSM is an umbrella term that reflects a wide range of erotic desires, behaviors, identities, relationships, and communities related…
Is the First-Person Narrator a Uniquely American Idea? — “I am an American, Chicago born,” begins Saul Bellow’s 1953 novel The Adventures of Augie March, “and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first…
Data Centers: The Latest Thing to Destroy Beautiful West Virginia — The data centers have been speaking to me lately, in the form of ChatGPT slop. The spam offers to market my new novel for a fee, perverting the language I’ve written about a place the data centers …
The Electability of Abdul El-Sayed — The former public-health official won Michigan’s Democratic primary with an unapologetically progressive platform—and a total defiance of the Party establishment.
Seven killed, including two police officers, in UK ‘wrong-side’ car crash — Accident follows similar crashes in Ireland where police highlighted social media trend driving in opposite direction.
Trial, Triumph, and the Art of the Possible: The Remarkable Story Behind Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” — A hymn of rage, a hymn of redemption, and a timeless love letter to the possible.
Equinix Seeks at Least $3 Billion From Latest Data Center Deal — Data center firm Equinix Inc. is looking to raise at least $3 billion from a sale of US investment-grade bonds, according to people familiar with the matter, selling into a recently weakened environment for debt…
The Art of Losing and the Art of Beckoning Love Back: The Story Behind One of the Greatest Poems Ever Written — You wouldn’t have bet on it, the frail famous poet teaching at Harvard as a visiting professor and the athletic secretary of the campus residence half her age. But…