Nate Bukaty on World Cup 2026 and the Heart of American Soccer — MLS commentator Nate Bukaty joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to talk about Kansas City’s influence on American soccer and how the city came to host the World Cup. Bukaty, the …
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.
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…
Alice in Wonderland is mostly math jokes — Storica — Charles Lutwidge Dodgson taught mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford, for twenty-six years. He wrote textbooks defending Euclid and treatises on symbolic logic. The children's book he is now famous for is, when you read it as a
Tuchel: England carry ‘scars’ of World Cup heartbreak — England face France in a third-place playoff on Saturday, shortly after suffering a late semifinal defeat to Argentina.
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 …
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…
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.”
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…
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…
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…
Clapback to the Future — PAST: Bodysculpting. PRESENT: Looksmaxxing. FUTURE: Vibeplundering.
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…
James Baldwin on How to Live Through Your Darkest Hour and Life as a Moral Obligation to the Universe — “I have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being. I am aware that we do not save each other very often. But I am also aware that we save each o
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…
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.
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…
The thinking was never just mine — Maybe “mine” was never about origin. Maybe it was about what gets carried forward.
May’s Best Reviewed Fiction — Elizabeth Strout’s The Things We Never Say, Douglas Stuart’s John of John, and Ali Smith’s Glyph all feature among the best reviewed fiction titles of the month. Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit H…
Josh Weil on the Necessity of Writing What Scares You — This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. Here are my terrors: First, monsters. Mostly the deep ocean variety, unfathomable, unseeable, likely lurking beneath me as…
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 …
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.”
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…
This library lets you read the exact first editions authors held in their hands — marginalia, coffee stains, everything!! 📚✨
Ben Lerner Reads “The Readers” — The author reads his story from the June 29, 2026, issue of the magazine.
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.”
A Room of Her Own: What Women Writers Sacrifice to Pursue Their Passion — In the mid-2000s, the Guardian weekend magazine ran a regular feature called “Writers’ Rooms.” As a secretly aspiring writer (is there any other kind?) I couldn’t get enough, poring ove…
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.
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…
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…
Five Things I Got Wrong in My First Novel, According to My Dad — My dad worked with kids for forty years, teenage boys mostly, who’d been in trouble and were committed through the state to live somewhere else a while in hopes of getting themselves together. They…
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.
Five Anti-Colonial Travel Narratives You Should Read Before Your Next Trip — I am on a personal campaign to give the travel sphere something no one asked for but definitely—and desperately—needs, an Indigenous perspective. Whether European newcomers know it or not, tribal p…
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.
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.
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."
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.
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…
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…
Life with hazard ratios — How to discount your expectations
Hana Stretton Shares New Songs "Seagull Theory II" & "As It Was Before This": Listen — The British-Australian musical artist Hana Stretton specializes in ambient folk, seemingly merging samples, field recordings, and original tracks into soft smears of emotion. Her songs…
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…
Never-Ending Brightness: How Excessive Exposure to Artificial Light Is Hurting Us All — If you want a perch from which to observe the circadian train wreck of modern industrial society, you could do worse than a corner booth in the Tick Tock Diner. A 24-7 neon beacon holding…
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 …
Ireland fight back to deny Wallabies in thriller — Replacement Australia fly-half Ben Donaldson misses a last-gasp penalty as Ireland claim a comeback bonus-point win in an enthralling Nations Championship contest in Sydney.
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 …
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…
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…
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…
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.
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…
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?
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. …
England beat France in 10-goal thriller to win third-place play-off — Bukayo Saka scores a hat-trick as England beat France 6-4 in a thriller to record their best men's World Cup finish since 1966.
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.
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 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…
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