[{"id":275871,"date":"2026-08-19T06:45:55","date_gmt":"2026-08-19T10:45:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275871"},"modified":"2026-08-19T07:03:29","modified_gmt":"2026-08-19T11:03:29","slug":"how-accusations-against-black-academics-point-to-the-real-end-of-woke-1-0","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/how-accusations-against-black-academics-point-to-the-real-end-of-woke-1-0\/","title":{"rendered":"How Accusations Against Black Academics Point to the Real End of \u201cWoke 1.0\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week, the British academy was rocked by a scandal that curdled into a tragedy.<\/span><\/p>\n

Jason Arday, a neurodivergent Black Cambridge professor who was feted as a wunderkind by some and denigrated as a fabulist by others, resigned earlier this month amidst accusations of plagiarism.<\/span><\/p>\n

After experiencing several weeks of hounding by the British press\u2014including dog-whistly suggestions that he was a DEI hire, under-qualified from the start\u2014Arday was found dead at his home last Friday of apparent suicide. He was 41 years old.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In<\/span> an editorial<\/span><\/a> published today explaining their role in the investigation, <\/span>The Guardian<\/span><\/i> positioned the professor’s death as an alarming bellwether. Whatever his intellectual indiscretions, editors wrote, Arday, the youngest Black professor in Cambridge’s 800 year history, “became an exhibit in an ideological, almost Trumpian campaign against diversity and inclusion.”<\/span><\/p>\n

In his death, the editors insisted, we must locate a lesson. But of what, exactly?<\/span><\/p>\n

And who is ‘we?’<\/span><\/p>\n

*<\/span><\/p>\n

Arday’s case became the subject of international fascination in part because it rhymes with a conversation happening on this side of the Atlantic.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

For the past year, the Trump administration and its too-ready-to-comply henchmen in higher-ed have been hard at work<\/span> dismantling Black and Africana Studies programs<\/span><\/a> on charges of “woke ideology.” (Northwestern University’s program is the latest on the<\/span> chopping block<\/span><\/a>, as of this week.)<\/span><\/p>\n

The scapegoating is singular, but convenient in the same way. Where English racists<\/a> cry DEI hire, American ones cry DEI <\/span>curriculum<\/span><\/i>. All with the same net effect: diminishing the work of Black and POC scholars. <\/span>And alas, the baddies are winning. Big time. Even the liberal backlash against DEI<\/a> programs begins to take on the rhetoric and tone of its initial conservative haters.<\/p>\n

In fact, it’s a no good, very bad time for <\/span>all<\/span><\/i> the FKA woke folk. Though it’s sometimes been hard to hear this bell over the death knell for American<\/span> college,<\/span><\/a> in general.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

All across the States, university enrollment is down while tuitions are soaring. Meanwhile, degraded working conditions\u2014see, the<\/span> adjunctification<\/span><\/a> discourse\u2014make academic professionalization less and less sustainable. This financial reckoning neatly coincides with the ongoing ideological assault. And the bottom line bodes ill for all current seniors.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

As Joel A. Schlosser and Tommaso Bardelli wrote in a recent analysis for the<\/span> Los Angeles Review of Books<\/span><\/i><\/a>, college skepticism in the States is no longer a particularly partisan issue.<\/span><\/p>\n

“Whether driven by rising tuition costs and student debt or ideological polarization on campus,” Bardelli and Schlosser observed, “a growing number of both Democratic and Republican voters have become less certain of the value of a four-year college education.”<\/span><\/p>\n

All this makes for tough ground to defend, and a climate that’s all too hospitable to reactionary explanation. It’s easy to imagine the institution\u2019s defense.<\/span> When kids can\u2019t afford the sticker price full-stop, how do we make the case for something like Black Studies? Always a precarious field, in a racist country?<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

And if you follow <\/span>that<\/span><\/i> aggrieved line of thought, and accept the terms of debate set by the powers-that-be, how could you possibly forgive a person who appears to<\/span> cheat <\/span><\/i>at the rigged game?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Goat, meet scape.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

*<\/span><\/p>\n

The Guardian<\/span><\/i> is right to perceive Arday in context. In July this side of the Atlantic, another Blackademic<\/span> came under fire<\/span><\/a> amidst plagiarism accusations.<\/span><\/p>\n

The historian Kerri Greenidge lost her job at Tufts University and had a book contract canceled after a peer review found several misattributions in her 2022 book, <\/span>The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Greenidge, an award-winning public historian, refuted all charges, and told the <\/span>New York Times<\/span><\/i> that attacks on her scholarship were racially motivated. As in Arday’s case, online debate about the scholar’s alleged crimes quickly became unhinged before key details could be verified.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Presidential historian<\/span> Alexis Coe argued in a recent newsletter<\/a> that it’s significant this shaky story was made public at all. <\/span><\/p>\n

In her own defense, Greenidge pointed out that prominent white historians have been granted far more interpretive latitude than she received. And though this context does not prove racial discrimination was at work in her case, Coe argues \u201cit does make race and power legitimate subjects of inquiry rather than rude interruptions of a supposedly neutral process.”<\/span><\/p>\n

Coe also points out that the nature of Greenidge’s scholarship is relevant to the \u201csupposedly neutral\u201d process of her public shaming.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In <\/span>The Grimkes, <\/span><\/i>Greenidge explores “<\/span>how slavery\u2019s violence continued inside a family celebrated for transcending it.” Her take on the famous sisters “demonstrated how white feminist history manufactures usable ancestors” while considering “who must disappear to make them usable.”<\/p>\n

Like Coe, I’m of the opinion that readers deserve to see receipts for any project aspiring to history. But the target, the substance, and the timing here are hard to ignore.<\/p>\n

Though the jury’s still out on her case, you get the sense that someone’s won, when all accusations bend away from substance and back toward scandal. And it wasn’t the scholar, in this case.<\/p>\n

*<\/span><\/p>\n

Guardian<\/span><\/em> editors were more frank about the role racism played in Arday’s downfall. Though some accusations seem to hold water, the headline is his hounding in context. <\/span>“White academics are generally allowed to fail as individuals,” editors wrote.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Black ones are not. Arday may have had questions to answer; that did not make black academics collectively answerable for him. A society committed to equality must allow black people the same freedom as everyone else: to be<\/span> flawed<\/span><\/a>, to make mistakes, and even to fail, without their failure becoming an indictment of their race.<\/span><\/p>\n

This<\/span><\/i> Blackademic read this defense with a huge sigh. Because the words are so worn, so <\/span>obvious<\/span><\/i>, it feels like they could have been written fifty years ago. Which is precisely the trouble with accepting debate terms established by the racist country or institution in the first place.<\/span><\/p>\n

If you\u2019re a Black scholar caught cheating the (rigged) system, somehow, you wind up having to defend your entire <\/span>humanity<\/span><\/i>. Instead of apologizing for a mistake.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

*<\/span><\/p>\n

Plagiarism is an interesting charge for the unique moral taint it carries. As we see in cases like Arday’s or Greenidge’s, the very accusation often confers guilt. Burden of proof is reversed: you must prove yourself innocent to the peer review, the public opinion. Meanwhile, the charge of intellectual theft has often landed on the least powerful. And as Coe implies, that’s rarely a coincidence.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In a recent newsletter<\/a>, the political theorist Corey Robin considered how the charge of plagiarism has been weaponized against what some of us never stopped calling “DEI hires.”<\/span><\/p>\n

“There are cases of plagiarism where people don\u2019t bat an eye or the person gets exonerated (the ones I am thinking of involve white men) and others where people, often of color, are brought down,” Robin noted.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Like Coe, he is able to hold two ideas in head when it comes to untangling crime and context.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I am not\u2014I repeat, I am not\u2014saying that plagiarism is different if it\u2019s committed by a scholar of color or a white scholar; it\u2019s not, and it should be handled as the serious breach that it is. But I do think the cultural valence that gets provoked, disrupted, imbalanced, what have you, is different for scholars of color<\/span>…plagiarism scandals provoke a similar crisis and discourse of authenticity in the context of scholars of color\u2014the idea being, essentially, <\/span>you don\u2019t belong here in academia.<\/span><\/p>\n

And this, I fear, is the “lesson” too many will take from these unsettling stories, in this oh-so-unsettled time. Arday and Greenidge are distinct cases, distinct human beings. Who have also (and so easily!) been made into symbols. Ideological exhibits. Proof, for either side of a bad faith debate, that the invitation to the Ivory Tower is contingent for most of us.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

We will talk about the ways they did or did not play crooked far longer than we\u2019ll talk about the way the game stays rigged.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week, the British academy was rocked by a scandal that curdled into a tragedy. Jason Arday, a neurodivergent Black Cambridge professor who was feted as a wunderkind by some and denigrated as a fabulist by others, resigned earlier this<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17066,"featured_media":275934,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43102,6,43101,43092,43095],"tags":[10985,111835,35675,109224,7383,6105,37872,101522,60646,576,109227,111833,111845,1058,10264,111836,31017,111834],"class_list":["post-275871","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-biography","category-features","category-history","category-newsandculture","category-politics","tag-academia","tag-adjunct","tag-alexis-coe","tag-black-studies","tag-cambridge","tag-college","tag-corey-robin","tag-dei","tag-higher-ed","tag-history","tag-ivy-league","tag-jason-arday","tag-kerri-greenidge","tag-plagiarism","tag-scandal","tag-the-grimkes","tag-university","tag-woke-ideology"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19Lx","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Jason-Arday.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275871","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17066"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275871"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275871\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275934"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275871"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275871"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275871"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275843,"date":"2026-08-19T06:41:55","date_gmt":"2026-08-19T10:41:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275843"},"modified":"2026-08-19T07:00:25","modified_gmt":"2026-08-19T11:00:25","slug":"the-submitters-on-the-literary-economy-of-unreadness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/the-submitters-on-the-literary-economy-of-unreadness\/","title":{"rendered":"The Submitters: On the Literary Economy of Unreadness"},"content":{"rendered":"

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 Publishers Weekly<\/em> deals announcements, making astral connections between time periods, and writing sex scenes from a distant gender\u2019s point of view; it is a culture of fees, of Moleskines, and bios that read seriously, seriously, jokingly; of tips, tools, and works in progress in, one can only assume, sheds; of deadlines for floodgate submission periods and inboxes full of L<\/em>\u2019s; of checks for $50 like birthday gifts from doting grandmothers (though no one calls to remind you to cash them); of sending out short fiction like so many state-fair-quality butternut squashes and banging out personal essays a decade after boom\u2019s end<\/a>. All that, and what to show for it, and what to tell?<\/p>\n

Among those ostensible first steps in the writing trade is to simultaneously storm the gates of literary agents, the subject of Laura McGrath\u2019s Middlemen<\/em><\/a>. It follows Dan Sinykin\u2019s Big Fiction<\/em><\/a>\u2014a history of the publishing conglomerate\u2014and elaborates on Mark McGurl\u2019s deathless Program Era<\/em><\/a> (or, what little of \u201cMFA discourse\u201d makes actual reference to it) in describing clearly but with the occasional interesting verb our current literary economy. McGrath sees agents as a missing link, traders of \u201csymbolic capital,\u201d a split difference between market manipulators and keepers of the flame of tastefulness in an algorithmic world. Incidentally, Middlemen<\/em> also makes a near pass, ever so close to an observation of the dark matter of books. The vast majority of contemporary literature is not in fact published but submitted<\/em>. If, as Christian Lorenzen wrote, \u201cthe dominant literary style in America is careerism,\u201d then it\u2019s the writers without careers who are most responsible.<\/p>\n

We have only approximate measure of the slush. In Everything and Less<\/em><\/a>, his book on Amazon, McGurl faintly detects an \u201cunderlist, a vast ocean of inert literary content stored on the server at marginal cost.\u201d This anti-canon may or may not include samples attached to an estimated 20,000 annual applications to MFAs<\/a>, with acceptance rates plummeting below 2%\u2014nearly as discriminating as a no-name literary journal or a deluged sci-fi magazine<\/a>. Add to that McGrath\u2019s conservative estimate of 15-17 million <\/a>full manuscripts in the slush piles of literary agencies, plus the 1.4 million new titles per year earning royalties via Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). What is significant about these marginally publishable literary acts, these ten pages in the body<\/em> (of the email), is not how they are read but their conspicuous unreadness. Merely implied in the familiar story of technological advance\u2014the speed and volume and \u201coverload\u201d of information\u2014is the correspondingly exponential increase in futility. Go forth and \u201cfind your voice,\u201d the Submitters were told. And so it was a million times found, and then promptly lost.<\/p>\n

In publishing, this futility is something of an open secret. Penguin Random House, largest seller of books, and most eager to sell them best, testified in court that the sales of only 4 percent<\/a> of its books effectively subsidized the rest. \u201cEverything is random in publishing,\u201d said CEO Markus Dohle, to serve his argument that a merger with Simon & Schuster would hardly create a monopoly in, among other things, bookselling acumen. But the numbers back him up. According to BookScan, of the 3.2 million new titles of 2021<\/a>, fewer than 1 percent sold more than 5,000 copies. This reality jars somewhat against the narrative of a P&L-fixated \u201csuperorganism<\/a>\u201d that marshals its editors and marketers in the production of data-driven page-turners, a supposedly well-oiled machine built to dominate the bestseller list.<\/p>\n

A glance at that list tells a different story. Big-5 publishing has routinely dipped into the underlist for romantasy, fanfic, and film-adaptable sci-fi on personal websites\u2014books already technically published, with proven sales or downloads or likes on forums or communities or platforms that haphazardly systematize iterative plays on genre. (Ruby Dixon\u2019s self-pubbed Ice Planet Barbarians series\u2019 big blue sex aliens with knots<\/em> are followed up by Bull Moon Rising<\/em>\u2019s sex minotaurs\u2019 ruts <\/em>from Ace, 2025, but both, for instance, have horns). On any given week,[1]<\/a> half the NYT<\/em> trade and hardcover fiction lists might emerge from this end-around traditional publishing, forcing agents and editors to pivot into the role of recruiters. This is publishing\u2019s adaptation of the gimmickry of modern culture industries: the ability to set aside the success of one\u2019s own product and still make on-time deliveries of shareholder profit. It should go without saying that if publishers were leveraging proprietary knowledge of what books their customers want to read, readers would be reading them. Two things can be true: that the business has been remorselessly optimized for sales, and the sellers are coming from outside the house.<\/p>\n

Exclusion generates the prestige toward which unpaid labors strive.<\/p>\n

Once upon a time, the Crichtons and the Grishams ruled a mass market for books, and the literary novel thrived in its wake\u2014\u201chigh-cultural pluralism\u201d (McGurl\u2019s beautifully circumspect genre distinction) or \u201cbooks about race\u201d (McGrath\u2019s blunt assessment of the market for it); Knausg\u00e5rd, Cusk, and the unlikely household names of autofiction; the McCarthy western among fuzzy \u201cgenre hybrids\u201d \u2014a definition which Middlemen<\/em> insightfully elides in proposing the lit agent\u2019s capricious taste as the precise locus of art and commerce (i.e. the \u201ccultural dislocation\u201d of super-agent Nicole Aragi\u2019s list). But the most influential literary genre is the one that clearly doesn\u2019t exist. \u201cMFA fiction\u201d\u2014ordered with extra solipsism by the CIA\u2014has made for eloquent and blistering pans, but serves primarily as a voodoo doll of the Iowa Writer\u2019s Workshop.[2]<\/a> Textbook examples of MFA style (\u201cWas it the woman in the lace-top thigh-highs, chemise wrap, or the Taylor strapless bra\u201d\u2014a character browsing the Victoria\u2019s Secret catalogue in Grover\u2019s piece from Noah Baumbach\u2019s Kicking & Screaming<\/em>) are vague enough to read as projections of anxiety about literature\u2019s unstreamable irrelevance, which academics and rank-and-file Submitters would prefer to attribute to guys in your MFA and publishers\u2019 aping of algorithmic data-ism, rather than face a Road<\/em>esque apocalyptic landscape where publishers can\u2019t sell books, and literary agents gatekeep a mainstream that doesn\u2019t exist.<\/p>\n

What is listed in the last remaining book sections and shelved in the last remaining bookstores play their diminishing parts, but a structural theory of books culture is incomplete without accounting for the profound outnumbering of traditional publishing\u2019s successes by the pages upon pages of the Submitters\u2019 foiled ambitions: futility at scale. The compelling factor of the MFA era and conglomeration is not top-down mechanization\u2014in any case an overstatement of corporate competence\u2014but the bottom-up professionalization of writing that tried to meet it halfway, and necessarily<\/em> failed to meet it there. Exclusion generates the prestige toward which unpaid labors strive.<\/p>\n

Sinykin argues that the contemporary author is themself a fiction, an industrial composite; and so is the failed author, who attempts to navigate a system that\u2019s not supposed to work so much as protract the emergent, extractive process for the aspirer and facilitate their art\u2019s contribution to its own obsolescence. The plight of the Submitter tracks with the paradox of the internet age: those same democratizing elements\u2014more MFA programs, more literary prizes, the publishing industry\u2019s belated commitments to diversity, reckless access to social media platforms where writers do freelance publicity for themselves \u2014lengthen the odds of the lottery by increasing the overall number of ticketholders, and tend to strengthen the hand of elite institutions. If college students are indeed struggling to read beyond the short excerpts of test prep, it seems plausible that books culture as we knew it could never reemerge. The age of the Submitters is here but, fittingly, might already be over. Everyone back in the pool.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Is writing work? The question sends books discourse into regular paroxysms. Rates are disclosed. Postings with a starting salary in NYC receive a measured response. Paeans to the dignity of the writing trade are juxtaposed with a tiered rejection from the Coastal Nebraska Review<\/em> and calls for this nonprofit run out of a storage space on the Platte to increase its pay, however commendable, from the less-than-fair amount of fifty bucks.<\/p>\n

When a writer in workshop is told to \u201cearn\u201d plot contrivances in a short story, and revisions on a second draft are described as a particularly luckless rideshare shift, self-mythology is soon to follow. A real job is but a rite of passage, worked instead<\/em>. The professional identity of \u201cwriter\u201d transcends a relatable protagonist\u2019s past as \u201cjust\u201d a waiter. To stave off this fate, today\u2019s working writers are \u201cproductive\u201d with their days spent in a rush to make aspirational word counts, and format the pitchdeck of self virtually required of them, all in service of an unworkable principle: to value their own work at precisely the time the market has priced that work at zero.<\/p>\n

We hear there\u2019s a thing that can help us cheat. Oh, wow, can it help us feel cheated too?<\/em><\/p>\n

A book manuscript is a dying houseplant, mistakenly fed words. It is<\/em> a lot of work. Only, unlike most work, it most often comes to nothing. To insist on writing, then, according to McGurl, is to insist on \u201cdestroying time, the time it takes to write the books that will sit inertly as lines of code on a server.\u201d And yet, liberating writing from the capitalist ethic has its own value. Rather than a piece of writing dignified by money, the work of writing is dignified by a reader\u2019s time.<\/p>\n

Because work can always be done faster. As the force-feeding of words to LLMs seemed to put writers at existential risk, a clumsy line of defense was drawn: that there was something definitively unmistakable about human writing. The suspicious em dash\u2014and the easily disprovable notion that only AI used them\u2014was offered as a telltale sign. Updated arguments have proved no more workable: distinguishing our \u201cchoices<\/a>\u201d from theirs, or laboring to define bad writing with better writing. There is no way to define human writing in the abstract; it is the act of writing, the process, that cannot be properly replicated without hours upon years of destroyed time. The uncanniness, in the debris, of hearing one\u2019s own voice. Of, one could say, finding it. It is not as if the only question of literature is Can one be fooled?<\/em> Which, of course, we can<\/a>. And so what? We hear there\u2019s a thing that can help us cheat. Oh, wow, can it help us feel cheated too?<\/em><\/p>\n

There are very real representational problems with regard to realism, phones, and internet life\u2019s microwave instructions for rendering the literal ironic and the ironic literal. On the other hand, the constraints are phantoms: Big Data cliches, Balkanized audiences eating up cliched ethnography. The displacement of little magazines by Substack\u2019s incentives makes for a venue shortage, but the fracturing of audience is another abstraction, just as easily replaced by something more visceral: a popular revolt against runaway artifice and its adoption by corporate culture. If authenticity should be once more the high principle of culture, writers have a free hand to take up the mantle of universality\u2014however riddled with contradiction, false sentiment\u2014and write the social novel of the way we live now. The novel\u2019s real and true question\u2014\u201cWhat do you think about when you masturbate?\u201d\u2014rings eternal, propelling our narratives, compelling us to do the work of conscience.<\/p>\n

Though our words may amount to nothing but feed for the servers, our mere existence composes a letter to young Submitters, its message loud and not very clear: It doesn\u2019t matter who you are, it only matters what you have to say, or vice versa; be relentless, never quit; outline the plot, lose the plot, username, password, username, password. Believe in your novel, which you made up; vow revenge on the NEA. Make an unsolicited life for yourself\u2014make every which way you turn into a Wendy\u2019s. Take every last thing personally\u2014leave nothing to chance. If you have a short biographical statement to make, which is to say in 500 words connect who you are with near certain failure, state it now though the heavens fall. Username, password. To spend one\u2019s life at the desk is to sit with one\u2019s unlived lives; to make peace with destroyed time, to submit, submit, submit. In one of those lives unlived you are a writer; in one of those unlived lives you have heard a reply.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> Take the self-pub-starters of the NYT<\/em> Paperback Trade Fiction list of May 3<\/a>, 2026: Andy Weir, whose first book, The Martian<\/em>, was serialized on his personal website; Freida McFadden, who self-published for a decade<\/a> before Netflix adapted The Housemaid<\/em>; Matt Dinniman, popularizer of the \u201clitRPG\u201d genre, started out on a self-pub platform, then moved on to KDP, where SJ Tilly aims for a book a month; singer-songwriter and septuagenarian lawyer Allen Levi had already sold 150,000 copies of Theo of Golden<\/em> himself before Simon & Schuster bet they could sell at least a few more (37 weeks on the list, mostly atop it); and Navessa Allen straight-up posted chapters on Goodreads before signing on to Zando and PRH\u2019s arguably narrower distribution. Pointedly, none were discovered according to an agent\u2019s discriminating taste or molded by an editor into a font of commercial storytelling.<\/small><\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Graduates of Harvard, a prestigious college not in Boston but nearby, have 17 times the chance of winning a literary prize<\/a>, but a degree from Iowa confers an edge to the tune of 49 times.<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 Publishers Weekly deals announcements, making astral connections between<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":143,"featured_media":275853,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43201,43069,6,43070,43092],"tags":[2120,111817,91128,111815,2126,72315,111816,3694,111818,4026,16005,108206],"class_list":["post-275843","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-news-newsandculture","category-craftandcriticism","category-features","category-literary-criticism","category-newsandculture","tag-amazon","tag-big-fiction","tag-dan-sinykin","tag-laura-mcgrath","tag-m-c-mah","tag-mark-mcgurl","tag-middlemen","tag-on-writing","tag-program-era","tag-publishing","tag-submissions","tag-the-business-of-writing"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19L5","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Untitled-design-2026-08-17T134757.480.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275843","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/143"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275843"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275843\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275853"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275843"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275843"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275843"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275726,"date":"2026-08-19T06:41:50","date_gmt":"2026-08-19T10:41:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275726"},"modified":"2026-08-19T07:06:39","modified_gmt":"2026-08-19T11:06:39","slug":"did-smartphones-really-kill-reading","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/did-smartphones-really-kill-reading\/","title":{"rendered":"Did Smartphones Really Kill Reading?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Did smartphones kill reading? In The Atlantic<\/i>, Rose Horowitch laments that \u201cThe Age of Reading is Over.\u201d We still, she observes, encounter many words, but increasingly find them in emails, text messages, Instagram captions, and other digital fragments rather than in books. This kind of reading tends to be brief and distracted, quite different from the focused attention encouraged by print.<\/p>\n

Modern readers may still be able to decode words, Horowitch argues, but they struggle to comprehend longer texts. Our society is not illiterate, but postliterate.<\/p>\n

It is tempting to blame smartphones for this condition and conclude that some kind of ban would solve the problem. But a historical perspective shows that this is not enough: reading was in decline before the smartphone appeared.<\/p>\n

In 1988, the literary critic George Steiner announced that \u201cthe age of the book\u201d was coming to \u201ca gradual end.\u201d Gradual is the key word here. Steiner believed the decline had begun in the 1950s, with the growth of radio, cinema, and television. The electronic media of the 1980s continued the transformation but did not initiate it.<\/p>\n

The data support Steiner\u2019s instinct. In 1976, more than 60 percent of American 12th-graders said they read a book or magazine for pleasure almost every day. From then on, the share declined by about one percentage point a year through the arrival of video games, personal computers, the internet, and smartphones. Forty years later, only 15 percent of high school students read for pleasure almost every day.<\/p>\n

The introduction of the internet and smartphones did not produce a sudden collapse of reading. Americans spent an average of 21.9 minutes a day reading for personal interest in 2003, compared with 18.3 minutes in 2010 and 16.2 minutes in 2025. These figures indicate no sudden break coinciding with the arrival of the iPhone, but a long, steady decline.<\/p>\n

First, protect the printed book.<\/p>\n

Technology is part of the story, but not the whole story. What has eroded, more broadly, is the culture that once made reading part of everyday life. To understand how this happened\u2014and how it might be reversed\u2014we must take a longer historical view.<\/p>\n

Reading became a popular practice in the nineteenth century, thanks to a combination of material and social changes. Cheaper paper, steam-powered printing, compulsory education, and improved lighting made books accessible to millions. Libraries, churches, labor movements, literary societies, and reading circles gave people reasons to read and communities in which to do so. Together, these developments created a bookish culture.<\/p>\n

In nineteenth-century Paris, a visitor marveled at the widespread appetite for literature: \u201cEveryone, but women in particular, is carrying a book in their pocket. People read while riding in carriages or taking walks; they read at the theatre during the interval, in caf\u00e9s, even when bathing.\u201d<\/p>\n

The flourishing reading culture of this era was sustained by an entire ecosystem. If we wish to restore it, it will not be enough to remove one distracting device. Instead, we must rebuild the conditions that make concentrated reading possible. This requires at least three things.<\/p>\n

First, protect the printed book.<\/p>\n

The printed book is a technology built for attention. It presents the text without the competing demands of hyperlinks, videos, or notifications, allowing us to remain focused on the page. At the same time, the thickness of the book helps us gauge our location in the story or argument, and keeps us oriented by giving us a sense of how far we have travelled and how much remains. This materiality supports memory as well: we often remember where on a page we encountered something\u2014whether it was on the right or left, high or low.<\/p>\n

Digital devices can help us find information quickly, but print is better suited to focused reading. Schools therefore need to continue championing books, yet the trend has lately moved in the opposite direction. In 2022, the National Council of Teachers of English declared that it was time to \u201cdecenter book reading\u201d in order to address \u201cinequalities in digital technologies and competencies.\u201d But equity can be used as an argument in support of the opposite approach. Children who do not grow up surrounded by books depend on schools to introduce them to sustained reading. Like computers, printed books are a technology that must be learned.<\/p>\n

Second, we need spaces where reading is the norm.<\/p>\n

We often treat concentration as a private test of willpower. But attention is shaped by architecture, atmosphere, and social expectations. We behave differently in a library than in a shopping mall because rooms tell us what kinds of activity belong there.<\/p>\n

Today, communal reading offers an example of how print and digital media can work in tandem to renew reading.<\/p>\n

Libraries, independent bookstores, schools, and caf\u00e9s can become what Steiner called \u201chouses of reading\u201d: places where silence, slowness, and absorption are not eccentric forms of behavior. In Norway, media scholar Espen Ytreberg introduced voluntary \u201cshut up and read\u201d sessions, in which students gather in rooms free from digital distractions and read silently together. There are also caf\u00e9s which ask customers to put away their phones. Such spaces create temporary refuges from the digital stream, and allow habits of slowness, concentration, and absorption to become socially reinforced.<\/p>\n

Third, make reading social again.<\/p>\n

The image of the reader is usually solitary: one person alone with a book. But throughout history, reading has repeatedly been renewed by communities. When the Dark Ages descended on the ancient world, Benedict of Nursia ignited a monastic revival that would establish thousands of monasteries and train generations of devoted readers. And in the nineteenth century, religious revivals, the labor movement, African American communities, and other popular movements organized circles that fused reading with collective action. Books mattered not only because they were read, but because people read them together.<\/p>\n

Today, communal reading offers an example of how print and digital media can work in tandem to renew reading. Online book clubs, fan sites, and discussion forums foster literary communities in which devoted readers not only discuss what they have read but also extend the stories through fan fiction. At the same time, some students have founded \u201cLuddite clubs,\u201d where digital devices are banned and members gather to read and converse.<\/p>\n

If we want reading to endure, tossing our smartphones into the nearest river will not be enough. Good readers are formed by a bookish culture, and it is this culture that we must try and rebuild. Reading will never survive as an individual act of heroic resistance; history shows that reading is and always has been a solitary act sustained by communities.<\/p>\n

__________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Reading Matters: A History for the Digital Age<\/a>\u00a0by Joel Halldorf is available from NYU Press.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Did smartphones kill reading? In The Atlantic, Rose Horowitch laments that \u201cThe Age of Reading is Over.\u201d We still, she observes, encounter many words, but increasingly find them in emails, text messages, Instagram captions, and other digital fragments rather than<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":30705,"featured_media":275745,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6,43092,43445],"tags":[10642,111020,30826,85998,168,111019,11975,5582],"class_list":["post-275726","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-newsandculture","category-technology","tag-book-clubs","tag-joel-halldorf","tag-nyu-press","tag-printed-books","tag-reading","tag-reading-matters-a-history-for-the-digital-age","tag-smartphones","tag-technology"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19Jc","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/smartphones.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275726","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/30705"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275726"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275726\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275745"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275706,"date":"2026-08-19T06:40:06","date_gmt":"2026-08-19T10:40:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275706"},"modified":"2026-08-19T06:55:18","modified_gmt":"2026-08-19T10:55:18","slug":"on-women-and-the-water-cure-nine-memoirs-about-wild-swimming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/on-women-and-the-water-cure-nine-memoirs-about-wild-swimming\/","title":{"rendered":"On Women and The Water Cure: Nine Memoirs About Wild Swimming"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cWild swimming\u201d is a term coined by British nature writer Roger Deakin in his cult classic Waterlog: A Swimmer\u2019s Journey Through Britain<\/i> (1999), about his year swimming outdoors all over the UK. A paean to the joys of daily, year-round immersion in rivers, seas, ponds, and lakes, <\/i>it sparked a nationwide cultural phenomenon with a catchy name, a society, a swim trip company, and an entire line of gear for changing onshore. As practiced in Britain and Ireland, wild swimming might more properly be termed \u201ccold-water bathing,\u201d since it can involve merely a few minutes of head-raised breaststroke in water temperatures ranging from heart-stopping to extremity-numbing (35-60\u00baF), clad in nothing but a swimsuit and a wooly hat. Most wild swimmers are not athletes training for an open-water event or even necessarily very proficient at swimming. They do it for wellbeing and connection, as a way of being in touch with the natural world and the seasons.<\/p>\n

In my UK childhood, I felt an ease in the water that I rarely did on land, though I never swam competitively. Early moves from England to Ireland to Nigeria and then back to England had left me feeling an irremediable outsider. In water\u2019s reassuring embrace, however, I felt confident and at home. Swimming (both indoors and out) is a practice I\u2019ve carried with me as I\u2019ve triangulated my life between the US, Spain, and the UK. As I wrote my memoir Unbelonging: A Life in Search of Home<\/i><\/a>, I was surprised to find how often I drew on memories of swimming. Water has been the translucent thread that runs through my transnational life, connecting me more deeply with place while reminding me of the fluid borders of the self.<\/p>\n

The UK\u2019s Outdoor Swimming Society, founded in 2006, initially boasted 300 members, but now numbers over 200,000. Intriguingly, the Society found in a 2023 survey that roughly three-quarters of its members are women. Over the last ten years, there have been a spate of memoirs about wild swimming penned by women around the UK and Ireland, many of which appeared in 2017, meaning they must have all been written concurrently. These narratives portray open-water swimming not as heroism but as healing and empowerment. Their authors swim for the interior journey, to commune with a place and the elements, with other women, and their own bodies.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Amy Liptrot, The Outrun: A Memoir<\/i><\/a>\u00a0<\/i><\/strong><\/p>\n

Amy Liptrot\u2019s raw, luminous memoir about moving back to the Orkney Islands and striving to heal from drug abuse and alcoholism became a surprise bestseller after its publication in 2016. The bleakness of those far northern isles, the punishing, incessant wind, the wild beauty of the land and rugged coastline are unforgettably conjured alongside her inner struggle to stay sober. Late in the book, she joins the mostly-female Orkney Polar Bears for their convivial Saturday dips in the gelid seas off the islands. Along with walking, farm chores, and birding, her wild swims become an essential component of her recovery, each dip leaving her exhilarated, \u201creborn and very alive\u201d. In the water, she experiences a sense of elemental, existential connection, a sort of spiritual dissolving. Sea swims don\u2019t magically cure the narrator, but they provide the container for healing to occur over time, gentling the existential ache of not-belonging that underlay her addictions.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Victoria Whitworth, Swimming With Seals<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Novelist and academic Victoria Whitworth lived on Orkney at the same time as Liptrot and swam alone daily as well as with the Orkney Polar Bears. She interweaves lyrical snapshots of her wild swims with discussions of local history, myth, folklore and archeology, braiding in memories of growing up in Kenya, her struggle with crippling pain due to plantar fasciitis, and glancing references to \u201cthe slow-motion misery of a failing marriage.\u201d The narrative is punctuated by prose-poems about the water conditions during her swims, which varied enormously from day to day and month to month, sometimes exquisite, sometimes terrifying. She prefers to swim at dawn or dusk, with no wetsuit separating her from the water. By the end of the book, she writes, \u201c[s]wimming in the sea has helped me rediscover myself \u2026 made me understand the strengths of my body, as well as its limits. It has been fundamental in healing my feet, but, more than that, it has allowed me to fall in love with being embodied all over again. With being alive.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Jessica J. Lee, Turning: A Year in the Water<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Jessica J. Lee\u2019s first book Turning<\/i> gained her international recognition as a writer who explores themes of multinational identity, migration, language, and environmental history. Seamlessly blending lyrical memoir, science writing and travelogue, Turning<\/i> covers her first year in Berlin. In the grip of depression, repeated displacement (she is British-Canadian-Taiwanese), and a broken heart, she decides to swim in a different lake every week for a year. The book is notable for its intellectual depth and evocative descriptions of finding and entering the many lakes, as well as the vivid sensory impressions of swimming in each different location. In January, she carries a hammer as all the lakes are frozen, and risks hypothermia by submerging in them alone. As well as the agony of cold, she documents its after-effect of intense elation, a high many wild swimmers come to crave.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Jenny Landreth, Swell: A Waterbiography<\/i><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Jenny Landreth invented a fantastic punning term for the emerging genre in her subtitle, \u201ca waterbiography.\u201d She provides a wealth of social and historical context, braiding her own evolving experience of swimming with the history of women\u2019s two-hundred-year struggle for parity of access to public waters and mixed bathing. She deflates the male Swimmer as Hero trope by stressing her distinctly unheroic learning process: \u201cI could maybe manage two or three widths, but I still swum in a U-shape and I still didn\u2019t get my hair wet.\u201d Even though her memoir begins by stressing her incompetence, it ends by affirming the pleasure and confidence open-water swimming bestows on her in middle age.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

At the Pond: Swimming at the Hampstead Ladies\u2019 Pond<\/i><\/a> edited by Deborah Moggach\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Opened in 1926, the women-only pond on Hampstead Heath is a beloved London institution. All the essays collected here are by writers who happen to swim, rather than swimmers who happen to write, including luminaries like Margaret Drabble, Esther Freud, and Leanne Shapton. Organized by season, the pieces vividly evoke the women\u2019s experiences of the water at different times of year. \u201cThe water is silky,\u201d Lou Stoppard writes about winter. \u201cIt\u2019s thicker than other water. It sticks to the skin, laps your body and holds you, suspended. You cut through it, as if stirring cream.\u201d Some offer heartwarming stories of how swimming there helped them through difficult periods, provided community and continuity, and reconnected them to their bodies and the more-than-human world. Others explore the history and geography of the ponds and the Heath, and the social worlds of the swimmers and their circles.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Sophie Pierce, The Green Hill: Letters to a Son<\/i><\/a>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0Pierce, who has since co-authored five regional wild swimming guides about Devon and Cornwall, lost her twenty-year-old son suddenly and unexpectedly in 2017. In the agonizing years after his death, she composed letters to him during walks and swims, a practice of active mourning in places they had enjoyed together. These form the spine of the book, interwoven with descriptions of swims of varying lengths in a very wide range of locales\u2014rivers, waterfalls, ponds, different coves and beaches, each different and beautifully captured for the reader. Over a five-year period, we witness her emerge from utter devastation to a more-bearable form of grief.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Freya Bromley, The Tidal Year: A Memoir on Grief, Swimming, and Sisterhood<\/i><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Grieving and adrift in the aftermath of her teenage brother\u2019s death from bone cancer, Bromley embarks on a year-long quest to swim every tidal pool in mainland Britain in a year with her friend Miri. Tidal pools are deep hollows in the rock that fill with seawater on an ebb tide, offering \u201cthe ability of enjoy the salt of the sea in a safe watery cradle,\u201d ideal for swimmers who don\u2019t want to brave the dangers of the open ocean. Descriptions of the dozens of beautiful (and occasionally disappointing) locations they visit are inspiring, and the swimming-induced self-discovery and the solace of female friendship create a redemptive arc.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Megan Hayes, Glimmering: Healing in Twenty-One Wild Swims<\/i><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Hayes suffered unspecified childhood trauma and is, at the outset of the book, in a damaging relationship with a manipulative, sex-addicted boyfriend. Her wild swims at beautiful spots in Wales and around the world offer well-being and safety in \u201cglimmers,\u201d the term coined by trauma specialist Deb Dana for \u201cmoments of regulation and connection.\u201d Hayes\u2019 memoir stresses the redemptive power of nature as an antidote to suffering and a way to build emotional resilience.<\/p>\n

__________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Unbelonging<\/a>\u00a0by Catherine Jagoe is available from University of Wisconsin Press.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cWild swimming\u201d is a term coined by British nature writer Roger Deakin in his cult classic Waterlog: A Swimmer\u2019s Journey Through Britain (1999), about his year swimming outdoors all over the UK. A paean to the joys of daily, year-round<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31654,"featured_media":275718,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6,43287,43103,43231,43092,43135],"tags":[26368,111750,111759,111751,111754,111757,111748,58640,111756,111752,111749,71733,111753,111746,111755,111747,111758,71734],"class_list":["post-275706","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-health","category-memoir","category-nature","category-newsandculture","category-readinglists","tag-amy-liptrot","tag-at-the-pond-swimming-at-the-hampstead-ladies-pond","tag-catherine-jagoe","tag-deborah-moggach","tag-freya-bromley","tag-glimmering-healing-in-twenty-one-wild-swims","tag-jenny-landreth","tag-jessica-j-lee","tag-megan-hayes","tag-sophie-pierce","tag-swell-a-waterbiography","tag-swimming-with-seals","tag-the-green-hill-letters-to-a-son","tag-the-outrun-a-memoir","tag-the-tidal-year-a-memoir-on-grief-swimming-and-sisterhood","tag-turning-a-year-in-the-water","tag-unbelonging","tag-victoria-whitworth"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19IS","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/wild-swimming.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275706","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/31654"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275706"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275706\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275718"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275706"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275706"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275706"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275888,"date":"2026-08-19T06:30:12","date_gmt":"2026-08-19T10:30:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275888"},"modified":"2026-08-19T09:05:03","modified_gmt":"2026-08-19T13:05:03","slug":"lit-hub-daily-august-19-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/lit-hub-daily-august-19-2026\/","title":{"rendered":"Lit Hub Daily: August 19, 2026"},"content":{"rendered":" TODAY: In 1631, John Dryden, England’s first poet laureate, is born. <\/span>\n