The Hub

News, Notes, Talk

Biologists named a sex pheromone found in mouse urine after Mr. Darcy.

If you’re anything like me, you’re constantly wondering, “How do these aloof and frankly cold male mice keep attracting partners?!” Science has an answer: Blame it on the darcin. Back in 2010, a team of biologists at the University of Read more >

By James Folta

Here's what's making us happy this week.

It was a rough one out there. No need to beat around the bush. Our happiness involved escape. We binged period pieces and anticipated glorious trash. We snacked and cycled. We zoned out to masters at work, and applied ourselves Read more >

By Brittany Allen

This week's news in Venn diagrams.

Another long summer week, with more downs than ups. A few too many bad stories, villains, and greats leaving the stage. And don’t stop making noise about Gaza; my colleague Dan put together a list of ways to help Gazans Read more >

By James Folta

Israel is starving Gaza. Here's how you can help keep people alive.

“People in Gaza are neither dead nor alive, they are walking corpses.” These are the words of Philippe Lazzarini, the Commissioner-General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, who posted on X earlier today that more than 100 people, Read more >

By Dan Sheehan

4Columns is closing up shop. Here are 10 unmissable pieces from their archives.

Another day, another great literary website bites the dust. Next summer, we’ll apparently say “auf wiedersehen” to 4Columns, a bastion of long-form arts criticism. 4Columns makes a practice of covering fringier offerings, like experimental theatre, fashion, and jazz. They publish Read more >

By Brittany Allen

A new George Saunders novel is coming this winter.

Random House announced today that a brand new novel by George Saunders will be landing on bookshelves this winter, on January 27, 2026. Vigil takes “place at the bedside of an oil company CEO, in the twilight hours of his Read more >

By Emily Temple

Why Clueless is still the best Austen adaptation to ever do it.

Thirty years ago this week, Amy Heckerling’s Clueless hit theaters and brought us all one of cinema’s most perfect creations—Cher Horowitz. Based on Emma Wodehouse, of Jane Austen’s Emma, Cher was as vibrant as she was delulu. Not to be Read more >

By Brittany Allen

Apparently, comparing someone's writing to AI is now a "classist slur;" and other news.

Another wild week for the makers of the popular predictive chatbots and large, generative pretrained transformer software. Here are just a couple stories about AI that came across my desk this week. Baldacci Burns Businesses The fallout around the discovery Read more >

By James Folta

A book stall in central Gaza is keeping literature alive amidst genocide.

Photo by Esraa Abo Qamar A small bookstall in the central Gaza Strip is keeping reading alive amidst Israel’s unrelenting chaos and violence, The Electronic Intifada reports. The stall, called Eqraa Ketabak (Read Your Book), is run by Salah and Read more >

By James Folta

What Colbert's cancellation means for late night television.

The Writers Guild of America issued a strongly worded statement Friday about Colbert’s cancellation. Given Paramount’s recent capitulation to President Trump in the CBS News lawsuit, the Writers Guild of America has significant concerns that The Late Show’s cancellation is a Read more >

By Brittany Allen

Michael Zapata has won the inaugural DAG Prize for Literature.

Today, the DAG Foundation announced the winners of its inaugural DAG Prizes, which award $20,000 each to a visual artist, a writer, and a musician “whose work expands the possibilities for American art.” According to the Foundation, the DAG Prize Read more >

By Literary Hub

Sinéad O'Connor! Sin City! A “Jewish Jane Austen!” 21 new books out today.

The wheel of the year continues its slow, strange turn, a turning at once painfully glacial and precipitously swift. At the moment, the wheel has landed upon a morass of MAGA conspiracies, lurid revelations about the President’s relationship with an Read more >

By Gabrielle Bellot

Vladimir Nabokov's entire backlist is getting a brand new redesign.

There have been a few great covers for Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. There have also been a lot of bad ones. It makes sense: it’s a difficult book to represent—which means that when it’s done right, there’s a special kind of Read more >

By Emily Temple

Here's what's making us happy this week.

This week, we’re fulfilling prophecies, and pledges to past selves. We bought the tickets and took the rides. Some of us into the archive. Some of us into the dungeon. And some of us out to greener pastures. Calvin Kasulke Read more >

By Brittany Allen

10 radical works of fiction and nonfiction that inspired Kylie Cheung's book on post-Dobbs violence.

Kylie Cheung’s forthcoming book Coercion: Surviving and Resisting Abortion Bans is a searing investigation into the intersecting structures that control the lives of women and pregnant people. In her introduction, Cheung writes that the book “is my best attempt to Read more >

By James Folta

Is Brad Lander’s original Shakespeare in the Park sonnet any good?

I’ve updated this article to include Lander’s sonnet co-writer Chloe Chik, and links to previous sonnets Lander has performed. Brad Lander’s having a great summer. From bravely standing up to ICE thugs, to becoming best buddies with mayoral candidate Zohran Read more >

By James Folta

The Defense Department wants to ban hundreds of books. Here are the weirdest titles.

The Trump administration has moved to ban 596 books from schools that serve military children. This is in addition to all their ongoing support for state book bans. Though it’s uniquely upsetting because military schools can be seen as arms Read more >

By Brittany Allen

Black authors' houses are historically hard to preserve. Here's why (plus, a few to visit).

In a recent report for The Guardian, the author Nneka M. Okona described the pull of historic literary sites. “I wanted to see more homes of the Black literary forefathers and foremothers, the ones I draw inspiration from in order Read more >

By Brittany Allen

The definitive ranking of reading technologies.

Last week a Silicon Valley startup announced a new kind of e-reader that you can wear on your face. The company Sol Reader, is creating books that are glasses, described as “a wearable e-reading device that resembles a pair of Read more >

By James Folta

Amelia Earhart! WWII spies! WWII witches! 23 new books out today.

It’s just about the middle of summer in a summer characterized by utter chaos, but I come bearing something rare in this era: good tidings. That is, the good news that new books are out today. Below, you’ll find twenty-three Read more >

By Gabrielle Bellot