Lit Hub Daily: April 20, 2026
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1912, Bram Stoker dies.
- The final round of voting is here! Only two films remain in our Best Literary Adaptations bracket, and it’s up to you to choose a winner. | Lit Hub
- On this 4/20, dare we say…blaze it? (Or, how cannabis became the countercultural drug of choice.) | Lit Hub History
- Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff investigate how (and when) Elon Musk took his hard turn to the right. | Lit Hub Politics
- “The homes of Schomburg, Dorsey, and other collectors were important sites of Black intellectual culture: salon-like spaces for the bookish crowd. Until now, however, it has been hard to picture them.” How Arturo Schomburg built a library and made history. | Lit Hub History
- “In these moments, I am reduced to this fact: Someone broke into your house and attacked you.” On healing after trauma through writing. | Lit Hub Craft
- “She seemed to go to extremes in order to make the play as obscene and immoral as possible.” This week in literary history, Mae West is sentenced to ten days in jail for obscenity. | Lit Hub History
- Jim Windolf explores the lengthy history between The Beatles and Bob Dylan. | Lit Hub Music
- “I just want to put a metal spoon in a / microwave and watch the possibility of / sustenance.” Read “Brevity is the fuse attached to every breath,” a poem by Bob Hicock from the collection Breathe. | Lit Hub Poetry
- “It was your idea, and if you didn’t want to get your feet wet, love, you shouldn’t have embarked.” Read from Vincent Delecroix’s novel Small Boat, translated by Helen Stevenson. | Lit Hub Fiction
- “If we can’t have the nineties back, we can build a life of things that might feel transportative.” Hanif Abdurraqib considers our nostalgic longing for inconvenience. | The New Yorker
- Tim Requarth dives into the AI writing panic—and wonders if it obscures a larger issue. | Slate
- Angela Pelster examines what humans, ancient and modern, owe to our grandmothers. | Orion
- Steven Levy on the journalists who use AI to write their stories. | Wired
- How language produces the soul: “How does the mind come into existence because of the brain? How does the great wealth of conscious experience emerge from the poverty of the electrical activity of nerve cells?” | Aeon
- What happens when newsrooms get in the prediction market game. | The Verge
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