Lit Hub Daily: August 12, 2020

• What do paramilitaries in the streets of Portland signal for November? A conversation with writers and veterans Matt Gallagher and Phil Klay, along with military scholar Risa Brooks. | Lit Hub Politics
• WATCH: Singer-songwriter Jewel talks about her early struggles with dyslexia, finding solace in philosophy, and her love of Nabokov and Steinbeck (and she plays a few songs!). | Lit Hub
• Trumpism, disunity, and resistance to change: Kurt Andersen on the corrosive politics of nostalgia. | Lit Hub Politics
• A spiritual manifesto for the Global International African Arts Movement, in the midst of a Black arts renaissance. | Lit Hub
• “Didn’t I want to read my grandma’s work? No, I was ferociously intent on not doing that.” Rebecca Rukeyser wrestles with the legacy of her grandmother, Muriel. | Lit Hub Biography
• “I feared I was becoming more like him, even as I was coming to understand what he had gone through.” Justin Taylor on the ways we fail to love each other. | Lit Hub Memoir
• The internet has split our sense of self. Rebecca Watson wonders if the page reproduce that. | Lit Hub Tech
• “It’s the American economy that broke the rules—or at least broke its compact with workers.” Jim Tankersley on the long hollowing out of the American middle class. | Lit Hub Politics
• Cree LeFavour writes an ode to the limitless read, and recommends her favorite books to revisit. | Lit Hub
• 17 independent booksellers rave about their favorite reads in the Art of the Hand-Sell. | Book Marks
• “I believe that crime fiction is at its most meaningful…when the reader is complicit in the crime.” John Galligan on the ambiguities of readership. | CrimeReads
• This isn’t a matter of exclusion or separatism—a book can be opened by anybody, and open any mind—but of fidelity to the truth of experience.” A.O. Scott on the work of Edward P. Jones. | The New York Times
• “If anything which challenges unfair structures and moves us closer to universal justice can be considered protest, then reading is one of its oldest forms.” On reading as protest. | Epiphany
• A brief history of royal tell-alls, from Catherine the Great to Princess Di. | Vanity Fair
• “You can’t tell a story about people’s wildness that extracts the humanity from them.” Diane Cook on danger, parenthood, and The Office. | Guernica
• John Freeman on the literature of California and its role as “a kind of portal for remarkable journeys.” | Alta Online
• While movie theaters remain closed, these streaming films transport us to long-ago summers. | New York Review of Books
• Trying to steer your kids away from careers in media? Try reading them Goodnight Exomoon, a STEM-focused Goodnight Moon parody. | Smithsonian Mag

Also on Lit Hub: Laura van den Berg and Karolina Waclawiak in conversation • On the ground fighting a new American wildfire • Read from Shruti Swamy’s new collection A House Is a Body.