Lit Hub Daily: August 16, 2021

• “How can they cheer the explosion of the Death Star and then turn around and become the IRL equivalent of a Storm Trooper?” A.E. Osworth traces the baffling nerd-to-white-nationalist pipeline. | Lit Hub Politics

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• Jo Hamya considers the uselessness of internet-driven book culture, in which novels are expected (at their own detriment) to be “current, or instructive, or a means of social cachet.” | Lit Hub Criticism

• “Within 70 years of her death, popular culture will have reduced this figure to a swooning poetess in whose little, couch-bound life only a tyrannical father and an ardent poet-lover contribute drama.” Fiona Sampson on the literary afterlife of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. | Lit Hub Biography

• Julie Klam recounts the genealogical brick walls she hit again and again while researching her enigmatic relatives—the radical, wealthy, “manless” Morris sisters. | Lit Hub Craft

• Brian Castleberry contemplates the role of fiction in America’s “struggle over reality and power.” | Lit Hub

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• On Keen On, J. Chester Johnson on the Elaine Race Massacre and whitewashed history and Emily Bass on America’s fight to defeat AIDS in Africa | The Virtual Book Channel

• “Performative language is light-years removed from the virtue signaling with which we are awash.” On the origins—and “current cultural captivity”—of “performative.”  | The Hedgehog Review

• How should we think about posthumous art? | JSTOR Daily 

• “I’m someone who has always pushed back against the idea that the internet is not real life.” Leigh Stein on social media, returning to poetry during the pandemic, and Boccaccio’s The Decameron. | NPR Morning Edition

• Eight books to help you with grief, death, and dying. | Vice

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• Kaveh Akbar discusses his sophomore poetry collection, philosophy, belief, identity, and the art of writing. |  Chicago Review of Books

Also on Lit Hub: Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine on the early days of their collaboration • Sidarta Ribeiro on the cultural history of dreaming • Read from Claire Luchette’s debut novel, Agatha of Little Neon