Lit Hub Daily: August 25, 2020

• “Animals aren’t just repositories for human meanings, even if we unthinkingly use them to reflect our own selves and concerns.” Helen Macdonald offers some hard-won wisdom for writing about the natural world. | Lit Hub Craft
• “Climate change is part of a much longer series of ecological catastrophes caused by colonialism.” Rev. William J. Barber on the scourge of environmental racism. | Lit Hub Climate Change
• “Here, gorgeous desolation, and the first remembered sign of one’s selfness.” A poem by Dawn Lundy Martin. | Lit Hub Poetry
• Clifford D. Conner looks at the many ways in which corporate money has distorted American science. | Lit Hub Politics
• Ros Anderson on the difficulty of finding a distinct human voice for her AI protagonist. | Lit Hub Craft
• “John Berger understood that in fact each line you make walks you to the brink of yourself.” In lockdown, David Farrier rediscovers drawing. | Lit Hub
• Tea Krulos traces the origin stories of celebrity conspiracy theorists, from Alex Jones to the Phantom Patriot. | Lit Hub Politics
• “There’s power in a comfort with silence.” Sebastian Matthews on balancing suspicion and good faith when encountering strangers. | Lit Hub Memoir
• Héctor Tobar recommends five iconic literary road trips, from On the Road to 2666. | Book Marks
• Wendy Corsi Staub asks crime and mystery authors how they plan to write about the new era of COVID. | CrimeReads
• The increased support for local community bookstores amid the pandemic has strained the capacity of some of the shops. | The Washington Post
• Kerri Arsenault on the conflicted nostalgia of growing up in a Maine mill town—and writing about it. | Down East
• Writers in Kuwait are celebrating an “anti-censorship” amendment to a publishing law that ends the need for the Ministry of Information’s prior approval. | The National
• “As writers, we must not say that the fire is coming, but that it was never extinguished in the first place.” Mychal Denzel Smith on how we will remember the protests of 2020. | GEN
• How Edith Wharton addressed the public self, intimate spaces, and the “very American myth of home-building as an exercise in self-creation.” | Los Angeles Review of Books
• “Every wood-wrapped window was a canvas. Minneapolis quickly has become an art gallery, and every neighborhood curates a different emotion.” Danez Smith on the protest art of Minneapolis. | Vanity Fair
• A history of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, “the ur-text of modern antisemitism.” | JSTOR Daily

Also on Lit Hub: Why are people so drawn to the legend of Chapo Guzmán? • How Ronald Reagan’s time at General Electric pushed him to conservatism • Read an excerpt from Ali Smith’s Summer.