Lit Hub Daily: December 8, 2023

• Monty Python, blasphemers: When the culture wars came for a little film called Life of Brian. | Lit Hub Film & TV

• “Moderation did not win the public’s favor.” How hot beverages became all the rage in 18th-century Britain. | Lit Hub History

• Debbie Urbanski urges novelists to think about AI “with interest and even optimism.” | Lit Hub Tech

• Rumaan Alam on what it’s like to see your teenage crush play your character in a movie. | Lit Hub Film & TV

• “When I write, I’m carrying so much care inside of me.” Channler Twyman on family and the Jenny Zhang story that changed his outlook. | Lit Hub Memoir

• In Jon Fosse’s Nobel laureate speech, the author said that if he’d listened to critics, he would have stopped writing 40 years ago. Heartening! | The Guardian

• “I’d like to see more writing about the earth and about nonhuman beings.” Sigrid Nunez shares what she’s reading and what she wants more of in literature. | The New York Times

• “Lionni’s deeper message is plain: Children can lead important social change.” Maya P. Lim on Leo Lionni’s quietly political children’s books. | Smithsonian Magazine

• Antonia Hitchens reports from the spin room at the fourth Republican presidential debate. | The Paris Review

• “We believe that Said would be throwing stones… at the doors of the Columbia officials working tirelessly to keep those in solidarity with Palestine out.” Columbia graduate students speak out against campus censorship. | Verso

Also on Lit Hub: A conversation with Laurie Anderson • Richard Hugo on starting a poem • Read from E.J. Koh’s debut novel, The Liberators