Lit Hub Daily: February 18, 2026
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1896, André Breton is born.
- LETTERS FROM MINNESOTA: Andrea Jenkins on the violent echoes of Reconstruction in the streets of the Twin Cities • Susan Raffo on holding space for humility in the midst of radical change. | Lit Hub Politics
- Eileen G’sell investigates the myth of the red-lipped suffragette. | Lit Hub History
- “I couldn’t believe my Muslim family had sent me to a Catholic school so I could stare at a statue of an almost naked man.” Huda Al-Marashi on writing a middle grade book about religion. | Lit Hub Religion
- Emily Galvin Almanza examines how media obscures the truth about crime and safety. | Lit Hub Politics
- Roland Ennos looks at the anthropological explanations behind Homo sapiens’ rise to the top of the animal kingdom. | Lit Hub Science
- Why public health is a shared responsibility: “Safe affordable housing, quality education, a livable income, stable employment, clean air and water, access to affordable fresh food, and a sense of belonging in a trusted community—these are cornerstone pieces…” | Lit Hub Health
- Amara Lakhous on the necessity of combining fiction writing with fieldwork. | Lit Hub Craft
- “Regardless of distance, stories of invisible exile expose the spatial processes of exclusion, as well as the journeys undertaken in search of new belonging.” On the blind spots and biases of traditional travel narratives. | Lit Hub Travel
- “Perhaps this was a mid-life crisis masquerading as bravery.” Sarah Domet considers the rebellion of dancing. | Lit Hub Craft
- “I didn’t mourn for Vivienne Bianco. I didn’t know her. I knew how she died, though, because Randall Smiley told me the whole terrible story.” Read from Claire Oshetsky’s new novel, Evil Genius. | Lit Hub Fiction
- Is the lengthy review having a comeback? Carolina Abbott Galvão considers a new generation of scrappy lit mags. | Columbia Journalism Review
- Emily Zarevich revisits Who Shall Die?, Simone de Beauvoir’s only play. | JSTOR Daily
- Nicholas Clairmont on the perils of optimization: “What you lose in optimizing morality is the same thing you lose in maximizing your airline-mile spend. In other words, nothing quantifiable—but precisely the chance to escape quantification.” | The Point
- Andrea Moro considers the futile search for a perfect language. | The MIT Press Reader
- How a story about AI got pulled (because the journalist used AI). | Aftermath
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