Lit Hub Daily: February 19, 2020

• Charlotte Alter on how the well-educated and downwardly mobile found (a gentle version of) socialism. | Lit Hub Politics
• “Football fever can serve as a collective insistence that there are other moral logics and priorities in this world.” On the biggest cultural phenomenon the world has ever known: football (aka soccer). | Lit Hub Sports
• From Jane Jacobs to Larissa MacFarquhar, Conor Dougherty on the books that helped him understand the housing crisis in America. | Lit Hub Politics
• Classically trained concert pianists are humans, too: Stephen Hough on the anxieties of a life in music. | Lit Hub Music
• “When you’re dying, I wondered, who do you call? Peter dialed in to a conference call.” On the devastating fallout of addiction and corporate burnout. | Lit Hub Memoir
• On sorrow, roadside shrines, and the brushed steel stereo from a 1987 Nissan Maxima: Ander Monson considers the elegies all around us. | Lit Hub
• Noir in the “Granite City”: Paul French on the rise of hard-boiled fiction in Aberdeen, Scotland’s grittiest metropolis. | CrimeReads
• A month of literary listening: AudioFile’s Best Audiobooks of February. | Book Marks
• “A lot of the messiness in Vanessa’s psyche comes from a culture that celebrates abuse as something from which great art can be made.” Read a profile of My Dark Vanessa author Kate Elizabeth Russell. | Vulture
• OK Doomer: On the recent trend of “doomer lit,” which is what you’d get if cli-fi were a little more melancholy and fatalistic. | WIRED
• “A funny writer is a writer to whom the reader gives a great deal of power, and gladly.” Lauren Groff on the subversion of Lorrie Moore’s work and wit. | New York Review of Books
• Penguin Random House is aiming to “fully” transition to green energy by 2022. | Publishers Weekly
• Calls to make February 18th “Lorde-Morrison Day”—in honor of Audre Lorde and Toni Morrison’s shared birthday—are lighting Twitter up. | Fast Company
• “I couldn’t give up either of you”: Lily King on a different kind of love triangle. | Vogue
• “Some of us are still trying to have some fun before we die and, I’m sorry, clever men are very rarely fun.” On the perks (?) of dating a man who doesn’t read. | The Outline

Also on Lit Hub: Daily chronicles of life under quarantine at the heart of the coronavirus outbreak • Censorship and abuse in the Word of Faith Fellowship • Read an excerpt from Märta Tikkanen’s novel in verse, The Love Story of the Century (trans. Stina Katchadourian).