Lit Hub Daily: February 4, 2026
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1995, Patricia Highsmith dies.
- LETTERS FROM MINNESOTA: Diane Wilson on traditions of American violence • Sarah Green on preserving the idea of kinship in the face of brutality. | Lit Hub Politics
- “This hearty dish is not only laden with calories but also heavy with both privilege and tradition.” Learn how to make an ancient Roman ancestor of mac and cheese. | Lit Hub Food
- Mira Ptacin on grappling with perimenopausal aphasia (and finding the word for forgetting words). | Lit Hub Memoir
- Katherine Kelaidis considers Russia’s new official dictionary as a prescriptive ideological document. | Lit Hub Politics
- Daniel Poppick recommends books about work by Kathryn Scanlan, Vivian Gornick, Franz Kafka, and others. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
- Bianca Stone’s TBR includes works by Jacques Lacan, Simone Weil, Paul Celan, and more. | Lit Hub Criticism
- “The denial of verifiable reality is as dangerous as manufactured propaganda.” From Gaza to Minneapolis, we are still being told to disbelieve our eyes. | Lit Hub Politics
- Michelle A. Williams explains how W.E.B. DuBois and James McCune Smith worked to combat American medical racism. | Lit Hub Health
- “Their understanding of use as essentially positive underwrote the casual ways they consented to being used, particularly intellectually, by one another.” On the intellectual, political, and artistic collaboration between Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin. | Lit Hub Biography
- “Let all your gentle brightness go with age / where all our ages go. Mother, goodnight. / The dying light is gone. You needn’t rage.” Read three poems by Robert Fanning from the collection, All We Are Given We Cannot Hold. | Lit Hub Poetry
- “Carson: There better be a gd pool.” Read from Emily Nemens’s new novel, Clutch. | Lit Hub Fiction
- “In Gaza, exile is not a metaphor or an intellectual category; it is the road south that families tread again and again.” Alaa Alqaisi on Edward Said and the Gaza of today. | The Nation
- In Richard L. Hasen’s book, The Voting Wars, he made the case for nationalizing elections. Trump has changed his mind. | Slate
- Darya Tsymbalyuk on Russia’s war on Ukraine and the grammar of survival. | Public Books
- Humans are invading social platforms for bots, and demonstrating in the process why AI can’t live without us. | The Verge
- Monica Potts explores the gender politics of Trump’s war on higher ed and the student loan crisis. | The New Republic
- Christopher Bell interviews Muntadhar al-Zaidi about being so much more than the journalist who threw a shoe at Bush’s head. | The Baffler
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