Lit Hub Daily: January 15, 2025
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1812, Lord Byron takes his seat in the Parliament of the United Kingdom.
- “And the problem with being less struck, less susceptible—with taking everything less to heart—is that you cannot defend yourself against being struck by what hurts without also parrying what would leave you awestruck or moonstruck or lovestruck.” Jane Zwart on Ross Gay and Amy Leach. | Lit Hub Criticism
- On Nan Goldin and Germany’s “Never Again is Now” resolution: “The new resolution does not protect Jewish communities; it shields Germany’s moral self-image by focusing of the “special relationship” with Israel.” | Lit Hub Art
- Layne Fargo cautions against literary envy, and proposes a really wild idea: celebrating others’ literary successes. | Lit Hub Craft
- “More than any other single case, Milliken v. Bradley is where the promise of Brown v. Board of Education ended.” Michelle Adams on how the failure of desegregation in the North reveals America’s lingering racial fault lines. | Lit Hub Politics
- Raúl Rojas traces the origins and etymologies of our most-used mathematical terms to the Islamic Golden Age. | Lit Hub History
- Zeinab Badawi explores the African origins of humanity’s earliest ancestors: “We are an African animal, an African species who colonized the world, at different times and in different ways.” | Lit Hub Science
- “The club wasn’t really called the Bunker, but that’s what I will call it, because that’s how we experienced it…” Read from Aria Aber’s novel, Good Girl. | Lit Hub Fiction
- Jess Cotton on Olga Tokarczuk’s “neo-realism.” | The Nation
- Guadalupe Nettel examines how writers create art and meaning from pain like “transforming base metals into gold.” | Words Without Borders
- Mike Davis on Los Angeles, the ultrawealthy, and fire, from his 1998 book Ecology of Fear. | Verso
- “These shifts are only going to accelerate as more and more outlets, traditional and otherwise, kiss ass to Trump..or make themselves mystical, vibes-based and ambiguously apolitical in order to survive what will be a nasty transition characterized by increased censorship, algorithmic siloing, and accelerated platform death.” Kate Wagner asks, what are we even doing? | The Late Review
- On capitalism, New Age spirituality, and a (literary) history of Erewhon. | The Baffler
- Jasper Nathaniel chronicles a three-day rodeo at Madison Square Garden. | The Paris Review
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