Lit Hub Daily: January 29, 2026
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1763, French Enlightenment poet Louis Racine dies.
- Naomi S. Baron considers the role of chatbots in contemporary literacy: “With AI, where does the prospect for empathy come in? In a word, nowhere.” | Lit Hub Technology
- Mariam Naiem chronicles the day Ukraine rose up for democracy in 2025’s A Brief History of a Long War, the most successful graphic novel in the country’s history. | Lit Hub Politics
- Stephen Fishbach on writing a novel (and taking inspiration from his time on Survivor). | Lit Hub Craft
- What’s on Bianca Stone’s TBR? Titles by Jacques Lacan, Simone Weil, Paul Celan, and more. | Lit Hub Criticism
- Julian Barnes’s Departure(s), Val McDermid’s Winter, Ben Markovits’ The Rest of Our Lives, and Jung Chang’s Fly, Wild Swans all feature among January’s best reviewed books. | Book Marks
- Leslie Cohen explains how to survive when you’re between writing projects. | Lit Hub Craft
- “It was through a passive-aggressive urge to shape the literal, as well as political, landscape that he became an iconic force in the larger story of continental empire.” Why Thomas Jefferson couldn’t resist fame. | Lit Hub Biography
- George Newman considers motivation and imitation as keys to successful creativity. | Lit Hub Science
- Robert Polito explores Bob Dylan’s reckoning with America’s history and present through his COVID-era album. | Lit Hub Music
- “It was not a pretty neighborhood. There was too much hunger and lack for gorgeous architecture to take hold.” Read from April Reynolds’s new novel, The Shape of Dreams. | Lit Hub Fiction
- Before Heated Rivalry, there was… Don DeLillo’s pseudonymously published erotic hockey novel? | The New York Times
- “A woodchuck lives as he’s meant to, whistling at every moment to the perfect freedom of the nonentity we imagine. His limitation is limitless.” Nick Neeley on Thoreau, Dillard, and the noble woodchuck. | Orion
- “Amid the compulsory enthusiasm and fatalistic inevitability that seems to be the hallmark of AI chatbot marketing, we should ask ourselves whether it’s really all so simple.” On LLMs and the fight for knowledge. | The Baffler
- Darshana Narayanan explores the history (and efficacy) of having children in space. | Broadcast
- “For a long time, I really felt frustrated by it like, ‘I wish I could feel things less intensely.’ I’m only starting to really feel grateful for it.” Jennette McCurdy tells Sofia Coppola about writing Half His Age. | Interview
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