- Dan Albert looks at the history and consequences of one of the great abuses of police power in contemporary life: the traffic stop. | Lit Hub
- How to eulogize an animal: Gabrielle Bellot on Pablo Neruda, Virginia Woolf, and saying goodbye to pets. | Lit Hub
- “I feel an obligation to consider whether the stuff I champion represents the ideals I uphold.” Jim DeRogatis on R. Kelly and separating art from the artist. | Lit Hub
- “The public swimming pool is a heterotopia.” Ellena Savage on the complicated past, present, and future of pools. | Lit Hub
- Write what you (don’t) know: Jake Wolff on the fine art of researching for fiction. | Lit Hub
- Darrel J. McLeod remembers his first glimpse of the city as a young Cree boy. | Lit Hub
- Michael Neimann looks at 8 crime novels of displacement and diaspora, from The Sympathizer to The Constant Gardener. | CrimeReads
- This week in Secrets of the Book Critics: Annie Galvin on Samuel Beckett, Fever Dream, and Jia Tolentino. | Book Marks
- “Amelia Bedelia turns passive aggression into a kind of art.” On the quiet subversiveness of Amelia Bedelia, “the Bartleby of domestic work.” | The New Yorker
- “There is absolutely no civilization without migration”: Aleksandar Hemon on his family’s displacement, and the transformative potential of migration. | The Globe and Mail
- Bill Wittliff, the Texas literary icon who helped adapt Lonesome Dove for TV, has died at 79. | Dallas News
- Read an interview with Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, the photographer and filmmaker behind the new Toni Morrison documentary, The Pieces I Am. | Publishers Weekly
- A seance, “ a crate load of Airedale terriers,” and a brilliantly passive-aggressive pseudonym: the story of Agatha Christie’s 11-day disappearance in 1926. | The New York Times
- Do you love books (and your phone) but aren’t exactly the cheery type? Welcome to “Deep Bookstagram,” the weird, horror-tinged side of Bookstagram “that only the bravest—and the most bored—typically enter.” | Mashable
- “We don’t talk about it, but there are parts of war that are glamorous, that are exciting. There’s a part of it that’s incredibly seductive.” Read an interview with author and veteran Elliot Ackerman. | Esquire
Also on Lit Hub: On Otherppl, Kathryn Scanlan on the origins of Aug 9—Fog • Namwali Serpell talks mosquito swarm narrators and women who won’t be “cured” on Reading Women • Inside the great bookstores of Paris • Five books with complex and credible child narrators • Read from Elvia Wilk’s debut novel Oval.