Lit Hub Daily: June 29, 2020

• “Maybe the WPA let new passions into the public space.” David A. Taylor on how the government supported the arts during the (first) Great Depression. | Lit Hub History
• Missing the drama of sports? James Tate Hill has some audiobook recommendations to fill the competitive void. | Lit Hub Audiobooks
• Election Day in small-town America: Heather Lende on running for office in Haines, Alaska, population: 2,500. | Lit Hub Politics
• “Humans are blessed with an inner navigator that is immeasurably more sophisticated and capable than any artificial system.” Michael Bond breaks down our internal GPS. | Lit Hub Science
• Filmmaker Sara Fattahi talks to Pamela Cohn about telling the stories of war from a woman’s perspective. | Lit Hub Film
• “I had to explain for too long, too hard, and too loudly about what seemed like obvious problems to me.” Rep. Pramila Jayapal on changing things from the inside. | Lit Hub Politics
• Moby-Dick, The Golden Notebook, The Call of the Wild, and more rapid-fire book recs from Andrew Martin. | Book Marks
• “Asian immigrants and their descendants have been offered the opportunity by both Black people and white people to choose sides in the Black-white racial divide, and we have far too often chosen the white side.” Viet Thanh Nguyen on the trap of the “model minority” myth. | TIME
• Jennifer Egan is writing a “companion volume” to A Visit from the Goon Squad, which turns 10 this month. | EW
• Rep. Ilhan Omar on writing her memoir, collective transformation, and what happens “when elected officials actually engage the people.” | Los Angeles Review of Books
• Andrés Barba recommends books about childhoods “wholly unprotected from the gaze and surveillance of adults.” | PEN World Voices
• In the 1950s, James Baldwin and Langston Hughes reviewed each other just a few years apart. Their takes were “mutually harsh.” | The New York Times
• “There’s something re-energising about connecting to feeling, even if that feeling is pain.” Black British poets on the revolutionary power of poetry. | The Guardian

Also on Lit Hub: Art Young’s Dante-inspired satire replaced demons with exploitative capitalists • Arrested for wearing a bathing suit: life as an early female swimmer • Read from Mónica Ramón Ríos’ English language debut, Cars on Fire, trans. by Robin Myers.