Lit Hub Daily: May 20, 2022

• Can national service keep America from another civil war? | Lit Hub Politics

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• “It had already been simmering in the pot, but now one of the greatest combinations in music history was about to erupt.” When Biggie Smalls and Puff Daddy collaborated on Ready to Die. | Lit Hub Music

• Alexander Maksik talks to Dwyer Murphy about wellness frauds, post-recession New York, and rejecting fashionable politics. | Lit Hub In Conversation

• How do we give names to nature? | Lit Hub Nature

• So close to lost: When the entire history of pre-NBA African American basketball lived in a plastic Duane Reade bag. | Lit Hub Sports

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• Mesha Maren and Fernando Flores discuss music, memory, and the topographies of writing. | Lit Hub In Conversation

• Erasure and expansion, the unknown and the infinite: Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza considers the many uses of the letter X. | Lit Hub

• Why the novelist Ann Hood became an airline stewardess in the 70s (hint: it has to do with writing). | Lit Hub Memoir

• Emma Straub’s This Time Tomorrow, Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa’s His Name Is George Floyd, and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Translating Myself and Others all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks

• Decolonize your traditional mystery reading list with these recommendations from Christopher Huang. | CrimeReads

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• “Why is ‘classical’ used to describe some cultures and ‘primitive’ others?” Stephanie Wong talks to Sarah Derbew about the future of classics and finding Blackness in antiquity. | Public Books

• In 1962, Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl promised sexual liberation. Now, writes Megan Garber, it reads like an omen. | The Atlantic

• Lessons on book bans from an earlier culture war. | The Nation

• “Your anxieties are your identity now. You don’t need to be fixed. Just discussed.” Steven Phillips-Horst on the “Tedcore” genre of self-help books. | The Guardian

• Maris Kreizman explores the history and future of the Library of Congress. | Smithsonian Magazine

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• New travel books to read this spring and summer. | The Washington Post

• “Translation is nothing but a form of writing. If anything, it’s more of a pure form of writing.” Jhumpa Lahiri discusses working between languages. | NPR

• “Writing for me was an act of survival.” Alex Espinoza talks to Reyna Grande about researching and writing historical fiction. | Los Angeles Review of Books

Also on Lit Hub: Natalie Diaz on the Mojave language and where English fails us • Jonathan Lee on hooking a reader with the first line • Read from Nina Shope’s latest novel, Asylum