Lit Hub Daily: May 30, 2019

• When mystics and mediums convinced scientists the paranormal was normal: Matt Tompkins on the golden age of talking to dead people. | Lit Hub
• “What is it about women and competition and horses that creates such dramatic capital?” Alyson Hagy on the unlikely winner of the world’s toughest horse race. | Lit Hub
• The radical power of writing in the first-person plural: Lynn Steger Strong on new books by Jamil Zaki and Christian Kiefer. | Lit Hub
• “In order to help anxious children, I needed to help their parents.” Amanda Stern wrote about childhood anxiety so other kids won’t have to. | Lit Hub
• Death and the poet: Kathleen Volk Miller considers Whitman at her husband’s grave. | Lit Hub
• Attention, superstitious writers: you might want to be extra careful on these most-cursed dates. | Lit Hub
• Tressie McMillan Cottom on the case against R. Kelly, Michael Wolff’s return to Trumpland, and more of the Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
• A look at the life and crimes of Kazuko Fukuda, who tried to outrun the bizarrely short statute of limitations for murder in Japan. From Tori Telfer and Criminal Broads. | CrimeReads
• “What Café du Dôme was to the Lost Generation, the dining hall at Bennington College was to Generation X.” An oral history of Bennington in the words of Donna Tartt, Bret Easton Ellis, Jonathan Lethem, and those who knew them. | Esquire
• “We have read it on a boat. We have read it with a goat. We have read it here and there. We have read it everywhere.” How Dr. Seuss’s Oh, The Places You’ll Go! became a ubiquitous (and cliché) graduation gift. | The Washington Post
• From Toni Morrison to Janet Mock to Dorothy Roberts: Ibram X. Kendi has curated an antiracist reading list to help contemporary Americans transcend their country’s past. | The New York Times Book Review
• Book editor Anne Perry’s guide to London, from the best umbrella shop to a hotel where a cat named Sir Godfrey lives. | New York Magazine
• “If all else fails, my final piece of advice is the simplest of all: Laugh.” Judith Viorst (author of, among other things, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day) on how to be happy. | Glamour
• “When I’m being bad and procrastinating, I’ll stop writing to pace and eat Chili Cheese Fritos or make a Blue Apron or just like make a pot of rice”: Tommy Pico likes food, and he’s here to tell you all about it. | Entropy
• Max Grinnell writes on how Chicago’s dwindling independent bookstores have had to compete with rising rents, online retailers and cell phones. | Chicago Reader
• “Secrets have come to seem quaint, something vaguely legacy or vintage, like glossy magazines or flip phones.” On fiction in the age of radical transparency. | Bookforum

Also on Lit Hub: On Literary Disco, how toxic masculinity harms men • Lacy Johnson and Anjali Enjeti discuss the state of reproductive rights on Fiction/Non/Fiction • An oral history of the magazine for trans men that became a movement • Read from Sinan Antoon’s new novel, The Book of Collateral Damage.