Lit Hub Daily: May 5, 2025
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1818, Karl Marx is born.
- Aron Solomon explains why the legal profession needs to stand up to Trump: “By not pushing back hard against this executive overreach, the country’s most powerful firms set a chilling precedent.” | Lit Hub Politics
- After 20 years, Kazuo Ishiguro reflects on the decades-long process behind Never Let Me Go. | Lit Hub Craft
- Sarah Manguso and Liana Finck “challenge the popular depiction of children as adorable idiots” in a series of drawings that explore youthful philosophy. | Lit Hub Art
- “There are moments when a place you live stops being livable. Sometimes that arrives slowly, like a leak. Sometimes all at once.” A dispatch from Oliver Baez Bendorf, poet in exile. | Lit Hub Memoir
- These 10 great May nonfiction books include work by Bridget Read, Amanda Hess, and Robert Macfarlane. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
- “Neither of us was thinking about poetry, yet it was the only way we had of saying anything to each other.” Astrid López Méndez on feeling resistance to poetry. | Lit Hub Craft
- From woodcuttings to ancient sketches, Jessica Poundstone explores a human history of depicting dogs in art. | Lit Hub Art
- Disha Bose recommends novels about female friendship by Elena Ferrante, R.F. Kuang, Sally Rooney, and more! | Lit Hub Reading Lists
- Peter Conrad considers the relationship between Charles Dickens’s own Dickensian childhood and his writing. | Lit Hub Biography
- “The kids at Calvin Village Elementary School made me feel better and worse about myself.” Read from Demree McGhee’s short story collection, Sympathy for Wild Girls. | Lit Hub Fiction
- “What is happening at this moment does not dictate what is going to be happening tomorrow.” Angela Davis discusses Gaza, June Jordan, and solidarity. | Democracy Now!
- Melina Moe considers Amanda Jones’ That Librarian: The Fight Against Book Banning in America, which attempts to address both “the public defamation of a librarian accused of willfully using book selection to pervert patrons, and the broader question of how books should be selected (and challenged) in public collections.” | Los Angeles Review of Books
- Jennifer Smith Richards and Jodi S. Cohen report on the gutting of the Department of Education’s civil rights offices. | ProPublica
- Forget LLMs! Hannah Katznelson looks at 16th century language automation models. | Aeon
- In the age of A.I., Joshua Rothman wonders: “In how much of our thinking lives will we be passengers, rather than pilots?” | The New Yorker
- Dana Liebelson on the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kennedy Center, and Trump’s attempts to conquer the arts. | The New Republic
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