Lit Hub Daily: November 8, 2024

TODAY: In 1894, Robert Frost’s first poem, “My Butterfly” is published in The New York Independent.

What if the Covid safety net had been a starting point for change? Steven W. Thrasher looks back at America’s brief experiment in true government care. | Lit Hub Politics
Jaydra Johnson on the intersections of literature, classism, and what it means to be called white trash. | Lit Hub Memoir
“It’s hard to know how a film as perverse as this could have ended satisfyingly in a way that keeps faith with its themes.” Tim Robey remembers Babe: Pig In the City, the flopped sequel to a beloved family flick. | Lit Hub Film
Writers who procrastinate: you’re not alone! How Miranda July, George Saunders, and more think about not-writing. | Lit Hub Craft
Eric Olson talks to Neal Stephenson: “But even in a relatively abbreviated outing, there’s an awful lot to learn from the past.” | Lit Hub In Conversation
Christopher Cox examines Woodrow Wilson’s relationship with his first wife, Ellen Axson Wilson: “In Wilson’s chivalric framework, women were required to be submissive precisely so that men could protect the weaker sex.” | Lit Hub Biography
“[W]hat happened…is far worse than what happened in 2016. This time it isn’t an aberration. Trump is now the ultimate Republican insider.” Mark Krotov on the election. | n+1

A century of sandwiches: Diana Hubbell talks to Barry Enderwick of Sandwiches of History fame. | Atlas Obscura
Perhaps unsurprisingly, we’re entering a boom time for “cozy, whimsical” fiction. | The New York Times
“On impulse, I picked up my old college copy of King Lear and looked through it for the scene of Lear raving at the storm.” Lynn Steger Strong on hurricane season reading. | The New Yorker
In a not-so-shocking turn of events, a lot of people are buying The Handmaid’s Tale. | The Guardian
Fintan O’Toole on why “disinhibition” describes the state of American politics. | New York Review of Books

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