Lit Hub Daily: October 28, 2025
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1903, Evelyn Waugh is born.
- “If Kafka were alive today, he wouldn’t be unpublished—he’d be under NDA.” On the dangerous fine print of creative contract law. | Lit Hub Craft
- Anthony Vinci examines space warfare, spy satellites, and espionage’s new era. | Lit Hub Politics
- Joseph J. Ellis explains how little faith America’s Founding Fathers had in democracy. | Lit Hub History
- “All efforts were futile. We were merely spectators to the ways of nature.” Jeff Wilser chronicles the dramatic and dangerous twists of a 2008 whaling research expedition. | Lit Hub Nature
- What single-celled marine organisms have to do with one of the most influential illustrated books ever published. | Lit Hub Science
- The 23 new books out today include titles by Zadie Smith, Catherine Newman, Cameron Crowe, and more! | Lit Hub Reading Lists
- How Audley Moore’s fight for reparations influenced a generation of Black activists. | Lit Hub Biography
- Jane Ciabattari talks to Susan Straight about chronicling COVID in literature: “I stood at the gate and listened to my neighbors and the traveler nurses. Their backpacks were their lives, and their camaraderie.” | Lit Hub In Conversation
- Ron Rosenbaum breaks down Bob Dylan’s reaction to receiving his Nobel Prize. | Lit Hub Music
- “His full name was Matthew Echota, a cripplingly shy, talented, smart, and handsome boy, although many poked fun at him for being short, the poor soul, trailing along like a rabbit trying to keep up…” Read from Brandon Hobson’s new novel, The Devil Is a Southpaw. | Lit Hub Fiction
- How Marjorie Ingall learned to find joy in scary children’s books. | The New York Times
- Beyond “tools in the service of human productivity”: Laura Tripaldi explores the wondrous world of useless robots. | The MIT Press Reader
- Manvir Singh traces the modern history humanizating of monstrosity. | The New Yorker
- Steven Levy explains what happens when LLMs go rogue: “Yet here was Anthropic’s pride and joy, acting like a film noir hoodlum.” | Wired
- “We are the testing ground. Every single state needs to be paying attention.” Jennifer Smith Richards reports on why the rise of Christian nationalism in Oklahoma schools models the far-right’s vision for education in America. | ProPublica
- Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins interviews Granta editor Thomas Meaney about leftist politics, literature, and the future: “Like any instrument of culture, it operates through an alternating process of attention and neglect.” | The Nation
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