Lit Hub Weekly: August 5 - 9, 2024

• “Perhaps it isn’t such a big deal if the algorithm knows me well enough…but what if that kind of surveillance is taken to its logical extreme?” Helen Phillips on writing speculative fiction in the age of AI. | Lit Hub In Conversation
• “I want to live in a world where we can finally hear Palestinian laughter unburdened by the promise of a cruel future…” Nabil Echchaibi on finding joy amidst the crush of occupation. | Lit Hub Criticism
• What The Decameron reveals about contemporary anxiety and storytelling as a means of preserving our humanity. | Lit Hub TV
• Finding literary inspiration in 15th-century Italian poet Luigi da Porto, Romeo and Juliet’s original creator. | Lit Hub Biography
• “Where conservatives have been the traditional foe of academic freedom, in the wake of October 7, lines of red and blue are increasingly blurred.” The independence of public universities is under attack, writes Shilpa Jindia. | The Baffler
• Joshua Rothman explores the benefits of studying our ignorance. | The New Yorker
• Joe Field, owner of longstanding shop Flying Colors Comics and founder of Free Comic Book Day, discusses the state of comics publishing and sales. | The Comics Journal
• How much help did J.D. Vance have writing Hillbilly Elegy? Sam Kashner talks to some of the people behind the reductive bestseller. | Air Mail
• Writers Against the War on Gaza has called for a boycott of PEN America. | WAWOG
• In Utah, 13 books have now been banned from public schools state-wide. | The Salt Lake Tribune 
• “I am powerfully drawn to the way mystics experience what they experience, and then think, speak, and write about that experience.” Simon Critchley on mysticism. | The Paris Review
• Jesmyn Ward on how she first discovered Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor and Toni Morrison. | The Washington Post
• In the age of AI, what separates humans from machines? “Writing poems that make your girl cry—add that to the list of abilities that used to make (some) humans unique but no longer do.” | The New Yorker
• “I see that for the moment your morale is good. I hope this will last.” Read four letters between siblings Simone and André Weil. | The Paris Review
• “My mother has read my novel and is my biggest champion. Soon I will get to read her new work—in translation, sized up to a 24-point font.” Abraham Chang on publishing and aging. | Esquire
• How the Frankfurt School engaged with Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche. | Jacobin
• “Although I think being nice is the best policy in most situations, I also think that a limited case exists for being mean.” Matt Dinan makes the case for truth. | The Hedgehog Review
• On the history of anti-trans panic in sports: “As is often the case, these unscientific decisions were made by people who purported to be defenders of science.” | The Nation
• Jonathan Kramnick on the craft of literary criticism. | Public Books

Also on Lit Hub:

The case for why removing methane from the atmosphere • How Catalyst and Iskanchi Press are bringing African writers to wider audiences • “Eels have an uncanny knack for grabbing our attention” • Do humans deserve extinction? • Fiction writers are getting fainting and swooning all wrong • Melissa Broder on Elaine Kraf’s The Princess of 72nd Street • Fictionalizing the tumultuous and toxic relationship between architects Eileen Gray and Le Corbusier • Lena Valencia on writing place like a character • Helen Phillips recommends literature about the near future • A history of nomadic pastoralism in Southeastern Europe • Kat Tang on giving up writing (and starting over again) • Are you the asshole if you want to tell your friends they have bad taste in poetry? • The rigorous (but humorous) ways humans first studied dinosaurs • How football built community among deaf students • On emerging waves of evangelicals in the 1970s and 80s • Grocery shopping as a means of character development • Alex Zucker on translating Magdaléna Platzová’s Life After Kafka • Trying to teach travel writing amid UCLA student protests • On the systemic abuse of Black refugees in Israel • Investigating the shocking assassination of Gauri Lankesh • Do dolphins give each other names?