Lit Hub Weekly: January 22-26, 2024

• Danell Jones on what Virginia Woolf’s infamous “Dreadnought Hoax” tells us about ourselves. | Lit Hub History
• It can be very hard to find a book that both you and your child enjoy… Which is why we created the Toddler Tolerability Index. | Lit Hub Parenting
• How witches shifted from daily healers to heretics and dangerous women under Christian rule. | Lit Hub Witches
• Author as illusionist: William Maxwell on literary magic and refusing to give up as a writer. | Lit Hub Craft
• Notes from the Gathering of the Ghosts, a ghostwriting conference. | The New York Times
• Anna Wiener considers the office memoir canon. | The New Yorker
• “Children’s books are not for teaching or moralizing or philosophizing. (That’s what articles about children’s books are for!)” B.J. Novak considers Caps for Sale. | The Paris Review
• “Think of it as a cousin of open-mindedness or a willingness to listen and carefully consider someone else’s truths.” Conversations on the power of intellectual humility. | JSTOR Daily
• Ben Lerner considers Ed Atkins’s Pianowork 2, “a sixteen-minute computer animation that involves an uncannily realistic digital avatar of Atkins playing Jürg Frey’s minimalist piano composition ‘Klavierstück 2.’” | NYRB
• A brief history of the United States’ accents and dialects (with an interactive map!). | Smithsonian Magazine
• “I needed the spectral company that these gifts summoned.” Leslie Jamison on the gifts that helped her survive her divorce. | The New York Times Magazine
• Kiley Reid talks to Rebecca Liu about American racism, education, and “seeing a socioeconomic situation[s] played out in a personal way.”| The Guardian
• Lincoln Michel on the difficulty of reviewing books. | Counter Craft
• “The ancestors that exist in our imaginations may not be entirely made up.” Samia Madwar explores the continued resonance of multigenerational novels. | The Walrus
• Clayton Childress and Dan Sinykin talk publishing in the age of conglomerates. | Public Books
• “By constructing her own mythology, and especially by refusing to let her lover (and readers) in, she makes her own life a work of art.” Victoria Baena considers the afterlives of Proust’s Albertine. | The Yale Review
• Five Palestinian writers living in the US reflect on the state of Palestinian life now. | The Nation
• “For the first time, the public will have the chance to think deeply about the birds we love and come up with new things to call them.” On the changing world of bird names! | Slate
• Inside the Copyright Office, “a small and sleepy office within the Library of Congress,” which is conducting a first-of-its-kind review of copyright law in the age of artificial intelligence. | The New York Times
• Barnes & Noble is planning to open a store in the Hamptons, and the Hamptons are not happy about it. | Curbed

Also on Lit Hub:

Sahar Delijani on the legacies of the Arab Spring • On the slow unraveling of a nation’s suburbs • Ten great new children’s books out in January • Why we all want to become our own boss • Moshe Kasher explores deaf history, language, and education as the hearing child of a deaf adult • Henry Threadgill and Brent Hayes Edwards on the creative process behind music composition • Zachary Pace on the push and pull of working in publishing as a writer • How Nellie Bly wrote creative nonfiction before it was a thing • Megan Hunter on the experience of bringing a novel to the big screen • Laurie Frankel on throwing away half her book while writing it • Of unborn ghosts and ancestral murder: Brian Klaas on trying to celebrate the chaos that led to us • Jennifer Keishin Armstrong in praise of all the literary mean girls • How doctors treated diabetes before insulin therapy: Gary Taubes on the history of diet-based remedies for chronic illness • How Frantz Fanon put theory into practice • A long-lost memoir from a Holocaust survivor • How America’s first Black cinematic vampire subverted stereotypes • Introducing “Am I the Literary Asshole?,” a new column in which Kristen Arnett judges your (bad) bookish behavior