Lit Hub Weekly: June 17 - 21, 2024

• How do babies learn to understand language? Steven Mithen on the science of language acquisition in early childhood. | Lit Hub Science
• “Minty and Elizabeth were not alone in their desperate appeal to an unseen presence for emotional comfort.” How a young Harriet Tubman found solace in religion. | Lit Hub Biography
• “I want the novel to open up a hole in this world and lead somewhere else.” On why your novel needs an origin story. | Lit Hub Craft
• Layal Liverpool examines racist beauty standards, the hidden harms of hair relaxers, and Black women’s health. | Lit Hub Health
• Kaitlyn Greenidge talks to Nikole Hannah-Jones about The 1619 Project, five years on, and creating new spaces for Black creativity. | Harper’s Bazaar
• “I am pleased to see the dinner party as an occasion to intensify dissent rather than merely react to it.” Sarah Miller on the pleasures of fighting at dinner parties. | The Paris Review
• “Anger’s ability to craft stories by way of their proximity to the truth, rather than a concern for accuracy, is an exercise that, in this case, played on the vanities of a small biker gang.” Revisiting Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• Julia Carpenter explores the necessity and difficulty of accessing books in prison. | Esquire
• Yasmin El-Rifae talks to Ratik Asokan about Gaza, Egypt, and the state of journalism. | New York Review of Books
• “This is pretty good, but not that good.” A meditation on downtown scammers and New York restaurants. | n+1
• “It had come to resemble what I understood of Le Guin: pioneering, inventive, and rapidly fading.” Meghna Rao revisits Ursula K. Le Guin’s early-internet blog. | Dirt
• “Over eight years have passed since Lahiri announced her intention to leave behind the terrain of English letters and write only in Italian.” On Jhumpa Lahiri and choosing language. | Public Books
• Laura Kipnis takes you inside an AI reading companion that might push the limits of the uncanny valley. | Wired
• Richard Kelly Kemick on the challenge and humanity of finishing a dead person’s novel. | The Walrus
• On The Zone of Interest, domestic life, and Hannah Ardent’s discussion of the “banality of evil.” | The New Inquiry
• Benjamín Labatut traces AI’s intellectual predecessors and the “terror born of great advances that seem to suggest that, if we are not very careful, we may—with our own hands—bring forth a future where humanity has no place.” | Harper’s

Also on Lit Hub:

Nikole Hannah-Jones reflects on The 1619 Project • Imagining a world where queer kids have access to books that celebrate their identities • Francine Prose on the unfinished sexual revolution of the 1970s • Books that explore female friendship in adolescence •  Michelle Hart talks to Jill Ciment about autobiography and revisiting the past • How Joni Mitchell pioneered her own form of artistic genius • Matt Young considers the nuances of memoir and autofiction • On Summer Brenner’s Dust • On pre-publication anxiety and the virtues of crafting • Alex DiFrancesco on searching for spirituality alongside transness • Growing up in a multicultural family (and being a multilingual person) • Brock Clarke on Robert Olmstead’s Stay Here with Me • Tracy Chevalier on writing, bookshelf organization, and alternative career paths • On Black land ownership and historical injustice • “My Atmosphere,” a poem by Alan Felsenthal • Worried about the out of pocket costs of promoting your own book? • Why American journalists should be outraged about Palestinian journalists jailed in Israel • Paige McClanahan on how Lonely Planet revolutionized travel • What it means to write a novel in two languages • AI and the undervalued data workers who carry the industry • Nadina Galle on how New York City inspired urban greenery around the world • How to set the right ambiance for writing • DW Gibson looks back at how activists planned the Seattle WTO protests • Read “YouTube Comments on My Marriage,” a poem by Cristine Brache