Lit Hub Weekly: May 13 - 17, 2024

• “She wrote for everyone who has let the sharp edge of regret dull into a daily ache, who has been surprised by love, by need, by the desire for more.” Jonny Diamond on seeing his mother in Alice Munro. | Lit Hub Criticism
• This one’s for the Yinzers. Ed Simon on the Glaswegian origins of Pittsburghese. | Lit Hub History
• What happens when you adopt a constitutional lifestyle? You might end up parading around Manhattan with a musket. | Lit Hub Politics
• Jessica Shattuck recommends a reading list of of the 1960s’ and 1970s’ protest movements to understand activism today. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
• Who are campuses meant to be safe for? “Students aged 19 or 20 found themselves under attack by men in their thirties and forties, some claiming to have had military or paramilitary training.” | Los Angeles Review of Books
• Alexandra Alter visits The Lynx, Lauren Groff’s new bookstore. | The New York Times
• “If our friends, or our partners, find out that we consider the privacy of our attention at least slightly sacred, to the extent that it still belongs to us, so much the better.” Lillian Fishman considers the read receipt. | Granta
• Where are bookbinders hanging out these days? TikTok. | The Guardian
• Jacob Silverman revisits Computer Power and Human Reason, the 1976 book and “moral guiding light” by the man who invented the chatbot. | The New Republic
• Graduate student reporter Deeva Gupta shares a firsthand account of the The Gaza Solidarity Encampment at Columbia. | n+1
• “Any story that’s going to be any good is usually going to change.” Read Alice Munro’s 1994 interview with Jeanne McCulloch and Mona Simpson. | The Paris Review
• Kathleen Hanna and Brontez Purnell discuss trauma, memoir, and birthday twins. | Interview
• “Aristotle pondered why it was always the thoughtful ones, like poets, artists, and philosophers (himself included), who succumbed.” A brief history of melancholy. | The MIT Press Reader
• “For nearly a century, the oil and gas industry has been obsessed with controlling its image in the media, especially in outlets that cater to elite audiences.” How oil companies manipulate journalism. | The Nation
• Brad Phillips on obsession, addiction, and Scrabble: “This morning, before breakfast, I played nineteen games of Scrabble on my phone.”  | The Paris Review
• “Although Munro, who died Monday at 92, rarely depicted the sex explicitly…she wrote with such definite shading of looks and sound and erotically registered detail that you feel the shape of the sex more than you read it.” On how Alice Munro wrote sex. | Vulture
• “What would it mean to interrogate labor as the engine behind conglomerate publishing and the core of its systemic failure?” Miriam Gordis on publishing’s labor crisis. | Verso
• Read an open letter by a group of students who faced administrative discipline for participating in Harvard’s Gaza solidarity encampment. | Public Books

Also on Lit Hub:

Kate Feiffer on reading her mother’s x-rated novel •  Jon Fosse on saying the unsayable •  How wildfires threatened a high school football season • Bee Sacks on coming out as a nonbinary author • Teddy Wayne asks authors 7 burning questions • Lilly Dancyger on how to support a friend through grief • What if you die before you finish your book? • Jane Ciabattari in conversation with Claire Messud • How Annie Ernaux inspired Colombe Schneck to write against shame and solitude • Wendy Doniger on Amit Chaudhuri’s Freedom Song • Studs Terkel talks to Babe Secoli about her work as a supermarket checker • Kimberly King Parsons recommends sisterly fiction • Lou Stoppard on pairing photographs with Annie Ernaux’s Exteriors • 4 must-see museums • What penis envy gets wrong about trans people • The dehumanizing use of language in Japanese internment camps • Kristen Arnett answers your awkward questions about bad bookish behavior • Elias Canetti considers the many guises of death • On translating the forgotten Argentine writer Ángel Bonomini • Carolyn Kubler recommends small town fiction • The neurological impulses that fuel parent-child bonds • On writing “the kind of book that keeps me awake.” • A reading list of superstitions • Anna Dorn shares some writing tips that prove how good it is to be in the middle • The magic of hybrid writing • Thomas D. Seeley demystifies one of the greatest mysteries of honeybee behavior