LitHub Daily: August 19, 2016

• Why do I still care if the US men’s basketball team wins gold? Benjamin Markovits on winning streaks and the rest of the world. | Literary Hub
• In praise of the micro landscape: Angela Palm learns to see in miniature. | Literary Hub
• Anger, record-burnings, and the KKK: When the Beatles played Memphis, 50 years ago today. | Literary Hub
• Rachel Hall on the grandfather she never knew, a French resistance fighter. | Literary Hub
• “She always requested the strongest on offer. Lucky Strikes, Marlboro Reds.” Elizabeth Geoghegan on smoking with Lucia Berlin. | The Paris Review
• Pamela Paul, the New York Times Sunday Book Review editor, will now oversee the entirety of the paper’s books coverage. | The New York Times
• As if hit with an Engorgement Charm, the Harry Potter franchise just won’t stop growing: coming this September are three new e-books on Hogwarts. | Pottermore
• “We can work harder to mourn, get better at it, connect it better to how we live, how we care for people, how we educate people. It’s politics, for me.” A Q&A with Max Porter. | ZYZZYVA
• As the first anniversary of his death approaches, Orrin Devinsky remembers his best friend, Oliver Sacks. | The New Yorker
• How the discovery of letters Elizabeth Bishop wrote to her psychiatrist Dr. Ruth Foster raises questions about “the ethics of archival reconnaissance.”| Boston Review
• Laura Secor on Iran, revolutionary politics, and Children of Paradise. | Hazlitt
• “In the dark comes spiders out of art and first I’m sleuthed away.” An excerpt from Eimear McBride’s forthcoming novel, The Lesser Bohemians. | The Times Literary Supplement

Also on Literary Hub: Cover reveal: Traffic, tumor, high heels, jet lag, personal stereo, and other stuff! · 13 translated books by women you should read · Rerouting, rerouting, rerouting: from Drew Magary’s The Hike