TODAY: In 1883, Japanese novelist and short story writer Naoya Shiga is born.
- “The beginning of democracy requires a transport into a necessary fiction.” Judith Butler on why democracy needs the humanities. | Lit Hub Politics
- “The book’s effect is hypnotically telescopic, a vision of people we come to know across decades.” 5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
- Katherine Stewart explains how Americans can still keep the rising tide of fascism at bay. | Lit Hub Politics
- What do Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf, and Walt Whitman have in common? They self-published. | Lit Hub Craft
- “My 2025 worries were instantly annihilated while listening to George’s various litanies about not having a girlfriend and then about having one and not knowing how to get rid of her.” Anandi Mishra on the merits of escaping into old television. | Lit Hub TV
- William von Hippel on the psychology behind why humans need independence and connection. | Lit Hub Science
- “My mind kept returning to Leo’s, and I’d be sitting opposite Olivia, watching her stir her tea.” Read from Michelle de Kretser’s novel, Theory & Practice. | Lit Hub Fiction
- Julia Alekseyeva examines how documentaries by Matsumoto Toshio, Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker, and Agnès Varda are connected to anti-fascism. | Jacobin
- “They are all-accommodating, embracing all interests, contradictions, revisions, distractions, irrelevances; they permit one to explore everything and release one from the burden of having to conclude anything.” Jared Marcel Pollen on Montaigne’s essays. | The Point
- Noor Anand Chawla considers the sociological impact of E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India. | JSTOR Daily
- Beat Generation poet Gerd Stern has died at 96. | The New York Times
- “But while Kornbluh views the style of immediacy as a signal and catalyst of disempowerment, Patel, for her part, uses that same style…as part of her totalizing exposé of the industry of cultural production.” Sarah Brouillette on autofiction. | Public Books
- Mark Greif explains why government employees should hold the line: “In a bureaucratic showdown, heroism need not be grandiose.” | n+1
