TODAY: In 1972, Betty Smith dies.
- “Remember that every bit of worldbuilding that makes it to the page adds to the set, and stage space is limited.” Erika Swyler on the art of worldbuilding. | Lit Hub Craft
- James H. Sweet chronicles the mystery of the Black Prince’s shipwreck and the complex history of anticolonial mutinies. | Lit Hub History
- On racial capitalism, coercion, and the reality of college football: “Everything in college football is about making money . . . except if you’re a so-called student-athlete. Then you can’t make any money. You’re not allowed to.” | Lit Hub Sports
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Aria Aber’s Good Girl, Colette Shade’s Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything, and Pico Iyer’s Aflame all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. | Book Marks
- Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum recommends books about wild girls by Sarah Moss, Jamaica Kincaid, Carson McCullers and more. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
- Caroline Eden writes in praise of the magnificent melon and its long journey from Central Asia to Western Europe. | Lit Hub Food
- Kyle Paoletta explores language, survival, and failed human efforts to conquer the desert. | Lit Hub Nature
- “This was where the bag of milk would be, defrosting, if he’d only remembered to defrost it.” Read from Andrew Lipstein’s novel, Something Rotten. | Lit Hub Fiction
- David Lynch has died at 78. | The New York Times
- “It wouldn’t be accurate to even call it a battle. More a full-scale appropriation of place.” Mya Frazier chronicles the ongoing struggle between data and land. | Switchyard
- Amna A. Akbar on How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Luigi Mangione, and “a surge in genuine curiosity about the need for radical action.” | n+1
- Jia Pingwa reflects on friendship. | Granta
- Is your local librarian a spy? Probably not, but Greg Barnhisel looks at the World War II-era librarians and scholars who were. | The New Republic
- Ellen Wexler considers Zora Neale Hurston’s obsession with the biblical villain Herod the Great. | Smithsonian Magazine
