Lit Hub Daily: October 23, 2024

On Maggie Smith as Miss Jean Brodie: “She has a heady, infectious sense of her own powers—her ‘prime’ is a drug of which the audience also partakes and feels the intoxicating effects.” | Lit Hub Film
“I realized the magnitude of the problem and concluded that, in most cases, the politician knows they are lying.” How politicians deceive Americans. | Lit Hub Politics
Nguyễn Bình on why Edgar Allan Poe was, for a time, “the single most admired American author in Vietnam.” | Lit Hub Criticism
Naomi Cohn meditates on braille, loss, and blindness’ many forms. | Lit Hub Memoir
Eugenia Bone explains the less magical side of psilocybin and chronicles the many different kind of bad trips. | Lit Hub Health
“The aristocratic breakfasts of Victorian and Edwardian times were not so much dainty repasts as full-on gastronomic assaults.” A British royal history of breakfast (and a recipe for baked eggs). | Lit Hub Food
“I hope I can look long and hard enough to let the mess and the mystery break my heart.” Molly McCully Brown on the power of poetry to sustain our spirits. | Lit Hub Craft
Tyler Wetherall on channeling her childhood diaries through fiction: “I recently found an item that I assumed was lost to time: My ‘Snog Log.’” | Lit Hub Craft
“I had always lived in dreams, among the ghosts of language.” Read from Christian Kracht’s novel Eurotrash, translated by Daniel Bowles. | Lit Hub Fiction
When election ballots doubled as (artistic) political propaganda. | Smithsonian Magazine 
Here’s a little good news: grandparents across the country are fighting back against book bans. | The Cut
“We humans have long tried, often mistakenly, to differentiate ourselves from nonhuman animals—by arguing that only we have souls, or use tools, or are capable of self-awareness. Perhaps we should see what the birds have to say.” Rivka Galchen on birdsong. | The New Yorker
Don Kaye on the iconic Harlan Ellision-penned episode of The Outer Limits. | Reactor 
“But when I quit a job, my employer always looked profoundly relieved.” Sandra Newman on finding a job. | Granta
On Ryan White, HIV/AIDS, and the value of innocence: “As soon as White entered the national consciousness in mid-1985, his seeming proximity to death shaped his life story.” | Public Books