Stories have always been an important part of the human experience. Even people who don’t consume books, movies, or television shows still embrace stories. It’s how we recount our experiences and how lessons have long been passed from one generation to the next, even before we could use to to reach the masses.
There’s a reason good storytellers become icons now that you can tell that story to millions of people
Nothing Better Than a Whole Lot of Books: In Praise of Bibliomania
Antibiotics could trigger immune response through gut microbiome metabolites
Ernest Hemingway owned 9,000, Thomas Jefferson 6,487, and Hannah Arendt 4,000: How to understand the urge to harbor more books than you can read?»
“I was twenty-five, young enough to be severely disillusioned by the limits I had encountered [in grad school]… I was also nostalgic for my life outside of academia, which I had never fully experienced. So I turned the Barnard offer down and left philosophy…” — Naomi Zack’s 2021 Dewey Lecture
Sam Altman
The diary of an Egyptian journalist
Postcards from Woolf
Everything is TV
Chinese cookbooks
Gillian Tindall, R.I.P.
Acoustic amateurs
Save the university press
Margaret Atwood memoir
PhD overproduction
Post-literacy
The campus charade
Bigfoot belief
Dorian Gray
War on leaves
Life on Venus
V. R. Lang
Jonathan Lear, R.I.P.
Ghostbots
Predicting primes
Extreme cleaning
Wodehouse problem
New Virginia Woolf
Fowler’s English
End of thinking?
Politics of LitHub
City of books
Cemetery writing
Modern alchemy
Faust in the ’60s
Great American travel book
A YouTube education
Art market 'doom'?
Robert Macfarlane
Judith Butler
Self-publishing
'Settler colonialism'
'Home Alone'
AI vs. authors
Dark academia
Arrogant apes
On translation
Easy As
Jonathan Karp
Sixth extinction
Anti-people pleasing
'On Tyranny'
Essential Baldwin
David Crockett
Bring back the Blue-Book
"1984"
"Mocha Dick"
August reading
Feuding college presidents
Spotify playlists
WaPo struggles
The MingKwai
Vladimir Sorokin
Who is using AI?
Best Books of 2025
Susan Choi
Remembrance of scents past
Mystery shipwreck
Abundance
Elmore Leonard
Picasso in Tehran
Academia under siege
Publishing Pepys
Olúfemi O. Táíwò
Solar storms
James Lloydovich Patterson, R.I.P.
On charisma
Anonymous critics
Travel writer's dilemma
Best of Atwood
Art of bad writing
Edmund White, R.I.P.
Ancient psychedelics?
Alasdair MacIntyre, R.I.P.
Summer reading
Ngugi wa Thiong’o, R.I.P.
The Met
Robert Macfarlane
Hobbit obsession
Ann Goldstein
"Mafalda"
Niall Ferguson
Jamestown brides
Coetzee's mother tongue
Washington Post
“The Connoisseur of Kisses”
Balanchine years
Higher ed's comeuppance
Andrea Long Chu
Bringing up baby
Missing torsos