LitHub’s 50 Biggest Literary Stories Of 2025

He who knows no hardships will know no hardihood. He who faces no calamity will need no courage. Mysterious though it is, the characteristics in human nature which we love best grow in a soil with a strong mixture of troubles.

~ Harry Emerson Fosdick

 In 2023, Paul Scheer spent a few days talking to fathers who accompanied their daughters to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour in LA, either as concert-goers or just chauffeurs. I love this video. One of the dads summed up the vibe of being there for your loved ones, even if it’s maybe not entirely your thing:

Life is moments. Life has nothing to do with money, nothing to do with things. Life is dancing, that is life! It’s when you feel happy. Their happiness is my happiness.

Elizabeth Spiers wrote about the Swiftie Dads on Bluesky:

This is a model for what actual masculinity should be. Men don’t need to spend more time in caves beating their chests with other men; they need to take their daughters to a meaningful thing and talk to them about it.

These guys taking their daughters to Taylor Swift concerts — and unabashedly enjoying it! — are the model. They are being themselves and not treating their daughters’ interests as stupid or aberrant or a thing they should be patted on the back for participating in.

See also The Joy of Fortnite. 

Core Memories With the Swiftie Dads

Longwood Town destroyed, three missing in horror Victoria bushfires

There’s barely a blade of grass’: A family-owned winery gone within an hour

Renee Nicole Good, murdered by ICE, was a prize-winning poet. Here’s that poem.

VENI, VIDI, VENEZUELA: Pox Americana from War-a-Iago Dennis Kuchinich 

Reddit overtakes TikTok in UK thanks to search algorithms and gen Z The Guardian. “A recent deal with Google that allows the company to train its AI model on Reddit’s content also appears to have provided a boost. Reddit is the most-cited source for Google AI overviews…”

LitHub’s 50 Biggest Literary Stories Of 2025

A book prize was "paused" when half the nominees dropped out because they objected to another nominee, Reading Rainbow came back, Salman Rushdie’s attacker was convicted of attempted murder, AI ruined the em-dash, and plenty more. - Literary Hub

Like “The Vandals In Rome”: Senators Investigate How MAGA Allies Are “Looting” Kennedy Center

Led by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Democrats on the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee say they’ve obtained documents suggesting that the Center is being operated as a “slush fund and private club for Trump’s friends and political allies”, resulting in millions of lost income and a departure from its statutory mission. 

1. 20th Century Theories of Scientific Explanation by James Woodward and Lauren Ross.

Revised:

1. Korean Buddhism by Lucy Hyekyung Jee.
2. Mathematical Style by Paolo Mancosu.

IEP

1. Being in Structural-Systematic Philosophy by Alan White.

1000-Word Philosophy

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BJPS Short Reads

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Recently Published Open Access Philosophy Books

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Book Reviews

1. Early German Positivism by Frederick C. Beiser is reviewed by Mark Textor at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
2. Conceptualising Concepts in Greek Philosophy by Gábor Betegh and Voula Tsouna (eds.) is reviewed by Christoph Helmig at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
3. Psychoanalysis and Ethics: The Necessity of Perspective by David M. Black is reviewed by Maria Balaska at Philosophical Psychology.
4. Who’s Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler is reviewed by Lorna Finlayson at Boston Review.
5. The Complete Notebooks by Albert Camus translated by Ryan Bloom is reviewed by Joanna Kavenna at Literary Review.
6. A Theory of Subjective Wellbeing by Mark Fabian is reviewed by Jessica Sutherland at Philosophical Psychology.
7. The Developmental Psychology of Personal Identity: A Philosophical Perspective by Massimo Marraffa and Cristina Meini (eds.) is reviewed by Mahmud Nasrul Habibi, Monicha Ana Billa, Ida Umaria Hentihu, Arvan Setiawan & Kristina Serenem at  Philosophical Psychology.
8. Open Minded: Searching for Truth about the Unconscious Mind by Ben R. Newell & David R. Shanks is reviewed by Aliya Rumana at Philosophical Psychology.
9. It’s Only Human: The Evolution of Distinctively Human Cognition by Armin W. Schulz is reviewed by Olivier Morin at The British Society for Philosophy of Science.
10. The Oxford Handbook of Moral Psychology by Manuel Vargas and John Doris (eds.) is reviewed by Anneli Jefferson at Philosophical Psychology. 
11. Arthur Schopenhauer: The Life and Thought of Philosophy’s Greatest Pessimist by David Bather Woods is reviewed by Terry Eagleton at London Review of Books.

Philosophy Podcasts – Recent Episodes(via Jason Chen)

Compiled by Michael Glawson

BONUS: Further moves in the simulation argument game

1. “There will be no Q&A sessions. There will be no dead air. We shall not hear the tick-tock of the clock. How will OpenAI learn from us? I feel a flash of small panic, like a trapped squirrel” — philosopher Daniel Story describes what it was like being at an OpenAI higher education summit
2. “The whole point is to keep the interesting parts of our thought, about what must be true and what people believe, inside logic, instead of banishing them” — the first of (currently) four posts on reading through Ruth Barcan Marcus’s “Modalities”, from Richard Marshall
3. “Isn’t it sometimes good to be bored?” — No, says Lorraine Besser
4. Philosophical commentary on the interesting new show “Pluribus” — from Bill Vanderburgh. The link is to the first in a series of posts, though you shouldn’t read the first before watching the first episode
5. “Poetry can encourage ambiguity and, unlike philosophy, can focus on emotional and non-rational connections between ideas” — Bradford Skow has released a book of poems about the American Revolution
6. Liberalism and socialism “share more than they realize—not least their shared tendency to overestimate their distance from one another” — Jan Kandiyali & Martin O’Neill on Rawls and Marx
7. “Education’s auto-cannibalism: universities consuming their own purpose while cheerfully marketing the tools of their undoing” — facepalm after facepalm in this rant by Ronald Purser about how universities are killing themselves with AI
8. 
   

1. “There will be no Q&A sessions. There will be no dead air. We shall not hear the tick-tock of the clock. How will OpenAI learn from us? I feel a flash of small panic, like a trapped squirrel” — philosopher Daniel Story describes what it was like being at an OpenAI higher education summit
2. “The whole point is to keep the interesting parts of our thought, about what must be true and what people believe, inside logic, instead of banishing them” — the first of (currently) four posts on reading through Ruth Barcan Marcus’s “Modalities”, from Richard Marshall
3. “Isn’t it sometimes good to be bored?” — No, says Lorraine Besser
4. Philosophical commentary on the interesting new show “Pluribus” — from Bill Vanderburgh. The link is to the first in a series of posts, though you shouldn’t read the first before watching the first episode
5. “Poetry can encourage ambiguity and, unlike philosophy, can focus on emotional and non-rational connections between ideas” — Bradford Skow has released a book of poems about the American Revolution
6. Liberalism and socialism “share more than they realize—not least their shared tendency to overestimate their distance from one another” — Jan Kandiyali & Martin O’Neill on Rawls and Marx
7. “Education’s auto-cannibalism: universities consuming their own purpose while cheerfully marketing the tools of their undoing” — facepalm after facepalm in this rant by Ronald Purser about how universities are killing themselves with AI