Lit Hub Daily: April 3, 2025

TODAY: In 1783, Washington Irving is born. 

• On the government’s threat to NPR and PBS: “The precedent being set is a dangerous one: that politicians can use hearings and funding threats to shape the media landscape to their advantage.” | Lit Hub Politics
• “America is no longer a country of refuge but one that is preying upon its most vulnerable inhabitants, including children, who stand to suffer the most from the trauma and terror of this time.” Lessons from the Jewish children who fled Nazi Germany. | Lit Hub History
• Are you the asshole if you don’t want to list someone you fell out with in your book acknowledgments? Kristen Arnett answers this and other awkward questions about bad bookish behavior. | Lit Hub Craft
• “Szalay has written a novel about the Big Question: about the numbing strangeness of being alive.” 5 book reviews you need to read this week. | Book Marks
• Robert Garland examines the mourning rituals and burial practices of the prehistoric and ancient past. | Lit Hub History
• “In a world that feels increasingly troubling and out of control, the dollhouse is where my mother and I are at our best together.” What an old dollhouse has to teach about storytelling and family. | Lit Hub Craft
• “my many eyes open/close / in the dark that you’ll never / master or capture.” Read “Because You Wished For It,” a poem by Ahmad Almallah. | Lit Hub Poetry
• Douglas J. Penick considers time, transitions, and the unfamiliar world of aging. | Lit Hub Memoir
• Thor Hanson explores how “backyard biology” can lead to scientific breakthroughs. | Lit Hub Science
• “Before I begin, I look.” Read from Kyle Edwards’s novel, Small Ceremonies. | Lit Hub Fiction
• “The problem with fascism is that it’s an empty container– there’s no actual care or belief outside the violent exercise of power.” Sol Brager discusses their graphic memoir, Heavyweight. | The Comics Journal
• Kali Wallace revisits René Laloux’s Fantastic Planet: “The style is odd, to be sure, but so is the story and the world it represents.” | Reactor
• Matt Reeck and Michelle Chan Schmidt discuss the philosophy of literary translation. | Asymptote 
• Harris Lahti on why Flesh by David Szalay “interrogates the genetic ties that bind the reins of the mind.” | The Baffler
• Aaron Boehmer chronicles the censorship of student journalists on University of Texas campuses. | The Nation
• Read from Constance Debré’s Name: “He is all that remains of my childhood, with his oxygen, his Subutex, and his illness in the falling-down house in Touraine.” | The Paris Review

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