Lit Hub Daily: August 25, 2026

THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET

TODAY: In 1900, Friedrich Nietzsche dies.

• New data centers are threatening to destroy the natural beauty of West Virginia’s Canaan Valley. | Lit Hub Technology
• How Christian nationalism rose in the United States: “Those of us who saw the moral arc of the universe bending toward justice missed the fact that millions of our fellow Americans saw it differently: They saw a Christian nation under siege from within.” | Lit Hub Politics
• Titles by Rachel Cusk, Liane Moriarty, Jill Lepore, and more are among the 20 new books out today. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
• Why Hieronymus Bosch’s otherworldly paintings reveal the artist’s “particularly pessimistic” way of thinking. | Lit Hub Art
• What nightscapes reveal about our dependence on artificial light and our “implicit daylight bias.” | Lit Hub History
• “Not defensive, not quiet / not the voices of human beings / but the plant moved in front of the balcony and windows open to the rain.” Read a poem by Antonella Anedda from the collection, Emerging from the Winter Sea. | Lit Hub Poetry
• “Here’s what happens: She sees the boy the first day the house goes on the market, while cleaning the kitchen between visits from two potential buyers.” Read from Andrés Barba’s novel Last Day of a Prior Life, translated by Lisa Dillman. | Lit Hub Fiction
• Gazelle Mba recalls ”the poisonous exceptionalism that followed Black students and staff at Cambridge,” and the undermining of Black suffering that contributed to Jason Arday’s demise. | The Nation
• On new books by Eileen G’Sell and Sophie Lewis, which ask “who gets to be femme and what the performance of femme can accomplish politically.” | Los Angeles Review of Books
• How deepfakes haunt educators in their own classrooms. | Wired
• The rise, fall, and rebirth of humanity in Olaf Stapledon’s 1930 speculative novel Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future. | The MIT Press Reader
• What will happen when there are no books left to feed LLMs? They might need to eat themselves. | The New York Times

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