Ed Simon explores the limits of language to understand why “pain makes poor poets out of all of us.” | Lit Hub Criticism

Carlo Rovelli warns against getting trapped in your own limited perspective of reality: “A child born in a village naturally thinks that the whole world is like that village.” | Lit Hub Craft

Emerson Whitney recommends eight books that wrest humanity back from the language of bureaucracy. | Lit Hub Reading Lists

How Heated Rivalry imagines a queerer future for the NHL. | Lit Hub Sports

“I was starting to join the ancient community of people who have cut beauty and order from rock, and I knew that I was in the right place.” On preservation and masonry. | Lit Hub Memoir

“Saying yes to no and yes to yes to / the baby boy so many times a day.” Read “Teaching Speech,” a poem by Laura Kolbe from the collection The Decadent Movement. | Lit Hub Poetry

“My father Chas Bouguereau upped sticks some sixty years ago and left Louisiana and settled himself in Paris, a small town in Tennessee.” Read from Sebastian Barry’s new novel, The Newer World. | Lit Hub Fiction

Harry Levov considers the promise of effective altruism, which, despite its best efforts, “always seems to catch audiences on the wrong foot.” | The Point

Monica Potts lays out the political uselessness of the term “working class.” | The New Republic

Livia Gershon explores the history of the saleswomen who took books door to door. | JSTOR Daily

Napster is back, and it’s… developing AI teachers for classrooms? | Wired

Film historian Karina Longworth looks at the literature of Hollywood. | Cultured