Project Panama's industrial book scanning, spines sliced off in the service of training data.

Hob Broun's lost novel, recovered decades after the fact.

Newly identified sermons of Augustine, surfacing from the manuscript record.

A dispute at Vanderbilt over the future of its anthropology department.

Radek Stefanski's quantitative analysis of 23,000 Western canon texts.

Onward.

Author advances shrinking while retained rights become the real currency of a book deal.

Alexander B. Joy going back to "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" and finding a different city than he remembered.

Geoffrey Mak on remake literature and what happens when novels start behaving like reboots.

An AI system guided by Randall Collins's theory of intellectual networks.

The odd split between UFO stories about hardware and UFO stories about consciousness.

Let's begin.

• McKenzie-McHarg on how "conspiracy theory" went from neutral forensic language to an argument-ending verdict
• Catherine Liu on trauma as the professional class's preferred substitute for the word "exploitation"
• Morgan Meis, who spent a lifetime on Benjamin's angel of history, finally seeing it and wishing he hadn't
• Clara Mattei going viral for saying capitalism was built through force and enclosure
• Musa al-Gharbi on inequality studies quietly eating the rest of sociology

Plenty to chew on today.

• Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm writing a genealogy of genealogy and turning the humanities' favorite method on itself
• Christine Abigail L Tan using Zhuangzi to dismantle the self that thinks it deserves its success
• Theo Baker's Stanford portrayed as a campus run like a giant app
• Isaac Butler on how the culture wars were manufactured at the NEA, not born inevitable
• Ray Brassier's Fatelessness finally dated for April 2027, nearly twenty years after Nihil Unbound

Worth your time. Dig in.

• Zena Hitz on why 1,600 people per semester are reading great books for free online, outside any university
• Jean-Baptiste Fressoz's case that there has never been an energy transition, and that the nuclear lobby coined the idea
• The Harper's Bazaar short story readers suspect a machine wrote
• Amy Kind's argument that imagination is a cognitive skill, and what happens when we outsource it
• Brady's reading of Elena Greco as the moral villain of Ferrante's Neapolitan novels

Let's get into it.

• The Sydney Morning Herald retracts an op-ed defending AI after the author used AI to write it
• David S. Reynolds on why Jamestown 1619 and Plymouth 1620 are still fighting it out in American politics
• David Runciman in the LRB on healthy and unhealthy scoring — gamification, and C. Thi Nguyen's The Score
• Wiley absorbs Emerald Publishing for £337 million, adding 500 journals and 8,000 books
• A Yale AAUP survey finds two-thirds of faculty say academic freedom has declined under Trump's second term
• Gavin Newsom's memoir, assembled by another writer on his behalf, arrives under his name

Make yourself a coffee first.

• Olga Tokarczuk admits asking AI "darling, how could we develop this beautifully." Then Riverhead walks it back
• A Chronicle of Higher Education professor assigns the same 20-page article she has used for five years. Zero students finish it
• Michael Hofmann on a 1951 German-Jewish novel that took 70 years to reach English readers
• J. Robert Lennon confesses to having dismissed Larry McMurtry without reading a single page
• Gramsci meets the Venice Biennale, Soviet children's books get their English debut, and Japan's zine resurgence

Worth your time this Monday.

• The Commonwealth Short Story Prize, Granta, and an algorithm that caught what five human judges missed
• Becca Rothfeld in The New Yorker on the NYRB reissue of Leslie Fiedler's 1960 Love and Death in the American Novel
• Joyce Carol Oates on literary theory as a generation's wrong turn
• Chris Cutrone in Platypus Review answering Gabriel Rockhill on whether the Frankfurt School worked for the CIA
• David Runciman on C. Thi Nguyen's The Score in the LRB
• Phil Metzger arguing Substack is structurally a new university

Read on.

• Stefan Collini on the UK university system as near-accomplished ruin, with data
• James Marriott's The New Dark Ages and the question of whether literary studies invented its own crisis
• Geoff Shullenberger applying Lukács to Silicon Valley's Singularity faith
• A book about AI corrupting truth, undermined by AI-fabricated quotes
• A lost Leonora Carrington painting found with her psychiatrist's heirs after 80 years
• Modern Intellectual History's most-read list and the field's non-Western turn

Let's get into it.

• A book about AI's threat to truth — caught by the NYT using AI-hallucinated quotes, with no fact-checker involved at any stage
• A federal court letting a public university's shutdown of student magazines stand — and what that means for institutional control of campus publishing
• The historian who changed how America thinks about marriage never finished a PhD — Steven Mintz makes a case for what that actually means
• Publishers quietly swapping Doja Cat and TikTok into 2006 YA novels: the next front after sensitivity editing
• Jessica Riskin's rehabilitation of Lamarck, surfacing through the Hinternet — suppressed for political and theological reasons, now partly vindicated by epigenetics

Read on.

• Simon Sebag Montefiore publicly challenging The Economist over its review of Molly Crabapple's new history of the Bund — naming the specific Bundist leaders Stalin had shot in the back of the neck
• Naomi Kanakia's new Princeton UP book making the left case for the Great Books — launched the same day at McNally Jackson Seaport
• A network of fake academic journals publishing over 100 AI-generated papers under real professors' names without their knowledge
• Dan DiPiero in the Cleveland Review of Books on what happens to humanists who try to write outside the academy
• Sheila Liming's Yale Review essay opening with a dumpster behind her university's library

Read carefully.

• The $500M Hindutva Ramayana film — and the 1991 essay by A.K. Ramanujan its producers would rather you had never read
• Harper's on Esperanto, including the Vatican's largely forgotten endorsement of a constructed language invented by a Polish-Jewish ophthalmologist
• The lost Sholom Aleichem novella whose protagonist makes Tevye the dairyman look like a saint
• Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical, which makes its case for human dignity in the age of AI by citing, among others, Tolkien's Lord of the Rings

Read on.

• Harold Bloom's private letters, finally published — and why the man who called himself a "monster of reading" sounds nothing like the oracular author of The Western Canon
• A Sydney panel with Mariana Enriquez, Bora Chung, and Matt Alt on what gets lost when writers write for global markets instead of local ones
• The first English translation of a Sholom Aleichem novella that never made it into his collected works — horse thieves, swindlers, and the wrong side of the shtetl
• Esperanto's great schism: the utopian camp that wants mass adoption vs. the diaspora camp that decided to stop waiting

Here we go.

• Yang Shuang-zi's Taiwan Travelogue wins the 2026 International Booker — and why the translator's name deserves equal billing
• Namwali Serpell's On Morrison: the argument that Toni Morrison's formal genius has been buried under her own symbolic importance
• 42 Jewish authors accuse the Jewish Book Council of institutional bias — including a Booker-shortlisted novelist among the signatories
• Princeton ends its 133-year unsupervised exam honor code, and Carl Hendrick draws the obvious conclusion about what a degree now certifies
• R.F. Kuang's forthcoming novel triggers preorder cancellations — over a character who appears on two pages and says nothing
• A new paper in Theory and Society argues that ideological homogeneity in social science is not just a political problem but an epistemic one

Read on.

• Russia raided its own Institute of Philosophy and put the head of an Aristotle translation project under house arrest — the backstory involves a disgruntled ex-director, Dugin's Telegram network, and six years of nationalist pressure
• Sally Rooney finally has a Hebrew publisher: a two-person basement operation in Jerusalem that is the only Israeli house meeting BDS criteria
• A Nobel laureate discloses she uses AI to brainstorm, and the literary world reacts as though she admitted to ghostwriting
• An anonymous X essayist mounts a serious philosophical defense of social masks, civility, and deliberate self-erasure — with a bibliography to back it up
• What happens when 340 newspapers block the Wayback Machine, and why scholars should be paying attention
• Artforum revisits the moment when criticism felt like a life-or-death undertaking — and finds the contrast with the present uncomfortable

Make of that what you will.

• A prize-winning story in Granta flagged as 100% AI-generated — and neither the publisher nor the Commonwealth Foundation has said a word
• Antonia Bembo's 1707 opera reaching the Opéra Bastille for the first time, 319 years after it was composed
• Michael Wood in the LRB arguing Ozon's restraint gets Camus right in ways Visconti's romanticism never did
• Sergio Ramírez — stripped of his Nicaraguan citizenship for his writing — on why autocrats don't actually lose sleep over novels
• Cardiff University giving staff three weeks to clear 7km of rare-book stacks, including irreplaceable Welsh and Celtic literature

Dig in.

• Becca Rothfeld argues Anglophone publishing ignored Marlen Haushofer for decades — despite The Wall being a postwar classic in German-speaking Europe
• Ben Lerner's new novel has its unnamed narrator drop his phone in a hotel sink and then publish a fabricated interview from memory — reviewed as an "outrageous riff" on Walter Benjamin's angel of history
• A previously unpublished Donald Kagan interview on Thucydides surfaces five years after his death, exactly as Xi Jinping reportedly cites Thucydides to Trump
• Ann Patchett and a fired Rutherford County library director honored by PEN; an Italian communist party branch demands Eshkol Nevo be excluded from a festival over his grandfather's politics
• Sam Kahn on why the tech billionaires ramming Heinlein and Asimov "down everybody's throat" is a literary-critical problem, not just a cultural one

Good reading weather. Dig in.

• Quentin Skinner — the Cambridge historian who reshaped political philosophy — on why Hobbes and Machiavelli mean completely different things by "freedom," and his new Liberty as Independence
• How 25 literary agents shaped more than half of 21st-century prizewinning American fiction, and the one woman behind postmodernism
• Lisa Robertson's second novel in a lifetime of poetry — built around a buried river in Paris and a protagonist who calls herself a hag
• The case that Kim Il Sung didn't borrow from Stalin so much as from the Gospels
• The Orwell Prize 2026 fiction shortlist: Susan Choi, Ben Lerner, Douglas Stuart, Tahmima Anam, and four others

Let's get into it.

• Mario Vargas Llosa's posthumous final novel — a hybrid essay-fiction on Peruvian identity, música criolla, and the concept of huachafería — now available in English
• Quinn Slobodian arguing that "empire" has become polemic rather than analysis in critical tech writing — and proposing three sharper alternatives from dependency theory
• A federal judge declines to approve Anthropic's $1.5B copyright settlement, while 25+ opt-out authors including Eggers, Greer, and Wolff file fresh suit
• Lance Richardson's Pulitzer-finalist biography of Peter Matthiessen — spy, Zen Roshi, naturalist, and Paris Review co-founder — finally gets its full reckoning

Read on.

• Thomas Nagel reviewing T.M. Scanlon on punishment — and why he still can't sign off on anti-retributivism
• Grasset's dissident authors rename their counter-assembly the États généreux and bring a historian of publishing to the podium
• Douglas Stuart on grief, queerness, and the Isle of Harris in John of John, with Alan Cumming asking the questions
• A Korean translator's decade-long solo project through Dostoevsky's four major novels — and what it says about Korean literary culture
• A Swiss federal court orders a historian to hand back grant money over what it calls "massive" plagiarism across two books

Read on.

• Achille Mbembe at the Africa Forward Summit — why the "rule of gerontocracy" has already ended, even before a single strongman falls
• Beryl Satter's decade-in-the-making follow-up to the book that powered "The Case for Reparations" — and the critic who invokes Hofstadter against her
• Hungary's most prestigious literary journals name the rival publications quietly receiving ministerial side-money their NKA filings don't show
• A Nigerian critic's formal claim that Americanah was never meant to be adapted — because the novel is the interior, not the plot

Read on.

• A majority of Grasset's foreign authors — Han Kang among them — refuse to submit their next books to the house after a politically motivated CEO firing
• Ailton Krenak, the Brazilian Indigenous philosopher who painted his face black on the floor of Congress in 1987, and what his Anthropocene thought means now
• Fathi Triki on why philosophy in the Arab and African worlds is finally waking up to its own identity
• PEN America's counterintuitive finding: only 10% of banned books contain sexual content — the other 90% are something else entirely
• A Kazakh historian building a new national canon from scratch, and why it matters beyond Central Asia

Tuesday reading incoming.

• How a 10% commission quietly became a million-dollar-a-year tax — and why writers are running from Substack
• A UVA professor's decades-long argument that consumer culture has broken the university, and what "god-terms" have to do with it
• Grammarly putting Stephen King, Carl Sagan, and bell hooks to work as AI editors — without asking any of them
• Russia's publishers blacking out books bar by bar, and a Korean picture book that readers turned into a detective case
• The International Booker winner announcement, the Auckland Writers Festival, Turin's Salone del Libro, and more

Let's get into it.

• A federal judge rules that DOGE used ChatGPT to unconstitutionally cancel $100 million in NEH grants — and the AI flagged a Holocaust anthology as DEI
• Nobel laureate László Krasznahorkai opens La Lettura on the eve of Turin, asking publicly where books of value have gone and whether anyone reads them anymore
• Mac Barnett, National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, says most children's books are "crud" — and now faces calls to resign
• Lloyd Strickland, independent scholar, publishes the first comprehensive English edition of Leibniz's most creative decade — 2,000 pages, 7 texts never before published in any language

Read on.

• A previously unknown 40-chapter typescript of Die Blechtrommel surfaces at the Akademie der Künste — what it tells us about how Grass actually built the novel
• The NYRB on Dorothy Tse's Hong Kong novella City Like Water — surrealism under surveillance, and a literary tradition you probably haven't read
• Carlo Rovelli in Noema: there is no hard problem of consciousness — and why that claim is generating serious pushback
• University of Hertfordshire quietly closes its history, philosophy, and English literature programs — a case study in the slow collapse of humanities in UK universities
• The Adorno family-abolition thread, Yann Martel's footnoted Iliad, and other curiosities

Let's get into it.

• Habermas's final interviews, collected in Il fallait faire mieux… — and why Le Monde calls it a "magisterial exercise in intellectual auto-history"
• Hugues Jallon, former Seuil CEO, on why French publishing is both a target and an echo chamber for the far right
• Cleveland State trying to eliminate its Poetry Center Press, Coetzee on translation as political force, and Grayling on authoritarianism
• Brandon Sanderson raises $1 million on Kickstarter in a day — and the internet's new habit of accusing writers of using AI whenever they reach for an em dash

All that and more. Let's get into it.

• Five major publishers and Scott Turow suing Meta over Llama — and the lead plaintiff is Elsevier, which has been on the other side of an academic boycott for years
• Žižek's new provocation in Prospect: why he is "resigned" to the paradox that preserving freedom sometimes requires censorship
• A Swiss federal court ordering a humanities scholar to repay $51,000 in grant funding for "massive" plagiarism — and banning her from future grants for five years
• Daniel Kraus winning the 2026 Pulitzer for Fiction with a WWI novel told in a single sentence

Here's what's worth your time today.

• ARCs of R.F. Kuang's next novel trigger a backlash over two pages featuring an Israeli pianist — and a viral thread arguing the real problem is that readers no longer understand what fiction is for
• A new Hebrew press in Berlin, named after Herzl's utopian novel, argues that the State of Israel doesn't own the Hebrew language — and is bringing that argument to American bookstores in September
• ~140 workers at the University of Chicago Press have formed the UCP Workers Guild
• Leila Slimani at the Prado on the obsession with being right; Gustavo Gutiérrez on why poverty is, for theology, an act of love

Into it we go.

• How the American right invented "Cultural Marxism" — and why a new book says the Frankfurt School had almost nothing to do with it
• A publisher commissions a crisis report about children not reading, then sells them the cure
• Argentina's most powerful literary agent telling the Buenos Aires Book Fair that publishers now print twice as many books as they can sell
• Michael Wood's elegy for Julian Barnes — one of the LRB's finest critics writing about one of England's finest novelists
• A linguist who spent 33 years preserving a dying American dialect is hanging up his tape recorder

Let's get into it.

• Pre-publication Salinger letters surface at the New York antiquarian book fair — what he asked his editor to hide from reviewers
• Siri Hustvedt's memoir of her 43-year marriage to Paul Auster, including 35 pages of his unfinished final writing
• A London-based independent press, African-owned and Black and woman-led, lands on the Women's Prize shortlist for the first time in 30 years
• Andrea Long Chu's Authority in paperback — and her charge that Maggie Nelson and Zadie Smith are guilty of "complacent humanism"
• An essay arguing that literate culture has become a threatened subculture in a world now dominated by video and audio

Worth your Sunday morning.

• Josh Kline's essay on why NYC real estate has made non-commercial art structurally impossible — and why it went viral in October magazine
• A third Elsevier editor quietly removed mid-term, and the citation-count J-curve that gave it away
• Mrs Justice Lieven overturns a £585,000 fine and finds the regulator had "closed its mind" before the investigation began
• Grand Central Publishing reprints the one Octavia Butler novel she spent her career suppressing
• Three Tongan scholar-artists and a bamboo nose flute the world had nearly forgotten

Read on.

• A 1943 novella that imagined the Holocaust before it fully happened — lost for decades, now translated into English for the first time
• Clare Bucknell reviews a new cultural history of pedantry in the New York Review of Books, and the implications for intellectual life are weirder than you'd expect
• A Georgetown philosopher on why the UN's landmark March 2026 resolution on the transatlantic slave trade finally matters — and what reparations actually require
• UNT shuts down a Chicano artist's solo exhibition mid-run, and faculty and students push back
• The Vatican weighs in on artificial intelligence, and it is more philosophically serious than you might think

On with it.

• France's most storied independent bookshop chain — 16 stores, 140 years old, 500 employees — in court-supervised reorganization and betting its survival on used books
• Justin Garson's new history of how NIMH psychiatrists used LSD and amphetamines to induce schizophrenia in human subjects, and what it did to American psychiatry
• Deborah Lutz's first full Emily Brontë biography in over twenty years, drawing on previously inaccessible manuscripts to present a very different Brontë than the legend
• A GWU Illiberalism Studies Program essay tracing how a little-known Argentine writer became the dominant intellectual of the transnational Spanish-speaking radical right

Here we go.

• Luke Dunne's LARB tribute to Alexander Kluge pushes back against the somber-sage obituary and recovers the flamboyant, sentimental filmmaker-theorist who refused moral seriousness
• Romila Thapar at 94 — the doyenne of Indian historiography, her career-long battle against Hindutva revisionism, and a Psyche portrait that opens with grief
• Hussein Aboubakr Mansour asks why there is no redemption in the Arabic novel — and argues the question implicates far more than literary taste
• Taylor Lorenz ran a pangram analysis across the top 25 Substack bestsellers in every category to find out how much of the platform is actually written by AI

Plenty here. Dig in.

• 42 Jewish authors and the institutional politics of the Jewish Book Council
• Arna Bontemps and the forgotten infrastructure holding Black literary memory together
• Whether "Certified Human" will become a meaningful literary category in the age of AI
• A new literary magazine, a new city, and a fight over whether Toronto even has a literary identity

All worth your time. Let's get into it.

• A university press pulps 5,000 copies of an Indigenous children's book — not because of anything in the book, but because of its illustrator's Substack
• Peter J. Carroll, the man Robert Anton Wilson called the most important writer on Magick since Crowley, died unexpectedly at 73 — announced only via his publisher's social channels
• Coco Fusco on why Wifredo Lam's synthesis of Afro-Cuban religion and Surrealism is one of the twentieth century's most underrated critical frameworks
• Rohmer's entire filmography, reread as a map of philosophical problems — with Le Rayon Vert as the unlikely centerpiece

Here we go.

• Wallace Stegner, a fellowship, and the bluntest career advice in American literary history
• Martha Nussbaum's new OUP book staking democratic freedom on what opera does to the emotions
• A North Carolina county that dissolved its entire library board rather than keep a children's book on the shelf
• A French feminist philosopher's reckoning with the Pelicot trial, now reaching German readers

Read on.