TODAY: In 1937, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit is published.

• 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 8 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

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