Lit Hub Daily: June 17, 2026

TODAY: In 1938, T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone is published.

Why Robert W. Service’s “The Cremation of Sam McGee” is a good poem for bad dads. | Lit Hub Craft

Aaron Boehmer considers the future of ethnic studies and academia in crisis: “While no protest, demonstration, or amount of organizing can resurrect the dead, perhaps such actions can chart a new course.” | Lit Hub Criticism

“The n-word felt like it could last a lifetime.” Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor remembers navigating American racism as a child with a famous father. | Lit Hub Memoir

On redeeming Freud through fiction: “But while pain may be an inevitable consequence of the life drive, it is always inadvertent and unwitting.” | Lit Hub Craft

What a post office that handles letters for the dead reveals about the ways we cope with loss. | Lit Hub History

What even the most vanilla among us can learn from BDSM. | Lit Hub Health

How the military and corporate forces that developed GPS turned us all into little dots on a map. | Lit Hub Technology

Deni Elliott explores the ethics of adapting to her progressive blindness. | Lit Hub Memoir​Why artificial light could be contributing to your insomnia. | Lit Hub Health

“What am I looking at? Ships?” Read from Keith Ridgway’s new novel, Dooneen. | Lit Hub Fiction

Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera on exile, Edward Said, and “the scars of ‘Americanization.’” ​| Public Books

Xia Jia on writing and the limits of both human and artificial intelligence. | The MIT Press Reader

Why travelers are going hard for literary vacations. | The New York Times

Caleb Brennan explores the fascist internet nihilism of groyper politics. | The Baffler

“There are specialists for whom cleaning up and locking down one’s digital record is a matter of obsession.” The real-life horrors of cloud storage in a world of digital surveillance. | New York Magazine