Caveat Intellectualis 

My brother, who is a serious academic, once mentioned that one of the things he does to keep au courant on the literary news outside his specialty (Greek and Latin philology) is to read Literary Hub, an e-zine that covers everything from Gilgamesh to The Great Gatsby to Gone Girl.

I can see how, if you were teaching literature of whatever time and genre at a top college today, you’d want to have something clever to say about the latest literary scuttlebutt. And I have enjoyed reading Lit Hub for that. But in the last year or two, I can’t bear to even look at it because of how Woke its editorial policy has become.

Woke cultural concepts and trends are tailormade for busy executives and their party-planning spouses because they provide topical and politically correct opinions and rationales for people that don’t have time to think for themselves.

And that is why 15 minutes spent with a Woke primer like Lit Hub could be helpful for any up-and-climbing academic who has given the great majority of his waking hours to a very specific rabbit hole of literature. There simply isn’t time to find out what’s going on in the rest of the literary world, let alone identify what news bits will be conversation topics and what sort of wry or witty comment might allow one to manage one’s way through a cocktail party full of professors and graduate students without risking looking like a fool. (Which is exactly what most of the people there are hoping you will do.)

So if you work or socialize inside the world of literature, you may want to subscribe to the Lit Hub website. But I must warn you that at least 50% of everything they publish are pieces like the following:

* Andrea Freeman on the impact of systematic oppression on indigenous cuisine in the United States. (“Frybread arouses passionate feelings in its fans and detractors… but everyone agrees that it is a far cry from the pre-colonial foods.”) Click here.

* Mathangi Subramanian on how understanding her own neurodiverse character helped her understand herself. (“I fretted that, despite my diligence, my story was riddled with errors that would, at best, disappoint or, at worst, traumatize my readers.”) Click here.