ICYMI, a nationwide book ban bill has been introduced in the States, targeting LGBTQIA+ voices, especially trans voices. Call your reps about H.R. 7661 ☎️

Hilarious cameo by Philip Larkin www.nytimes.com/2026/02/20/b...

New on Book Post → Noah Simon on the beautiful and complex legacy of chestnuts. “In Italian, Ettore compares the relationship between chestnuts and human beings to our relationships with dogs and horses—a coevolution.” books.substack.com/p/diary-noah...

Baldwin’s librarian

Child asking me about photographs in my office… ”…is this one your mother, or your teacher?” “That is Iris Murdoch, my favorite novelist and philosopher” “Is this one your mother?” “…that is also Iris Murdoch.”

Last week, scholar Alexander Manshel published a vital paper about American reading habits. He noted that “high school English is the place where many lifelong readers are made,” he declared the high school English classroom “the most influential literary institution in the United States.”

View of the day from Book Post author Brianna Zimmerman of the Trinity College Dublin post-graduate study room. 📖 Read Brianna Zimmerman’s latest review of On Earth or In Poems: The Many Lives of Al-Andalus by Eric Calderwood, now on Book Post.

“When I began editing… to me it was an almost euphoric experience… yourself just disappears, and you are sort of swimming through this language and trying to help it be what it needs to be or trying to be.” –Ann Kjellberg on The Bookshop Podcast thebookshoppodcast.buzzsprout.com/1400590/epis...

Read the new review here → books.substack.com/p/review-bri...

Al-Andalus—a dynamic place where people’s contradictions were grappled with: “ways of praying, ways of loving... ways of enjoying, ways of living.” Brianna Zimmerman reviews On Earth or in Poems: The Many Lives of Al-Andalus now on Book Post: books.substack.com/p/review-bri...

If you’re in DC tomorrow and want to see a lot of bookish people in one place, I have good news:

With Ron Charles and Becca Rothfeld laid off from WaPo, there are now only 5 full-time book critics working in the United States. That's down from 7 when this pubbed last year, though you may find my definition of a "full-time book critic" arbitrary. worldliteraturetoday.org/2025/septemb...

BREAKING: The Department of Education has ended its directive that attempted to restrict diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in schools nationwide. This is a victory for academic freedom and education equity.

Librarian here. We grant library cards to ALL residents, no matter their age or legal status. Our ID requirements pertain to establishing residency only. Do not invoke libraries, which embrace *everyone* in its civic fold, as a precedent for measures designed to *suppress* civic participation.

This is how you live a life

“I am trying to harvest a crop,” he said, “which I have not planted, and which may not exist.”

Last semester, I got very excited about one endnote, then ALL the endnotes, in Wilson’s Iliad. Then @bookpostusa.bsky.social gave me the chance to write about them: books.substack.com/p/diary-laur...

New Post → Laura Kolb on the joy of great annotations hitting their mark and the stellar marksmanship in a translation of The Iliad. books.substack.com/p/diary-laur... @wwnorton.com @laurakolb.bsky.social

Since I heard Penn State launched a course called "One Book Slowly" this year (Eric Hayot is teaching Madame Bovary) I can't stop thinking about it

I think the greatest gift college professors in the humanities can give to students right now is a seminar room where, for 80 minutes twice a week, nothing that happens to them is a sales pitch for an AI product.

We had a Book Post Editor’s Note a week ago about the removal of an exhibit about the enslaved in George Washington’s household from the Independence Hall historic site in Philadelphia. More in the Times this week about Philadelphians’ resistance to the excision. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/05/a...

If Bilbo had Chat GPT

“Historians call this passageway a masterwork of deliberate concealment, designed to be absolutely invisible to slave catchers or city marshals during the 19th-century”

Recalling today to these immortal words from Cory Doctorow pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/e...

Re-upping our prematurely jubilant post on the 2022 revival of @washingtonpost.com's Book World. Our aim in creating Book Post was to follow Becca Rothfeld’s call today in the @newyorker.com for books coverage that finds people where they are

(Though I repeat my complaint with such pieces: the NYTBR is *not* the last discrete newspaper books section. WSJ Books may be physically located within another section but it is nevertheless a discrete books section that publishes 10-12 reviews each weekend, plus 5 more on weekdays.)

News from @everylibrary.bsky.social: Rebuking President Trump, Congress votes to maintain most of the federal funding for libraries, museums, and archives. www.everylibrary.org/congress2026... via

The thing with the Claude ads is they don’t really acknowledge how creepy the bots are even before they start advertising. Got anything for that, Claude? (✍🏼)

"You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” —James Baldwin In honor of Black History Month, we are reflecting on the work of the incomparable James Baldwin (the namesake for our current partner bookstore, Baldwin and Co.)

“no one reads men any more”

Why aren’t more young men reading? Is it an issue of marginalization, as some have argued, or is it something else? Book Post editor Ann Kjellberg digs into this topic, now on Book Post: books.substack.com/p/notebook-1...

Scoop: As Washington Post leadership laid off hundreds of staffers this week, exec editor Matt Murray blocked the paper’s media desk from covering the cuts, spiking a pre-written story despite internal lobbying www.status.news/p/ms-now-cro...

Tomorrow

“This is not good writing. It shouldn’t work, and it doesn’t. But it kind of does.” Michael Robbins on Caroline Fraser’s Murderland, overwrought writing, and true crime. Read the new Diary now on Book Post. books.substack.com/p/diary-mich... @alienvsrobbins.bsky.social

organizations, and so they asked the arts organizations themselves what would be helpful, and they said to support arts journalists. Because the arts journalists educate the audiences. No audiences, no artists.

In 2003, I had a fellowship at the Columbia Journalism School as part of the National Arts Journalism Program (RIP). The program was funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, because—and this is my memory from a long time ago but I think it's pretty accurate—they were looking for a way to support arts...

Joy Williams siting: Honored Guest www.theatlantic.com/books/2026/0...

Halcyon Days: Book Post celebrates the revival of the @washingtonpost.com books section in 2022, looking back at the history of the freestanding newspaper book review, now going the way of the dodo books.substack.com/p/notebook-r...

“It's biblically bad,” one [Washington] Post journalist told Status, adding, “It will be a miracle if they can put out a paper tomorrow because no one is working” @nataliekorach.bsky.social at @status.news

Ron Charles is/was my favorite person in books coverage. He combined natural readerliness with good humor and a human touch. This is an insane decision. WaPo was the best newspaper books coverage in the country. Bezos just keeps finding new ways to harm reading. Immediate subscribe (✍🏼)

The Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, announced that they're shutting down their books section. We'd say "ironic," but... Keep supporting indie bookstores and public libraries over the mega retailer, aka the institutions that actually care about storytelling 💓

The layoffs at the Washington Post have begun, with newsroom leaders telling employees its sports and books sections will be 'eliminated in current forms' and its international coverage will be downsized

Ooh exciting, our @404media.co zine is here!

Oscar-nominated writer Mehdi Mahmoudian arrested in Iran for condemning the government’s brutal crackdown on protesters in a letter signed by 17 people, including #FreedomToWrite Awardees Narges Mohammadi (the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize honoree) and Nasrin Sotoudeh: www.independent.co.uk/news/world/m...

2/19, Morgan Library www.themorgan.org/programs/lec...

As Tom Waits says, "The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering."

Most media headlines right now are like "We are laying off 2/3 of our staff and also the president is our ombudsman now" but somehow David Brooks got two new jobs in one day