The cultural works becoming public domain in 2026
NPR informs us of the works entering the public domain this new year. There are some big names here, including the first four books of the Nancy Drew series, Dashiel Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, and Agatha Christie’s first Miss Marple mystery, The Murder at the Vicarage.
Can Bibliotherapy Heal the Pain of the World?
Writer and librarian Jess deCourcy Hinds hails the recent publication of Bibliotherapy in the Bronx by Emely Rumble, LCSW (licensed clinical social worker); Hinds describes Rumble’s book as “a lyrical, unpretentious guide for book lovers.” Hinds explains the history of the term bibliotherapy and the current status of the discipline within the mental health hierarchy. She goes on to explain how the process works and to discuss some of the books that Rumble recommends.
While bibliotherapy is an important topic, I appreciate the way Hinds emphasizes how important it is to understand that it should not be expected nor recommended to take the place of professional therapy for anyone with severe mental health concerns.
Stop Trying to Make the Humanities ‘Relevant’
“For humanities departments to continue to matter, they must challenge the modern world rather than accommodate it.”
Thomas Chatterton Williams is a staff writer for The Atlantic and a professor of humanities at Bard College. Here he takes on the topic of the crisis facing the humanities in higher education:
As a humanities professor myself, the biggest danger I see to the discipline is the growing perception, fueled by the ubiquity of large language models, that knowledge is cheap—a resource whose procurement ought to be easy and frictionless. The humanities, which value rigorous inquiry for its own sake, will always be at odds with a world that thinks this way; that’s why relevance is a futile goal. For humanities departments to continue to matter, they must challenge the modern world rather than accommodate it. Indeed, the most useful lesson the humanities have to offer today is a profoundly countercultural one: Difficulty is good, an end in its own right.
Hypergraphia: On Prolific Writers and the Persistent Need to Produce
“Ed Simon considers the habits and processes of a group of critically and commercially acclaimed authors”
Ed Simon names a number of prolific writers and considers the requirements for such prodigious production. After labeling himself a prolific writer, he continues: “I write because I absolutely have to write. Something in my constitution necessitates it, and while that doesn’t make me a better (or worse) writer in and of itself, it’s the essential element that has made me a prolific one.”
Related post: my review of The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain by Alice W. Flaherty
Simon concludes: “What I think those who have hypergraphia share is a prioritization of the process over the product, of the experience of writing as much as its conclusion. For us, writing is a means of being.”
In Defense of the Traditional Review
“Far from being a journalistic relic, as suggested by recent developments at the New York Times, arts criticism is inherently progressive, keeping art honest and pointing toward its future.”
Richard Brody, film critic for The New Yorker, states his view early on: “the practice of criticism should be as wide-ranging as possible and constantly growing, but it shouldn’t lose its center, which is the written review.” Further, he insists, reviews “are the most inherently progressive mode of arts writing” because they “are rooted in the most fundamental unit of the art business—the personal encounter with individual works (or exhibits of many works)—and in the economic implications of that encounter.”
5 of the strangest books ever written
“. . . some books and their authors aren’t remembered for being “things worth reading.” Some are remembered for being so odd, so offbeat, so utterly bizarre that one can barely understand them,” writes Scotty Hendricks. Check out the five that made his list.
© 2026 by Mary Daniels Brown
As long as we all don’t merge with The Borge, the humanities will always have a place in society (even if that place is very, very small).
I agree, Liz. But this is one of those questions that I wish would go away because we all just agreed that the humanities are the basis of any good education. (I also realize that this is not going to happen any time soon.)