hello cuties angels and lovers I spent most of today flyering for Hot Literati. It's more fun and potentially more effective than paying meta to show Hot Literati to people who it thinks might like it. I printed out a bunch of these flyers at UPS before walking to the lovely people of Laams to borrow some scissors. I went to Wolfnights, to order my hyperfixation wrap before going to my favorite social club for a glass of water. I sat down and started chatting with one of my f

Or how to become a better you Hailo is a bit of a character to me, she is someone who I become when life gets hard or when I need to do something brave. As ridiculous as it is, I think alter ego or persona building is extremely effective, and more importantly fun . My Princeton boyfriend began calling me hailo during our relationship. The name took other shapes like “swailo.” I began using hailo as an online name early on TikTok, then again when I became a discord moderator a

I get certain phrases stuck in my head sometimes, and this one about nicolas cage has been there for years. I used it as an instagram caption a year or two ago and eventually deleted every photo before deleting my entire account for a month. Most decisions like this, I make out of curiosity, not fear, or shame. I think joy and curiosity are good places to root anything and most of the time, even though not all, you can decide how you react to and feel about things. I let myse

summary Comedy: American Style is a tragedy. The title is the first irony. Fauset's 1933 novel follows Olivia Cary, a mother so consumed by the desire to pass as white that she destroys everyone around her — her daughter's future, her son's sense of worth, her family's coherence. Fauset was literary editor of The Crisis under W.E.B. Du Bois, the architect of the Harlem Renaissance's literary infrastructure, the editor who first published Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston,

summary Quake by Kitty Mrosovsky almost didn't survive. Written in the late 1980s, unpublished in her lifetime, composed after an HIV diagnosis — it is her last and most powerful work. The novel follows a woman named Olivia through an erotic odyssey, written without taboo, with the precision of a Flaubert translator and the hunger of someone who knows time is short. Mrosovsky was 48 when she died. That the book exists at all is the point. Big thank you to McNally for sending

Summary Influence: How to Exert It is a 1916 self-help classic with a literary mystery at its center. The book was published under the name "Yoritomo-Tashi" — presented to readers as the wisdom of a great Japanese Shogun — but scholars have since established that "Yoritomo-Tashi" was actually a fictional persona created by a French woman named Berthe Blanchard, who used "B. Dangennes" as one of her pseudonyms. Whether the book's argument came from a 12th-century statesman or

Saturday Night Your life is a series of big and small questions. Life is a word we gave for an amount of time that we have to do a lot of things, like walk around and say hello to a lot of people. Sometimes i have a hard time finding my place, and then i remember that life is trying to find your place and if you ever really found it, then you'd be finished with life. Life. What a good word. Ending with your teeth on your lip like that. I am really excited for my own life. It'

Did any of this resonate with you? let me know in the comments :) <3

During the summer of 2024, i was pretty unhappy with my life and i began to set all of these arbitrary rules for myself. Like the fact that I would run every morning and only listen to music that made me feel hot after a long stretch of depression rock and roll, and probably most importantly, that I wouldn't complain anymore. About anything . Whether you want to call it manifestation or what Proverbs says about protecting your thoughts or quantum leaping, my life changed real

84. Little Deaths/Delights Hello beautiful people of the Hot Literati Digital Universe. I have taken up a mind to observe the Sabbath. My perceptions of the Sabbath are related to reading Little House on the Prairie as a child and identifying with the children's restlessness in the book. Now as an adult, I sort of like the idea of a day where you aren't allowed to work, or even think about work. So yesterday, I went to church, sitting in my little pew surrounded by couples an

A couple of weeks ago, I had the honor of visiting Sarah Lawrence to read an essay and answer questions about Hot Literati and my writing practice. Huge thank you to Kulsum for organizing everything, and for the campus literary group Dark Phrases for hosting, and bringing such good, raw questions. I never thought that a single TikTok in 2022 would lead to Hot Literati, but it's grown beyond anything I could imagine and I'm so grateful. I love the website, the community, and

In December, I had the honor of hanging at the office of a record label called Verve Records for a couple of hours. What I did to earn the honor? I have no idea, but hanging out is a skill that I didn’t develop until I stopped being addicted to my phone. And I like to think that I was invited because now, I'm very good at hanging out. That morning, I left my apartment on the Lower East Side of Manattan, walking down the stairs in black cowgirl boots I bought in London and a s

Did this teach you anything new? Are you surprise by anything? Let me know :) xx hailo

Have you changed your media diet in a significant way that's been helpful? Comment if so <3