Berfrois

Your Local Internet

Your Local Internet

Technology, which at first promised global reach, could assist the local resurgence of abundant microcultures...

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Mail-order magazines played a vital role for rural women…

Mail-order magazines played a vital role for rural women…

Little Miss Fannie Allison Troutsmans writes that she is lonesome and would like to hear from Comfort readers,” the column begins.

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The Mary Shelley Who Endures

The Mary Shelley Who Endures

For 200 years, the freewheeling, chaotic lives of the Romantic poets, replete with sexual emancipation, elopement, teenage pregnancies and tragic death, have provided biographers with abundant riches. Mary Shelley’s illustrious parentage...

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Economic trends are made manifest by people with plans…

Economic trends are made manifest by people with plans…

New York used to be a place where fishmongers, seamstresses, and dock workers lived a stone’s throw from Rockefellers.

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60s nostalgia now or 60s nostalgia later?

60s nostalgia now or 60s nostalgia later?

The clever adage that “anyone who claims to remember the 1960s wasn’t really there” is amusing only because so many people associate the Age of Aquarius with a drug-induced haze.

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A New Year’s X

A New Year’s X

And to think, fair Bennetts, that I’d always misheard iron as island. “The tolling of the island bell.” The new year dawns.

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A New Diski Fan

A New Diski Fan

What is meant when a person is deemed ahead of her time? It sounds like a fantastic compliment, yet the circumstances under which people hear it, in reference to themselves, are not always so positive.

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Bennett’s 2017

Bennett’s 2017

12 January. At seven to the National Gallery for Beyond Caravaggio, now in its last week. It’s a mixed bag, with far and away the best picture The Taking of Christ on loan from Dublin...

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NOW

Bad Readers

Bad Readers

Quizzing the students in his European literature class at Cornell on their reading habits, the Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov observed in 1948, “The students leaned heavily on emotional identification, action, and the social-economic or historical angle. "

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A wandering, restless existence…

A wandering, restless existence…

To work in academe is to live at an angle slightly askew to the regular run of American life.

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Instagramm’d Nevertheless

Instagramm’d Nevertheless

While touring England’s Lake District, poet Thomas Gray suffered what we might call a selfie-induced injury.

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