November 2017
The Way We Were is devastating…

There’s a whole feminist thesis in this admission. And I’m going to teach it in my Love (in film) class next semester. It wasn’t on the syllabus last year. Somehow I forgot to include it.
Read More‘The Russian Revolution reshaped global time and space’

Over the past one hundred years, some 20,000 books on the Russian Revolution have been published, roughly six thousand of them in English.
Read MoreEd Simon: Resurrecting American Civil Religion

What ten sentences have been more scriptural than the ones delivered by Abraham Lincoln in that southern Pennsylvanian killing field? Not just scriptural in rhetoric...
Read More‘Many interests united literary supporters of Vichy’

What are the responsibilities of scholars and artists in a time of political crisis and militant nationalism? This dilemma confronts us today, just as it did French writers during the Second World War.
Read MoreBooks About Books About the Brontës

There are far too many books about the Brontës, and books about books about the Brontës, for us to be able to track and arrange our knowledge exhaustively.
Read MoreJustin E. H. Smith: Notes on Social Media and Autocracy

We have learned that part of Russia's intervention in the 2016 US election included placing ads on Facebook that spanned the political spectrum...
Read MorePostscript, Stranger by Nyla Matuk

It is only when we are able to understand the stranger within ourselves (étrangers à nous-mêmes) that we might confront our reasons for creating the stranger.
Read MoreAdam Staley Groves on Charmaine Chan

Recently, I read The Magic Circle, then found some poems when I heard Charmaine Chan read a few excerpts. So here is a review, but it is a review by the criteria of poetry and not, literary or critical, this or that.
Read MoreEmma Bovary absolutely refuses to be good…

Maybe Flaubert intends for us to loathe the characters: he was famously disgusted by everything around him...
Read MoreThe Manson Bloggers

An interest in murders and cults and cult murders makes sense in teenagers. Being sixteen feels chaotic and a little insane, even under the best circumstances
Read MoreWanted: Camaraderie and Purpose

We are, one hears, spending too much time on Appalachia. There are too many dispatches from woebegone towns...
Read MoreHoary-Headed Frosts

As climatologists define it, the Little Ice Age was a long-term cooling of the Northern Hemisphere between 1300 and 1850...
Read MorePrimitive aggressive hordes or emotionless repressive automatons?

As the gigantic ants—mutations born of the first nuclear weapon test in New Mexico—are exterminated by US army flame-throwers in the climactic scene of 1954’s Them!, Dr. Harold Medford reflects: “When man entered the atomic age, he opened the door to a new world.
Read MoreThe tea should be strong. For a pot holding a quart, if you are going to fill it nearly to the brim, six heaped teaspoons would be about right...
Read MoreThe thing about new blooms is that they tend to bleed— / Those petals birthed / hugging close / that come warmer weather are tricked into jumping away...
Read MoreI spent a good part of my childhood at home staring outside my bedroom window, following the trail of planes approaching the nearby Paris airport in the sky from my banlieue. I envied the passengers...
Read MoreThe tea should be strong. For a pot holding a quart, if you are going to fill it nearly to the brim, six heaped teaspoons would be about right...
Read MoreThe thing about new blooms is that they tend to bleed— / Those petals birthed / hugging close / that come warmer weather are tricked into jumping away...
Read MoreI spent a good part of my childhood at home staring outside my bedroom window, following the trail of planes approaching the nearby Paris airport in the sky from my banlieue. I envied the passengers...
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