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It's a truth universally acknowledged, and confirmed by VIDA, that, though women read more books than men, and female authors are published in comparable numbers, they are more easily overlooked: a smaller presence in literary journals both as reviewers, and the reviewed, they also account for fewer literary translations.

Haunting At Midnight, Albert Welti, 1912 by Mary Shelley I look for ghosts — but none will force Their way to me; ’tis falsely said That there was ever intercourse Between the living and the dead. — William Wordsworth What a different earth do we inhabit from that on...

From The History Boys, Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2006 From London Review of Books: 17 April. Shots of the cabinet and the ex-cabinet at Lady Thatcher’s funeral in St Paul’s just emphasise how consistently cowardly most of them were, the only time they dared to stand up to her when...

One year, living near the ocean in South Bay, we got a fake Christmas tree. The metallic silver needles, like tiny confetti mirrors, reflected shades of yellow, blue, and red, emitted from a rotating electric color wheel placed beneath the tree.

Following a map for a driving tour along Palm Spring’s mid-twentieth century Modernist homes and buildings, I had just peeked at Richard Neutra’s Kaufmann House, the rebellious sibling from 1947 of Frank Lloyds Wright’s Fallingwater House in Pennsylvania, which was begun for the same client in 1935. Figuring out...

You will have heard that the English do nothing, almost nothing, but talk about the weather. I apologise for having kept you waiting so long...

In an effort to be interdisciplinary, and to keep up with the current trend for all things neuroscience, I recently attended a conference in Berlin on neuroaesthetics. One of only two philosophers in the room, I found myself on the receiving end of an incredibly hostile attack after asking...

The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Gramercy Pictures, 1994 From Guernica: Instead of traveling solo, the heroines in Thelma & Louise (1991) escape together from social constraints and obligations from work, home and a controlling marriage. Instead of merely reflecting on their lives, throughout the movie Thelma...

Anna Nicole, New York City Opera, 2013 From The New York Review of Books: How fitting and dispiriting that an opera so determined to adapt to the times was produced by a company that ultimately failed to do so. The libretto by Richard Thomas is a vibrant mash-up of...

Seinfeld, NBC, 1989-1998 From Oxford American: It is nine at night on my last day in the South before my great-aunt Nancy and I start making fried chicken. The whole thing came about this way: Suddenly, after eating Nancy’s cake for cousin Judy’s birthday, I was filled with unaccountable...

Certainly for the adherents of Anonymous, possessing the technique to re-write a web-page is similar to achieving autonomy over the ones who created it, even if this form of autonomy exposes itself to the contradiction of working with the same language or code necessary for the construction and subsequent...

Artists glorify the imagination. And all people are artists when it comes to creating a “me.” Glorification of the imagination, and the imaginary “me,” is glorification of escape routes taken to avoid The Truth. Most of our energy is put into maintaining a fictitious self, a mask. We do...

From The Chronicle Review: Any addict can give you a hundred reasons why he should quit, tell you dozens of stories that would make any other person quit. But the decision to quit and “what would make you stop” are two very different things for the addict. Here’s how...