Posts by author
Lisa Dusenbery
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Feminist Firsts
Taking us back to her prep school days, Miranda July reveals her first feminist action and the fallout. “I didn’t have a plan beyond this moment. I wasn’t sure anyone would even get it—who and what I was talking about.…
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Craig Thompson Interview
In conversation with Mother Jones, graphic novelist Craig Thompson discusses his new love story, Habibi, his early affinity for cartooning, and growing up in a fundamentalist Christian household. “They used to be very upset by it and say that my…
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Scratch-n-Sniff
A scratch-and-sniff guide to New York is in the works. The children’s book, called New York PHEW York, will include “both the good (strawberry, pizza, hot dogs, churros) and the bad (garbage, sewer steam, horse manure) smells which sum up…
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Now We’re Talking
It’s not always oil that we spill into the ecosystem. Every now and then a pet cockatoo is let loose or escapes, joins a wild flock, and teaches the natives how to speak. The phenomenon accounts for “numerous” reports by…
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Books Set Free
The Guardian will unleash 15,000 books on the Brits in a Book Swap kicking off their six-week autumn books season. Readers and writers can also give away their favorites with an embedded message for the finder. If you are in…
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Touré Interview
“Post-racial suggests a world where race does not exist and racism does not exist, and it’s a completely ridiculous term…With post-Blackness, what I’m talking about is a conception of Blackness where the identity options are infinite. So, we’re not saying…
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Winning Captions
If you keep getting rejected by the New Yorker’s cartoon caption contest week after week, your frustration has company. The article offers some strategies for writing a winning submission. Findings of a quantitative analysis suggest captions should use words uncommon…
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Cartographic Controversy
“Map projections are just different ways of translating the dimensions of a globe onto a two dimensional surface. A sphere (or oblate spheriod, if you want to be fancy) can’t be flattened without causing some kind of distortion, be it…
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Post-Revolt Lit
“The concept of the ‘individual’ has been born during these revolts. At the same time, tribal structures and ethnic traditions will not simply disappear. Tribal culture will have to enter into a modern framework and that is very complicated but…
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Migrations Map
Here is a map to help you visualize human migration over the course of our 200,000 year existence. Using data based on mitochondrial DNA difference, the map models migratory patterns as humans “moved outward from Africa into Asia, and later…
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Endangered Alphabets
According to the Endangered Alphabets Project, the 6,000-7,000 languages spoken on this planet are written in fewer than 100 alphabets. And, at least a third of those remaining alphabets are considered endangered. The project exhibits fourteen of those scripts: Inuktitut,…
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YA Characters “Straightened”
Two co-authors of a post-apocalyptic young adult novel discuss how they were offered representation on the condition that they remove or straighten a gay character. “The conversation made it clear that the agent thought our book would be an easy…