Posts by author
Lisa Dusenbery
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The Help
There has been much analysis of the recently released blockbuster adaptation of the bestselling novel, The Help. Last week Professor Melissa Harris-Perry began live-tweeting as she sat through the movie, concluding that it “reduces systematic, violent racism, sexism, and labor…
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“Books and Babies”
Cambridge University Library has a new exhibit entitled “Books and Babies: Communicating Reproduction,” which explores the ongoing interactions between the “two senses of reproduction” over time. If you cannot make it to England before the end of the year, you…
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Women in Fantasy
What is the problem with the representation of women in fantasy? This piece addresses the question, pointing to the lack of fantasy stories that reflect our basic contemporary understanding of history: that women have had agency despite limiting factors, and…
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Spoiled Stories
Do you want someone to come along and spoil that short-story you’re about to begin? Yes you do, says this study. The “Hedonic Ratings of Spoiled & Unspoiled Stories” chart, compiled by U.C. San Diego researchers, addresses three distinct genres—ironic…
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Floating in Photography
Bomblog interviews Cole Rise, whose landscape photographs are described as both cinematic and surreal. The conversation gets at the artist’s process, the importance and difficulty of subtlety, travel and Mount Tamalpais. Rise also speaks to the floating quality of his…
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Climate Change Fiction
I’m With the Bears, a collection of short stories on climate change, is due for publication this October. Published by Verso—who describes it as “an aim to bring our probable future within the grasp of our comprehension”—the project’s proceeds will…
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Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
Who’s laughing now? Another reason to spare that spider’s life. It’s our moon–why wouldn’t we use it as a trash can? Spoon and chopsticks breed beautifully.
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Name That Accent
You know that accent you hear in old films from the 30s and 40s that’s “not faux-British, but it’s a particular kind of lah-dee-dah American diction?” This piece ponders the prevalence and subsequent demise of that particular sound—apparently known as…
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On Luminarium
Alex Shakar, author of Luminarium—this month’s Rumpus Book Club selection—is interviewed at Bomblog. Topics addressed include the author’s take on technology and science, spirituality and the sacred, as well as the concepts of entertainment, and the city that come through…
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Letter Writers
All hacking aside, are we not all snoopers? This interview with Jonathan Keates tackles “great letter writers”—Lord Byron, Stendhal, Queen Victoria, Henry James, Evelyn Waugh—and the legacy of their correspondences. He also ruminates on the death of “the letter as…
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Ideas of a Decade
A special issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, “An Era in Ideas,” goes under the surface of words like “death” and “terrorism” that have entered the public imagination since the September 11th attacks. The collection of essays reflects on…