Posts by author

Michelle Vider

  • Creating the Defamiliar Experience

    But I think of greater importance than a sense of commonality is one of understood difference. Fiction that respects us says, “I know you because I have not had your life.” For Lit Hub, Michael Helm writes on translation, examining…

  • Velva Darling: Girl Philosopher

    For Pictorial at Jezebel, Andrew Heisel presents a feature on Velva Darling, the “modern girl philosopher,” whose writing career sparked in the late 1920s and early 30s before she completely disappeared from the public eye.

  • Diversity for the Campus Novel

    At Ploughshares, Bryan Washington explores the lack of racial diversity in the “campus novel” genre, where the students rebelling against their educational establishments are still overwhelmingly white.

  • Defining Writing

    For JSTOR Daily, Chi Luu examines the long-conflicting ideas of whether writing is a form of technology or a separate dialect of its spoken form. Luu references the upcoming film Arrival and the sci-fi novella it’s based on, Ted Chiang’s…

  • Radical Queer Superheroes

    At ComicsAlliance, Jon Erik Christianson interviews creator Phil Jimenez on queer representation in comics and Jimenez’s work in changing what radical queer representation means to comics audiences.

  • The Gender of Mothering

    At Aeon, Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore writes on the language of “mothering” and the trans parents and activists seeking to define the work of mothering for themselves.

  • Hashtag at the Wedding

    For The Hairpin, Ella Riley-Adams delves into the phenomenon of the wedding hashtag, and the ways we control and shape the narrative around crucial life milestones.

  • The Book as Scholarship

    At Open Letters Monthly, Rohan Maitzen questions the measurement of scholarly value in academia, and suggests scholars should reevaluate the book as the be-all, end-all when it comes to informing others in their field of new developments.

  • Subjectively Sporting

    At Hyperallergic, Gretta Louw reviews a new exhibit in Berlin, Contesting/Contexting SPORT. The transdisciplinary exhibit seeks to address the gross fallacy that professional sports can be removed from the politics of race, gender, and policed bodies.

  • Bridging the Writing Gap

    At The Awl, Jo Livingstone discusses the divide between academic and popular writing. In this first installment of a two-part series, she is joined by David Wolf, the commissioning editor of the Guardian’s Long Read section, who offers the editor’s perspective…

  • Unlabelling Gender and Genre

    I wonder about this in terms of genre. Just as I don’t want to identify as non-binary, regardless of the potential room for accuracy, I don’t want to identify as a “writer of neither genres.” But how much does want…

  • Tech, Humanity, Language, and Romance

    For JSTOR Daily, Matt Langione reviews the current state of artificial intelligence, and the strides AI technology must make to fully complement human thought and experience. The latest step, Langione notes, is the news that Google began improving its “natural…