Posts by author
Michelle Vider
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Does Anyone Speak English Here?
At Aeon, John McWhorter explores the twists and turns through English’s linguistic history that brought us the “deeply peculiar” language structure used today.
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On Ladies’ Creative Pursuits
There are certain stereotypes about women’s creativity prior to the twentieth century, and generally they revolve around appropriately domestic novels, amateur watercolors, needlework, and “folk art.” But there’ve always been women who found ways around those rules. For Pictorial at…
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Defining America through Marriage
At Marginalia, a channel of the Los Angeles Review of Books, Darryl W. Stephens reviews a new history of 19th century marriage by Leslie Harris. Harris’s book documents the ways public rhetoric and legal proceedings reshaped marriage into a new…
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A Figurative Recovery from War
In his review for Hyperallergic of a new MOMA exhibit, Thomas Micchelli writes about the work of artists during and immediately after their experiences in World War II. In the exhibit, Soldier, Spectre, Shaman: The Figure and the Second World…
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Technology as Ecology
Suzanne Jacobs writes for Grist about the work of philosopher/technologist Koert van Mensvoort and his new project, the Next Nature Network. Mensvoort’s work seeks to redefine the human civilization’s relationship with nature, a distinctly modern relationship which Jacobs describes as:…
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Saving History through Translation
At Lit Hub, André Naffis-Sahely discusses the vital importance of translation as a way to preserve a cultural/historical record. Translation improves a book’s chances of survival. In a way, it must. What one culture proves indifferent to, might find a better…
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“Performing” Toxic Masculinity
Genevieve Valentine explores the performance of toxic masculinity for Strange Horizons. Valentine uses the horror movie The Guest to deconstruct both the camp and the too-real danger of toxic masculinity: The film’s most suspense-generating disconnect is between the degree to which…
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Afrofuturism and Optimism in Black Panther
At Lit Hub, Aaron Counts looks at writing afrofuturism in comics. Specifically, Counts discusses the upcoming run of Marvel’s Black Panther series by Ta-Nehisi Coates and how Coates’s nonfiction could inform the newest incarnation of Black Panther.
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Who Hunts the Witch Hunters?
Rachel Kincaid writes for Autostraddle on the twisted power dynamics inherent in witch trials, both in history and fiction, in the past and in the present day: But what rings most dangerously prophetic about Salem is the ideology that suggests…
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Choice or Fate in Romance
For Aeon, Polina Aronson writes on the different “romantic regimes” of the world, with “regime” defined as the cultural, economic, and sociological systems behind how we engage in relationships. Aronson compares the Western “Regime of Choice” with the regime in…
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Finding Truth Between Fact and Fiction
For Lit Hub, novelist Lily Tuck writes on “auto-fiction,” or autobiographical fiction, and why blurring the boundaries between strictly factual autobiography and fiction helps writers shape a firmer story.
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Supporting Black Male Teachers
Elissa Nadworny at NPR’s Education Team interviews a researcher and former teacher, Travis Bristol, on the decline of black men in the teaching profession. Bristol’s research discovered that, in several cities, the overall number of black teachers had fallen and…