Posts by author
Michelle Vider
-
It’s Complicated, Starring Religion and Archaeology
Rose Eveleth writes for Aeon on the complicated relationship between religion and archaeology and how both have shaped how we tell the story of the world. It’s impossible to do archaeology objectively. Even determining what constitutes a sacred object is…
-
Failing Like a Success
Many days, my own failure lurked in the shadows, too terrible for me to look at straight on, but I read the words, I watched the screen, again and again. I stared it straight in its miserable face and felt…
-
The Invention of Eastern Europe
Harry Merritt writes for The Awl on the history of Eastern Europe as the traditional home of villainy, particularly in comic books and their cinematic universes.
-
Origins of the Book Club
At JSTOR Daily, Pamela Burger follows the history of women’s book clubs from their progressive 19th century origins to their recent Oprah-inspired revival: In many ways, these older groups paved the way for women to view themselves as having a…
-
The Last of Their Words
Chi Luu writes for JSTOR Daily on the rapid extinction of the world’s languages and linguists’ efforts to preserve these dying languages for future generations. On the surface, there isn’t anything wrong with people wanting to communicate with each other…
-
Romance Writers Mean Business
For Pictorial at Jezebel, Kelly Faircloth explores the public imagination’s view of the romance writer, focusing on the genre’s boom in the 1980s and the modern-day romance writer with her eye on the business of writing. [The Romance Writers of…
-
Meet the Oldest Multicolor Printed Book
At Hyperallergic, Allison Meier offers a history of the oldest multicolor printed book, recently digitized and published online by the Cambridge University Library system. The manual [the 17th-century Manual of Calligraphy and Painting (Shi zhu zhai shu hua pu)] is…
-
Hoaxing History
The mythology of the New World – as expansive as the continent itself – engendered a mania for magical thinking, for reinvigorating Old-World myths in a land that still felt only half-real…. a land without myths can be a lonely…
-
Why We Write with Words
For wherever writing seems to achieve preeminence as a tool of the powerful, we find at that moment that it becomes possible to take it apart and turn it upon itself, a line of that same material quickened once more…
-
The Poetry of Laura Victoria
Kiss me like this – slowly. Your tongue, like a living flame, feeds my burning dreams – and after my heavy-hearted abandonment, a clean breeze brightens the jasmine in my bed. Emily Paskevics, writing for Luna Luna Magazine, profiles Laura…
-
Reality, Fiction, Everything in Between
In such a world, the trajectory of any one character, however prominent, never escapes being warped by the gravity of another. Even if, as in Preparation for the Next Life, these background figures are no longer alive. Just as marginalization…
-
Seeing (and Gazing On) Black Twitter
In the existing ways that our fashion, speech and music are ripped from our bodies and plastered as spectacle, this otherwise radical platform becomes a tool of injustice and control. This is the shortcoming of inviting the white gaze. While…