Posts by author
Michelle Vider
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The Age of Humanity
Suzanne Jacobs writes for Grist on the next epoch of life on earth, the Anthropocene. Epochs are used to classify distinct times in geologic history, and a new paper claims to have identified enough proof of human civilization’s effect on…
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Elements of Beauty
For Tor.com, Mari Ness writes on the long history of the Beauty and the Beast fairy tale, starting with second century CE Roman writer Apuleius and through its later rebirths in the 18th and 19th centuries.
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A Truly Intersectional Future
Florence Okoye, the founder of Afro Futures_UK, will be guest curator for an Afrofuturism-themed month at How We Get to Next. To kick off the collection, Okoye offers a long look into the abundance of futurist ideas and imagery, and the impact…
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Only the Lives Worth Saving
For JSTOR Daily, Tara Isabella Burton revisits Prohibition during the Coolidge administration, when the moral outrage that pushed for Prohibition didn’t extend to saving the lives of people dying from poisoned industrial alcohol: …[the] New York of the 1920’s viewed…
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Furthering Alexander Hamilton’s Hip-Hop Legacy
For The Muse at Jezebel, Julianne Escobedo Shepherd dives deep into Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton to find even more connections between the words of “the ten-dollar Founding Father without a father” and the literature of hip-hop.
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Change, but Not Too Much
Mensah Demary caps off the year at Catapult with an essay that reflects on the traditional New Year’s resolution and what our easy dismissing of these attempts to change says about us: I should probably write a few words about…
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The Art of the Prostitute
Joseph Nechvatal writes for Hyperallergic on the Musée d’Orsay’s “splendid but miserable” collection of art from around Paris’s Belle Époque, a collection that focuses specifically on the representation of prostitutes in the period’s cultural climate.
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Representing Black Women’s Stories
Why do black characters, in particular, black women of color, have to have some curated, Huxtable-like experience? Why can’t black women, like every other human on earth, be sexual, nerdy, outrageous, or flawed? Why aren’t we allowed to share our…
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The Aesthetic Sentence
At Open Letters Monthly, Rohan Maitzen discusses the language of Henry James and the cost of a writer’s search for linguistic, aesthetic perfection: …what he interprets as a sign of progress feels to me, as the reader I am, like…
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Rise of the Poetic Machines
For Motherboard at VICE, Elizabeth Preston profiles the work of Sarah Harmon, a programmer in the field of computational creativity. Harmon has taken significant steps in designing programs that can learn the rules of language and literature to create their…
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Gentrifying Atlanta
There are assuredly very complex reasons for why and how this phenomenon of gentrification plays out in Atlanta and in general. But one has to wonder what it means for the vibrancy of Black culture which resides in these cities…
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Women are People—Who Knew?
…there is a canonical body of literature in which women’s stories are taken away from them, in which all we get are men’s stories. And that these are sometimes not only books that don’t describe the world from a woman’s…