Salem witch trials
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Language Is the Spell: Kathryn Nuernberger’s The Witch of Eye
A compendium of pungent and poignant biographical narratives of numerous so-called witches, The Witch of Eye is difficult to put down.
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Girl Power: Quan Barry’s We Ride Upon Sticks
But this is We Ride Upon Sticks: someone’s perm falls out, someone becomes prom queen.
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Your Patriotism Isn’t Love, It’s Blindness
Love of country, some argue. With their boots firmly planted in my chest as I struggle to protest. No, that is not love, but blindness.
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Song of the Day: “Burn the Witch”
Radiohead is no stranger to anxiety. A tense tone—like a taut cord reverberating—runs through the high-energy opener “Burn the Witch,” from their latest record, A Moon Shaped Pool. Thom Yorke’s delicate wail floats over the brazen guitar and strings as the tempo speeds…
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Make Me Believe
The response to [the Handmaid’s Tale] was interesting. The English, who had already had their religious civil war, said, “Jolly good yarn.” The Canadians in their nervous way, said, “Could it happen here?” And the Americans said, “How long have…
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Why We Love Witches
At The Establishment, Annie Theriault discusses the allure of witches and witchcraft for girls that has lingered since the 17th century, musing on how witches both subvert and uphold gender roles: Beneath all that glossy packaging hums the same idea…
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Witchery and Wherefore
One thing that has become clearer and clearer in recent years is that violent extremisms are not created in a vacuum, but rather by human beings whose moral thresholds have been altered, often by resistance to societies that are failing them. At Flavorwire,…
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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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Witch Hunts, Past and Present
In the new Penguin Book of Witches, Katherine Howe assembles documents from three centuries of witch hunts—including arrest warrants, trial transcripts, and even apologies from a judge and jury in Salem. Per Genevieve Valentine at NPR, the historical record opens…
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The Repercussions of Modern-Day Witch Trials
We like to think mass hysteria about black magic in the US died with the Salem witch trials, but 300 years afterward, starting in the 1980s, childcare providers across the country were accused of “Satanic abuse.” One such case involved…
