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American Entertainers Visiting the Vietnam Warfront (11/23)
In California Golden, Mindy has a transformative experience touring Vietnam during the war that makes her question her chosen career in show business. The Vietnam War was a transformative experience for America in the 1960s, impacting virtually everyone in some way. While the involvement of the United States in Vietnam was a profoundly ...
Cult Psychology (11/23)
Cults are often difficult to identify from the outside, given that a common characteristic is members' denial that any dysfunctional elements are at play within their community. Many countries, including the U.S., do not have a legal definition, but prefer to use a series of criteria. However, a sort of colloquial understanding is more ...
Jeanne Lanvin (1867-1946) (11/23)
Noelle Salazar's The Roaring Days of Zora Lily follows a fictional aspiring fashion designer living in Seattle in the 1920s. But who were the real fashion designers of the day? In Salazar's novel, Zora wants to have a career like Coco Chanel and Jeanne Lanvin. While most American readers have likely heard of the Chanel brand and its ...
Dream Interpretation (11/23)
One of the short stories in Kij Johnson's The Privilege of the Happy Ending lists whimsical interpretations of specific dreams. For instance, to dream about an Audi 'signifies great strife and financial disaster. It is hard not to connect this to the fact that your ex left you for someone who owns an Audi.'
But the interpretation of ...
Bringing Them Home: The Use of DNA to Identify Remains at the Dozier School for Boys (11/23)
The Reformatory, the newest novel by celebrated author Tananarive Due, tells the horrific story of the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys. Once the country's largest reform school, Dozier supposedly intended to rehabilitate its students into productive citizens, but instead the boys were terrorized and tortured, and some were even ...
Teddy Ruxpin (11/23)
The portability and low price point of cassette tapes meant that they were easily integrated into many areas of technology, as Marc Masters explores in High Bias. Toys began incorporating tapes too, and the most famous tape-playing toy of all was named Teddy Ruxpin. First introduced in 1985, Teddy was quickly a favorite cutting-edge toy ...
A World Not Built for Women: Gender Bias in Medicine & Science (11/23)
In March 2019, NASA was due to launch the first all-women spacewalk from the International Space Station. It was to be a milestone in space exploration. Astronauts Christina Koch and Anne McClain were to walk outside the ISS to replace lithium-ion batteries; Mary Lawrence and Kristen Facciol were to be lead flight director and lead ...
ChatGPT (11/23)
Artificial intelligence grabbed the headlines in November 2022 when OpenAI introduced ChatGPT to the world (GPT stands for generative pre-trained transformer). A large language model (LLM) designed to interact informally with a human interlocutor, ChatGPT has since released three more generations on the foundation model, with GPT-4's ...
Female Frenemies in Literature and Reality (11/23)
In Rachel Hawkins's novel The Villa, childhood best friends Emily Sheridan and Chess Chandler decide to spend the summer together amid the splendor of Villa Aestas in Italy. Although the two women have fallen a bit out of touch over the years, this summer offers a chance for them to reconnect while combining work and play. But when ...
Korean Military Brides (11/23)
Franny Choi's The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On delves into how Korean women were treated before, during and after the Korean War, as well as the generational trauma and isolation resulting from this treatment. One aspect of this is the experience of military brides, or Korean women who married members of the American military...
"The Murders in the Rue Morgue" by Edgar Allan Poe (11/23)
In Jane Smiley's A Dangerous Business, the story 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' by Edgar Allan Poe becomes an important point of reference for main character Eliza as she and her friend Jean investigate a series of murders in 1850s Monterey, California. As Eliza examines the facts and circumstances surrounding the killings, her thoughts ...
Novels Exploring Terminal Illness in Middle Age (11/23)
In her novel We All Want Impossible Things, Catherine Newman chronicles the final days of Edi's life from the perspective of her lifelong friend, Ashley. Though terminal illness and death can be tragic at any age, facing these realities at the stage of life Edi is in comes with a particular set of challenges, such as knowing she will miss...
The White-Savior Complex (11/23)
What exactly is a white-savior complex (also known as white saviorism)? In Dipo Faloyin's Africa Is Not a Country: Notes on a Bright Continent, the definition is not as important as the negative impacts upon those who experience it.
According to Black Equality Resources, white-savior complex is defined as 'an idea in which a white ...
Migrants in Italy (11/23)
Many of Jhumpa Lahiri's protagonists in Roman Stories, while not described as being of a specific ethnicity or nationality, are clearly foreign to Rome. So where might they be from? Italy's immigration statistics program only tracks non-EU newcomers to the country, giving an incomplete picture of immigration in general, but we can see ...
Simchat Torah (10/23)
Human connections are arguably at their most powerful when experienced through communal dance, music and other communication beyond words. Events such as these are highlighted numerous times in Isaac Blum's debut young adult novel, The Life and Crimes of Hoodie Rosen, which creates a picture of Orthodox Jewish life that sears into one's ...
General James Oglethorpe (10/23)
In The Kingdoms of Savannah, author George Dawes Green describes General James Oglethorpe as a 'jewel of a man, a rare nonmonster in Savannah history.' Indeed, Oglethorpe was unique in the context of 1700s British imperialism: a champion of the oppressed who fought against the powerful in issues ranging from prison abuse to slavery to the...
Cabramatta, New South Wales, Australia (10/23)
Tracey Lien's debut novel,
All That's Left Unsaid, follows a Vietnamese Australian family in Cabramatta, which is a suburb of Sydney, capital of the state of New South Wales. The presence of a migrant hostel in the area in the 1960s and '70s made it a hub for Southeast Asians fleeing the Vietnam War. By the mid-1990s, around a quarter ...
Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man (10/23)
In his seminal work, On the Origin of Species (1859), Charles Darwin elucidated the theory of evolution by natural selection, explaining how organisms better adapted to their environment are more likely to survive and pass on their genes. What he didn't explain, however, was human evolution — that was addressed in his second but ...
The Harms of Industrial Hog Farming in North Carolina (10/23)
In Wastelands, Corban Addison recounts the true story of a group of North Carolina residents fighting for justice after suffering through years of pollution and nuisance from neighboring industrial hog farms. It's an uphill battle against a powerful multinational corporation, a broken regulatory system and a political establishment ...
The Jane Collective (10/23)
Kerri Maher's novel All You Have to Do Is Call fictionalizes the story of the real-life Jane Collective, an underground abortion network that operated in Chicago during the late 1960s and early '70s before abortion was legalized with the passing of Roe v. Wade in 1973. The organization was founded by Heather Booth, who as a college ...
The Fram: Polar Ship (10/23)
Helen Czerski's book The Blue Machine explains how Earth's oceanic system functions, including some discussion of the work that went into discovering that information. A few expeditions that contributed greatly were those of the Norwegian ship the Fram, which explored the Arctic and Antarctic oceans in the late 19th and early 20th ...
Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit People (10/23)
The emotional crisis faced by the protagonists of Jen Ferguson's Those Pink Mountain Nights stems from the disappearance of a mother and daughter from a First Nations community in Alberta, Canada. Although the book keeps its focus tight, on the intimate stories of a handful of teens, the characters occasionally reference the larger issue ...
Enslavement in Canada (10/23)
The nonfiction book Flee North recounts how activist and writer Thomas Smallwood encouraged the enslaved individuals he helped escape to relocate to Canada, where slavery was illegal, rather than remaining in the United States, where they might be returned to captivity if caught. Smallwood himself settled in Toronto with his family in ...
North Carolina's Ghost Lights (10/23)
In Ron Rash's The Caretaker, characters claim to have seen unexplained lights in Blowing Rock's cemetery and its environs: The previous graveyard caretaker, Wilkie, told Blackburn, the current caretaker, about a mysterious light that led a man to find his brother's grave after searching in vain in six other county burial grounds; and ...
Homelessness and Traumatic Brain Injuries (10/23)
Ava Carson, the protagonist in Ayana Mathis's second novel The Unsettled, is homeless because of domestic violence. At the Glenn Avenue shelter, she can't sleep or eat. She is listless and emotionally paralyzed. Yet Ava never considers that she might have a traumatic brain injury.
Researchers who analyzed data from multiple countries, ...
Taiwan and China's Palace Museums (10/23)
At the end of Fragile Cargo, Adam Brookes' excellent history about how China's cultural treasures were protected during World War II, the author informs his readers that the finest items in the imperial collection were moved to Taipan, Taiwan. They remain there to this day, an ongoing point of contention between Taiwan and China.
...
The Discovery of Plate Tectonics (10/23)
In Annalee Newitz's science fiction novel The Terraformers, characters threaten to trigger the development of plate tectonics on the planet Sask-E as a form of political leverage. The theory of plate tectonics has revolutionized our understanding of our planet and its geological processes. This theory states that the outer layer of Earth,...
Ted Bundy and the Myth of the Charming Serial Killer (10/23)
Jessica Knoll's Bright Young Women, a fictionalized take on the crimes of Ted Bundy, portrays its Bundy-inspired killer as an unimpressive man sensationalized as a charming genius. This echoes real-life critiques of the way Bundy has been cast by the media and law enforcement over the years.
Bundy was one of the twentieth century's ...
Jian Bing (10/23)
In C Pam Zhang's Land of Milk and Honey, which takes place in a fictional near-future of worsening climate change and severely reduced biodiversity, the main character chooses to work as an elite chef for a wealthy employer on an isolated mountain in Italy rather than give up access to the ingredients she loves that are rapidly vanishing ...
The United Fruit Company: The Scourge of Central and South America (10/23)
In Where There Was Fire, the neighborhood that is the central setting in the 1968 timeline is home to a banana plantation run by a fictional corporation called American Fruit Company, based loosely on the real-life United Fruit Company (UFC). United Fruit (which has since become Chiquita) had plantations in Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, ...
Non-Speaking Authors Writing About Experiences of Language (10/23)
In Angie Kim's Happiness Falls, Eugene is diagnosed with Angelman syndrome, or AS, a neuro-genetic disorder caused by a chromosome-15 gene deletion on the maternal side. Most people with AS have limited speech and motor abilities. It is important to distinguish Angelman syndrome and other conditions that involve learning disabilities from...
The MANIAC Computer (10/23)
The title of Benjamin Labatut's novel The MANIAC refers to the computer—the fastest of its kind at the time—developed by the Hungarian American physicist John von Neumann. During the Second World War, von Neumann was a consultant on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico, where he focused on the detailed mathematical ...
Controlled Prairie Burning for Maintenance (10/23)
In Nathan Hill's novel Wellness, protagonist Jack is from the Kansas prairie, where his father was an expert at managing prairie fires. Prairie fires may look terrifying and unwieldy, but in fact they are often purposeful and controlled, and play a critical role in maintaining healthy ecosystems. In much of North America, prairies were ...
Author Homes in Massachusetts (10/23)
One of the topics explored in Dayswork by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel is Herman Melville's home in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Arrowhead, which he went into significant debt to purchase but where he spent what seem to have been the happiest and most productive years of his life. Dayswork additionally mentions the homes of Nathaniel ...
The Poor Clares of Sant'Orsola Convent (10/23)
In Natasha Solomons' novel Fair Rosaline, the eponymous heroine is destined for life in a convent – specifically Sant'Orsola in Mantua, Italy. Margherita Gonzaga d'Este, a wealthy widow, commissioned the convent in the early 17th century, sparing no expense; she hired architect and artist Antonio Maria Viani to design the building, ...
The Execution of Charles I (10/23)
When it comes to the execution of English royalty, perhaps the most famous are the two wives of Henry VIII who met their ends at the Tower of London — Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard. The double execution of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette by guillotine in France is equally if not more famous, and countless other royals have ...
Zines and the 1990s (10/23)
In his memoir, Stay True, Hua Hsu recalls his college years in the 1990s, including the role that zines played in the evolution of his identity: 'Zines are a metaphor for life…It's your creation and your voice.'
The Oxford English Dictionary defines a zine as being a short form of fanzine, a kind of amateur-produced magazine ...
Hemingway's Islands in the Stream (10/23)
The Birdcatcher by Pulitzer finalist Gayl Jones features numerous allusions to literary figures and artists. The narrator, Amanda, is a writer, and her friend Catherine, who has repeatedly tried to murder her husband, is a sculptor. While contemplating Catherine's relationship with her husband, Ernest, Amanda references the work of an ...
The 13th Amendment and Contemporary Slavery in the US Prison System (10/23)
As we all know, slavery was abolished in the United States after the Civil War when Congress passed the 13th Amendment. What many might not recognize is that the 13th Amendment did not ban slavery entirely. In fact, it explicitly states an instance in which slavery and involuntary servitude are permitted — when people are ...
Grime Music (09/23)
As Olivette Otele references in her book African Europeans: An Untold History, many Black British artists find music to be an effective and far-reaching medium in which to address and explore their heritage and life experiences as people of color. Grime music has become one of the hottest and most vibrant genres to emerge in the UK in the...
Fascism in Pre-War England (09/23)
In Marie Benedict's historical novel The Mitford Affair, much of the narrative focuses on the rise of fascism in Great Britain before World War II.
Merriam-Webster defines fascism as "a political philosophy, movement, or regime…that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized ...
Stravinsky's The Firebird (09/23)
The protagonist in Meg Howrey's novel, They're Going to Love You, is a choreographer, hired to create a new adaptation of Igor Stravinsky's renowned ballet, The Firebird. First staged in Paris in 1910, it is often credited as the show that catapulted the composer to international fame.
The ballet's story is based primarily on the ...
The Rise of Vehicular Homelessness in the U.S. (09/23)
In 2018, in Seattle's SoDo neighborhood, a woman named Sabrina Tate died inside her RV. She was almost 28 years old. A chronic drug user, Sabrina may have been killed by an infection. Two men living in the same vehicular lot, what was considered a safe space, had died there earlier in the year. Sabrina's parents, who had tried to help her...
The Bylina (09/23)
The bylina, an Old Russian form of epic poetry or song, is referenced in
The Story of Russia by Orlando Figes, in which the author notes its ideological significance.
The word 'bylina' (plural: byliny) has its origins in the Russian 'byl,' translating as 'that which happened.' Byliny began to be printed and popularized in the 17th ...
Captivating Fantasy Worlds to Explore Next (09/23)
A trip to Elsewhere in the young adult debut
Hotel Magnifique is enough to give anyone the itch to travel. The question is, where to next? Here are some suggestions of fantasy worlds to explore once you've checked out of Emily J. Taylor's wondrous hotel.
Battle Magic (2013): Tamora Pierce's worldbuilding is famed, with fans ...
New York Review Books (09/23)
Susie Boyt's Loved and Missed was first published in the United Kingdom in 2021; two years later, it has been published in the United States by New York Review Books, which specializes in both contemporary literature and obscure classics and embodies what it calls an 'eclectic, adventurous spirit.'
Since 1999, New York Review Books has...
Monarch Butterfly Habitat Restoration on Roadsides and Beyond (09/23)
As Ben Goldfarb notes in Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet, we're in the midst of an insect apocalypse. It's largely agreed now that our planet is experiencing a sixth mass extinction event, and insect species are among the most imperiled.
Habitat loss is a critical component, driven by road construction ...
Sharks in the Water: German U-boats in World War I (09/23)
Douglas Brunt’s The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel tells the story of Rudolf Diesel, the German inventor of the internal combustion engine. After the Industrial Revolution, industry had become king, and Diesel’s groundbreaking invention produced more power, used cheaper fuel and didn’t require a team of laborers to ...
Women's Influence in the British Abolition Movement (09/23)
In The Fraud, Eliza's lover Frances is a passionate abolitionist whose commitment to the cause infects Eliza with a similar sense of urgency. Britain's Slavery Abolition Act was passed in 1833, freeing at least 800,000 people from bondage in the Caribbean, South America, and Canada. The act followed decades of campaigns from abolitionist ...
1940 U.S. Presidential Candidate Wendell Willkie (09/23)
The Golden Gate by Amy Chua begins with the murder of Walter Wilkinson, who is a fictionalized version of Wendell Willkie, a Republican presidential candidate who lost to Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940. Wilkinson and Willkie both died in 1944, but their cause of death was vastly different — Willkie died of a heart attack instead of ...
