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Books About Female Friendship (07/23)
Sex and the City, Girls Trip, Booksmart. Films that center female friendships feel good to watch. There is no real question as to why; these films weed out most of the realities of friendships we may not like, merge all the qualities of them we want to preserve, and play it all out in front of us, looping in a lighthearted plot to keep us...
The Motion Picture Production Code (Hays Code) (07/23)
In Anthony Marra's novel
Mercury Pictures Presents, the main characters struggle to ensure their movies adhere to the Motion Picture Production Code.
In the early years of the 20th century, as motion pictures were becoming increasingly available to the American public, some segments of the population expressed the opinion they ...
China and Taiwan: A Short Primer (07/23)
In Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden, Zhuqing Li writes of how her two aunts' lives were shaped by the events of the Chinese Civil War. One of them, Jun, ended up living in Taiwan after the war, married to a general from the losing side, the Nationalists, who ruled the island after the Communists took over the mainland.
The ...
Lem Billings and the Kennedys (07/23)
Jackie & Me, Louis Bayard's historical novel about the early days of courtship between John F. Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy (née Bouvier) is narrated by JFK's real-life best friend, Lem Billings. The two men met as boys while attending prep school at Choate Rosemary Hall in Wallingford, Connecticut.
Kirk LeMoyne 'Lem' Billings was ...
It's Raining Men: René Magritte's Golconda (1953) (07/23)
In Sloane Crosley's novel
Cult Classic, protagonist Lola is swept up in an experiment run by a secret society called the Golconda: The society's leader has manufactured a way to induce many of Lola's ex-boyfriends to appear, one at a time, in downtown Manhattan, so that she can confront them and achieve closure. The society is named ...
Eat a Bowl of Tea by Louis Chu (07/23)
In her book Orphan Bachelors, Fae Myenne Ng recalls her life-changing discovery of Louis Chu's 'defiant, subversive novel' Eat a Bowl of Tea (1961), now considered a classic of Asian American literature, which depicts Manhattan Chinatown bachelor society in the late 1940s.
The novel begins with two friends living in this milieu, Wang ...
The Death Doula Profession (07/23)
The protagonist of Mikki Brammer's The Collected Regrets of Clover is a death doula. Just as a doula (or midwife) helps in childbirth, a death doula helps people who are approaching death. The profession has grown remarkably since 2000, when a New York City program co-funded by NYU Medical Center and the Shira Ruskay Center of the Jewish ...
V-E Day (07/23)
Patrick deWitt's The Librarianist depicts main character Bob Comet's childhood experience of being driven home by a sheriff, after having run away, on the day that officially marked the end of World War II.
May 8, 1945 is the day when German troops throughout Europe surrendered to the Allies, and is known as V-E Day (Victory in Europe...
The "Dying City" of Civita di Bagnoregio (07/23)
Dominic Smith's novel Return to Valetto was in part inspired by his visit to Civita di Bagnoregio, a town roughly 60 miles north of Rome. Known as 'Il paese che muore' or 'The Dying City,' this tiny village sits atop a crumbling column of clay and tufa (a type of soft volcanic rock common in the region). As the column continues to erode ...
Ramadan (07/23)
Aisha Abdel Gawad's debut novel, Between Two Moons, follows twin sisters Amira and Lina as they navigate self-discovery during the celebration of Ramadan. Ramadan is a month-long Islamic tradition characterized by spiritual devotion practiced through prayer, fasting, charity and other activities. It is considered one of the holiest times ...
Pioneering Women Botanists (06/23)
Throughout their careers, botanists Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter helped to break barriers for women in their field. Beyond this, they became the first people in all of Western science to officially catalogue the plant life growing within the Grand Canyon. Despite their obvious expertise, much of the press coverage of their work at the ...
Fiji and the Girmit System (06/23)
The country and archipelago of Fiji is in the South Pacific Ocean, approximately 1,300 miles north of Auckland, New Zealand and 2700 miles southwest of Hawaii. It consists of more than 300 islands, about 100 of which are inhabited. The largest island, at approximately 66 miles long and 91 miles wide, is Viti Levu, or 'Great Fiji.' The ...
Harvard's Glass Flowers (06/23)
Olivia Wolfgang-Smith's novel Glassworks begins with the heroine employing a Czech glass artist to create a collection of realistic flora and fauna for her university in Boston. In interviews, the author has stated that she was inspired by Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, a father-and-son team who created thousands of remarkably detailed ...
The Imaginary Worlds of Childhood (06/23)
1.jpg "Map of the Glass Town Federation and surrounding lands")
In Patti Callahan Henry's
The Secret Book of Flora Lea, Hazel Linden, 14, and her sister Flora, 5, are evacuated to Oxfordshire during
Operation Pied Piper in World War II. To help Flora through the trauma of war and evacuation, Hazel creates a secret magical woodland world called Whisperwood and the River of Stars, to which she and Flora...
Blood and Ink: Writing Materials Through the Ages (06/23)
In Emma Törzs's Ink Blood Sister Scribe, the first word of the title plays an important role: By mixing blood with herbs, people can make ink with magical properties. In the real world, writing has been done with a variety of materials throughout history — including, from time to time, blood.
Evidence points to ink first ...
Minorities in Birding (06/23)
The viral video of Christian Cooper confronting a white woman who threatened to call the police on him while he was birdwatching in New York's Central Park helped drive the 2020 protests stemming from the police murders of Black Americans. Yet Cooper has done much beyond this video to raise awareness about racism in general and within the...
Insects as Food (06/23)
In T.C. Boyle's Blue Skies, environmentally conscious Ottilie tries her hand at raising her own livestock—not chickens or pigs, but crickets. In Western society today, people often react with horror at the idea of eating insects, but there are advantages to including them in your diet. Many insects are an excellent source of ...
Loneliness and Social Isolation in Japan (06/23)
Loneliness is one of many themes deftly explored by Mieko Kawakami in her novel All the Lovers in the Night, which follows a freelance proofreader living in Tokyo who has withdrawn from society.
A 2022 study conducted by the American Psychological Association concluded that global rates of loneliness have increased during the COVID...
Lavender Marriages in Classic Hollywood (06/23)
Nghi Vo's Siren Queen follows protagonist Luli Wei through an alternate version of historical Hollywood. While many aspects of the novel's world are fictitious to the tune of spells and supernatural beings, it also explores real-life social and political issues of the time and place, including the phenomenon of 'lavender' marriages. A ...
Novels Set in Rural and Remote Australia (06/23)
Location is key for Hayley Scrivenor's debut novel Dirt Creek, which is set in a rural Australian town in the southeastern state of New South Wales. The tight-knit atmosphere is pervaded by suspicion after the disappearance of a 12-year-old girl, and the ensuing mystery takes place during a particularly hot summer. Below, we'll take a ...
Archibald McIndoe (06/23)
The Facemaker by Lindsey Fitzharris tells the story of Harold Gillies, a brilliant surgeon and visionary who helped pioneer the field of facial reconstruction during World War I. Through his dedication and innovation, Gillies not only restored the faces of countless soldiers, he also laid the foundation for future reconstructive work and ...
Language Challenges for U.S. Immigrants (06/23)
Language and communication are key themes throughout the work of Ocean Vuong. In both his fiction and poetry — including his newest collection, Time Is a Mother — he discusses the difficulties his mother faced as a Vietnamese immigrant living in the U.S. who didn't read, write or speak English.
Historically, being a melting...
Søren Kierkegaard (06/23)
Born in 1813 in Copenhagen, Søren Kierkegaard was a Danish philosopher and theologian best known for his critical discourse on the Christian faith, which solicited both critics and admirers while he was alive. Known today as the 'father of existentialism,' he was one of the first philosophers to delve into themes that would be ...
Content Moderators' Lawsuit Against Facebook (2018) (06/23)
We Had to Remove This Post by Hanna Bervoets centers on a group of content moderators for a large social media site, who are technically contract workers employed by a smaller, third-party company. Their story and company are fictionalized, but Bervoets draws heavily on material about a 2018 lawsuit by content moderators against Facebook ...
The Intelligent Octopus (06/23)
In Ray Nayler's The Mountain in the Sea, the characters Ha Nguyen and Evrim discuss at length the extraordinary neurological traits of octopuses and how they are likely the key to unlocking a model of consciousness completely alien to humans. Ha mentions, for one, that two-thirds of an octopus's neurons are not even in its brain but ...
The Los Angeles Aqueduct (06/23)
In Marianne Wiggins' novel, Properties of Thirst, one of the main characters is in an ongoing battle with the Los Angeles Department of Water over their aqueduct installation in California's Owens Valley.
Los Angeles was officially founded on September 4, 1781 as part of Spain's colonization of California. As the town grew so did its ...
The House of the Seven Gables (06/23)
In We Do What We Do in the Dark by Michelle Hart, the main character, Mallory, visits the House of the Seven Gables, a historic landmark in the town of Salem, Massachusetts that inspired a novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne. She does so following a conversation with a character known only as 'the woman,' with whom she had an affair years ...
Serengeti National Park (06/23)
Chris Bohjalian's novel The Lioness is set in Serengeti National Park, a 5,700 square-mile wildlife refuge on the Serengeti Plain of north-central Tanzania. Established in 1951, it was one of the first areas proposed to be a World Heritage Site, obtaining that status in 1981.
The park is a subset of the larger Serengeti ecosystem, ...
How TV & Film Portrays Capital Accumulation (06/23)
Hernan Diaz has
said about writing his novel
Trust that, despite the numerous books depicting 'the symptoms of wealth,' 'there are very, very few novels that deal with the process of accumulation of capital. This, to me, was baffling.' This isn't surprising to me, as the accumulation of capital seems narratively uninteresting, at least ...
Female "Hysteria" (06/23)
Chris Pavone's portrayal of a victimized woman being called 'hysterical' in
Two Nights in Lisbon alludes to a phenomenon that can be found in accounts dating as far back as ancient Greece.
In a Curiosities of Medical History feature for
Medical News Today, Maria Cohut, Ph.D.,
details how conditions ranging from depression to ...
Sidi Mubarak Bombay (06/23)
Candice Millard's River of the Gods recounts the harrowing expeditions of Richard Burton and John Speke, two British explorers sent to find the source of the Nile River. Burton's name was well known before these ventures, but Speke became famous for being the first to discover the Nile's headwaters, and both men subsequently gained infamy...
The Mommy Wars (06/23)
In It. Goes. So. Fast., Mary Louise Kelly shares her struggles to balance work and family life. Although for Kelly there was never a question of whether or not to give up work permanently in favor of parenting, the difficulty of finding the balance she seeks makes that question a perennial topic of interest—and conflict—among ...
The Zapatistas (06/23)
In Jess Row's novel The New Earth, the character Zeno's mother was a Zapatista in Chiapas, the southernmost state in Mexico, where she was killed. The Zapatistas are an indigenous peasant movement from Chiapas named for the Mexican Revolution leader Emiliano Zapata. They formed in 1983, organized secretly for 10 years, and then gained ...
The Legacy of the Fourteenth Amendment (06/23)
In All the Sinners Bleed, as Titus Crown, first Black sheriff of Charon County, Virginia, faces down a group of Confederate Army reenactors parading through his town, he '[feels] his skin begin to crawl' and considers that 'the Fourteenth Amendment had passed over a hundred years ago' and 'racism was alive and well.' The juxtaposition of ...
The Handover of Hong Kong (06/23)
Ghost Girl, Banana takes place partly in Hong Kong in the summer of 1997, a setting intentionally chosen by the author for symbolic reasons, representing the inner conflict of the main character who is of Hong Kong descent but grew up in the UK, raised by her English father. This was the summer Hong Kong was 'returned' to the rule of the ...
The Portrait of Mao at Tiananmen Square (06/23)
Though Chairman Mao Zedong's legacy is a contentious subject in China, his portrait still presides over the gates of Tiananmen Square, the symbolic heartland of the nation. The enormous oil painting, measuring 6.4 by 5 meters and weighing 1.5 tons, was first put in place in 1949, shortly after Mao's Communist Party wrested power from the ...
Harm Reduction (06/23)
In The Forgotten Girls, journalist Monica Potts revisits her declining Arkansas hometown and her childhood best friend Darci, who is locked in a struggle with drug addiction that traditional interventions—stigmatization, directing the victim to God for help—have failed to cure. While Darci's struggle involves a pattern of ...
Fiction by Indian Diaspora Authors (06/23)
Sindya Bhanoo, author of the story collection Seeking Fortune Elsewhere, writes about South Indian immigrant and diaspora communities and the connections people in them maintain (or lose) with family in India. Bhanoo, who lives in Texas, was born to immigrant parents in the United States. The Indian diaspora is the largest in the world ...
Nicolae Ceauşescu (1918-1989) (06/23)
Ruta Sepetys's young adult novel I Must Betray You tells the story of Cristian Florescu, a Romanian teenager living at the pinnacle of the country's communist era in 1989. Cristian is blackmailed into being an informant for the Securitate, the government's secret police, forcing him to grapple with his guilt at betraying those he cares ...
Au Pair Exchanges (05/23)
The novel The Caretakers centers on several young women who are au pairs in France, living there on special visas that allow them to stay with a family, take language classes and immerse themselves for a year in Parisian social life.
The term 'au pair' refers to a (usually young) person who lives with a family in a foreign country in ...
Winston Churchill in TV and Film (05/23)
Countless movies about Winston Churchill have been made in the decades since World War II, with different actors playing the starring role to varying degrees of success. What are some of the most — and least — memorable of these cinematic depictions, and what effect did these films have in perpetuating the Churchill legend?
...
Young Adult Novels Exploring Sexual Abuse Against Boys (05/23)
Despite its prevalence, sexual assault remains a largely taboo subject, particularly in cases where men and boys are victims. Toxic masculinity and societal pressure push many to suffer in silence, afraid of being perceived as 'weak' and the repercussions this could have throughout their lives. The mental impact of this decision is ...
Muskiiki: The Four Sacred Ojibwe Medicines (05/23)
In Firekeeper's Daughter, Daunis is interested in how her fellow Ojibwe tribe members use medicinal herbs. She chooses to study pre-med courses and plant biology at college so that she may go on to study ethnobotany through an indigenous lens, and also learns directly from her tribe's Elders.
Traditional medicine is an important part ...
The Rising Threat of Hurricanes (05/23)
In Michael Farris Smith's novel Salvage This World, society is slowly breaking under the pressure of near-constant hurricanes. In real terms, it is already clear that storms have become increasingly powerful in recent years as a result of climate change. What will only become clear with time is whether this is the 'new normal' or if this ...
The U.S. Dakota War of 1862 (05/23)
Much of Susanna Moore's
The Lost Wife is set during the five-week conflict in Minnesota that came to be known as the U.S.-Dakota War. According to the University of Minnesota's
Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 'The conflict can be viewed as one of the genocidal efforts to forcibly remove the Dakota from Minnesota.'
Starting ...
The Therapeutic Value of Walt Whitman's Poetry (05/23)
Ann Napolitano's novel Hello Beautiful is the story of four sisters contending with life and loss, love, death and forgiveness, and finding different ways to cope with hardship. The characters go through mental and physical rehabilitation and therapy, and make a string of rash decisions as they try to find a way to deal with the ups and ...
Denmark: A Brief Overview (05/23)
Amulya Malladi's A Death in Denmark takes place in the country of Denmark in the north of Europe, which is comprised of the Jutland peninsula and an archipelago of over 400 islands. To the south, Denmark shares a border with Germany. On its west side, it is separated from the United Kingdom by the North Sea. The Baltic Sea and Sweden lie ...
The Life and Literature of Tullia D'Aragona (05/23)
As Naoíse Mac Sweeney explains in her book The West: A New History in Fourteen Lives, the fusing of Greco-Roman roots into a common 'Western' narrative took off during the Renaissance, and some of the most illustrative examples of this process came from an unlikely source—a female poet and courtesan named Tullia D'Aragona.
...
Women Homesteaders of the West (05/23)
Where Coyotes Howl is set in the young and growing town of Wallace, Wyoming in 1916, following a couple named Ellen and Charlie's path as they set out to build a ranch on the High Plains. Author Sandra Dallas provides a slice-of-life picture of homesteading and ranching in Wyoming through the various characters. Many of Ellen's friends ...
Books and Movies Inspired by Strangers on a Train (05/23)
If the premise of Nora Murphy's
The Favor — two unconnected strangers conduct revenge by proxy in what should be a perfect crime — sounds familiar, that might be because of its parallels to the plot of a classic book and film.
Strangers on a Train might be best known as a
1951 noir film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, but ...
