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ChatGPT (05/25)
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 ...
A Brief History of Sicily (05/25)
We may think of Sicily today as merely an extension of the Italian mainland, but the island has its own unique history that dates back thousands of years and reflects the cultural, political, and economic influence of numerous civilizations.
Because of its convenient location in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, Sicily has long been...
Lake Superior as Dystopian Setting (05/25)
'The setting is a character in itself' is a moth-eaten critical insight about any book (or film, or TV show), but I Cheerfully Refuse stops just short of literally making Lake Superior a character. As the protagonist Rainy sails across the largest of the Great Lakes, he describes it as 'a three-hundred-mile fetch of malevolent spirit,' ...
Thornton Wilder (1897-1975) and Our Town (05/25)
In Ann Patchett's novel Tom Lake, the main character fondly remembers starring in a production of Thornton Wilder's Our Town. This is Wilder's best-known play, which debuted in 1938 to mixed reviews but earned him a Pulitzer Prize that same year, making him the only writer to have received the award in both fiction and drama.
Born in ...
Terminal Illness Memoirs (04/25)
Rationally, we all know death is coming, but how many truly believe it? Most people only accept the inevitability when forced to by accident or terminal illness. Ironically, such a diagnosis can lend a new lease on life, as it did for Rod Nordland, author of Waiting for the Monsoon. Rereading E.M. Forster's Howards End recently, I came ...
Elián González (04/25)
In Say Hello to My Little Friend, main character Izzy Reyes traveled by raft from Cuba to the United States in 2003 at age seven with his mother, who drowned during the trip. It is mentioned in the novel that his Tia Teresa exploits the sympathy of teachers who note the similarity of the circumstances between Izzy's journey and that of ...
The American Heritage Dictionary Usage Panel (04/25)
Anne Curzan, author of Says Who?, has some compelling bona fides when it comes to remarking upon English grammar and usage. Not only is she a linguistics professor, she was also for many years a member of the illustrious (and somewhat mysterious) American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language Usage Panel. If you, like me, own a copy...
Blood Magic in YA Literature by Asian American Authors (04/25)
In Vanessa Le's debut YA novel The Last Bloodcarver, her heroine, Nhika, is the titular protagonist: a person with the power to alter anatomy with a single touch, able to travel through a body's bloodstream, and cure it, wound it, or end its life altogether. Bloodcarvers can also feed on blood and proteins from other humans and animals to...
Lucrecia the Dreamer (04/25)
The fictional heroine of Leigh Bardugo's novel The Familiar interacts with several characters based on people who really did live in Spain during the 16th century. One of these is a young woman based on the figure Lucrecia de León, also known as 'Lucrecia the Dreamer.' Like the main character Luzia, Lucrecia comes under government ...
Irish Vernacular in Glorious Exploits (04/25)
While it's impossible to determine for sure how ancient Greeks sounded, Ferdia Lennon asserts that, despite what one hears and reads in many works depicting this era, they didn't echo the tones of Oxford scholars. In his novel Glorious Exploits, set in 5th century BCE Sicily, the narrator Lampo converses in a contemporary Hiberno-English,...
Chinese Science During the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) (04/25)
May, the matriarch of Rachel Khong's Real Americans, is born into a poor rural Chinese family in the 1950s. Her fate is foretold by her mother's life: wake before dawn to cook breakfast, clean up after the men in the family, head to the rice paddies and toil until the time to head home to cook supper, rinse and repeat. It is backbreaking....
Climate Change Mitigation Strategies (04/25)
In The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue, author Mike Tidwell offers an overview of strategies being researched and implemented to mitigate climate change. Overall, the main strategies are decarbonization and the drastic cutting of greenhouse gas emissions by switching from fossil fuels to renewable energy. Geoengineering technologies also aim ...
Facebook's Early Days (04/25)
Sarah Wynn-Williams' book, Careless People, details her experiences at Facebook from 2011 to 2017. The company had been around for seven years before her chronicle begins, however, and its earliest history is fascinating.
Born May 14, 1984, Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg was a wunderkind. He displayed a talent for computer ...
Notable Female Boxers (04/25)
Rita Bullwinkel's novel Headshot depicts the intensity and intimacy of a girl's boxing tournament. Although women's boxing was only officially introduced to the Olympics in 2012 and was banned by the USA Boxing organization before 1993, accounts of women boxing date back to the 1700s. Here are just a few of the trailblazing women boxers ...
Icarus and Helios in Greek Mythology (04/25)
The titular protagonist of K. Ancrum's young adult novel Icarus denies that his name is an allusion to the famous character from Greek mythology and reveals that his mother christened him after the scientific name of a beloved fern, Icarus filiformis. Nonetheless, Icarus's denial of this reference only draws more attention to the ...
The Tangled History of "Strange Fruit" (04/25)
In February 1959, Billie Holiday sang the anti-lynching song she popularized, 'Strange Fruit,' on the London television show Chelsea at Nine. She was battling liver disease because of a prodigious vodka and gin addiction. It was rare for Billie to sing 'Strange Fruit' when she was this physically fragile.
'She just needed a reason to ...
Artificial Intelligence and Brain Science (04/25)
In The Last Murder at the End of the World, a small group of people have survived the deadly fog that destroyed mankind. These survivors have managed to create a peaceful, productive society on their small island, benefiting from the sense of community bestowed by Abi. Abi is a mysterious intelligence that is part of the minds of all the ...
US Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins (04/25)
Becoming Madam Secretary by Stephanie Dray narrates the life of Frances Perkins, Secretary of Labor under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the first woman to serve in the US Cabinet. Perkins was a tireless supporter of workers' rights and is credited with drafting and lobbying support for some of the most critical parts of the New ...
Puccini's Opera Tosca (03/25)
Roxana Robinson's novel Leaving begins with the protagonists meeting at the Metropolitan Opera House during a production of Tosca. This opera is a tragedy, set in Rome in 1800, during the Napoleonic Wars.
The drama centers around three main characters: Mario Cavaradossi, a painter and Napoleon supporter; Baron Vitellio Scarpia, the ...
Artist Ana Mendieta (03/25)
The title character in Xochitl Gonzalez's Anita de Monte Laughs Last is closely based on the artist Ana Mendieta. Although Mendieta's shocking death at the age of thirty-five has overshadowed her artistic legacy in the public imagination, Mendieta was a rising star at the time of her death, and her creative work continues to hold ...
The Highland Clearances (03/25)
In Clear, the third novel from Carys Davies, an impoverished presbyterian minister reluctantly takes part in the Highland Clearances, a series of mass evictions that took place in the north of Scotland between 1750 and 1850, driven in part by the restructuring of British society during the Industrial Revolution and the collapse of the ...
Oliver Twist Adaptations (03/25)
Charles Dickens' works have been adapted and retold in countless forms. In the case of Oliver Twist, the most notable adaptations have been straightforward retellings of the original storyline. For example, the West End musical adaptation Oliver! largely adheres to Dickens' plot, although it omits the events before Oliver ends up at the ...
Spotlight on a Banned Author: Maia Kobabe (03/25)
When speaking about book bans, it rarely takes long for the 2019 graphic memoir
Gender Queer to enter the conversation. Its author Maia Kobabe, who is also the first contributing author to
Banned Together, never imagined that writing a memoir about eir experience growing up and coming out as nonbinary and asexual would lead to national ...
Hertha Ayrton (03/25)
The friendship between Hertha Ayrton and Marie Curie is explored in Anne Michaels's multigenerational novel Held. Although Marie Curie is a household name, Aryton's fascinating life is likely unfamiliar to most readers.
Born in 1854 in Portsea, England, Hertha Ayrton was born as Phoebe Sarah Marks. Levi Marks, a clockmaker from...
Transgender Support Organizations Serving Rural America (03/25)
In Emily St. James's debut novel, Woodworking, the protagonist, Erica, must travel more than an hour each way, from Mitchell to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to attend a support group for transgender people. The group is small—seven people is 'a good turnout'—but it's there, and over the course of the book, the group's existence ...
"Pre-Crime" in The Dream Hotel and Real Life (03/25)
Laila Lalami's The Dream Hotel takes place in a dystopian future in which government surveillance extends to dreams, and people can be arrested for being deemed a risk to society based on their supposed likelihood of committing a crime. The concept of 'pre-crime,' or the idea that crimes can be anticipated before they occur, was also ...
Fish and Chip Shops (03/25)
In Colm Tóibín's novel Long Island, one of the main characters owns a chip shop in Enniscorthy, Ireland – a carryout restaurant that sells fish and chips (french fries in the United States). The dish is a staple of the British Isles, and hundreds of chip shops (aka 'chippies') can be found in the Republic of Ireland, where...
No-Fault Divorce in the US (03/25)
The title of Haley Mlotek's debut No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce is a reference to 'no-fault' divorce, which is a divorce granted without needing to prove wrongdoing by either spouse. For Mlotek, the legalization of no-fault divorce is an important moment in the history of marriage, as it raises questions about the significance...
New Journalism (03/25)
In 1963, Jimmy Breslin chronicled the death of John F. Kennedy from the point of view of the man who dug his grave. Instead of joining the big names in journalism in awaiting statements of grief from world leaders, he went to the cemetery where the US president was to be buried in order to write '
It's an Honor,' a piece that told the ...
Madame Sosostris in T.S. Eliot's Poetry (03/25)
In Madame Sosostris and the Festival for the Brokenhearted, Londoner Viv meets the infamous clairvoyant Madame Sosostris while she is giving readings at the Cholmondeley Room of the House of Lords. Guests are frightened and awed by the accuracy of her gift, calling her "the most dependable clairvoyant in the country," as she has...
Mariah Carey's The Emancipation of Mimi (03/25)
In Sarah Harman's All the Other Mothers Hate Me, Florence, an ex-pop star, clings to a notion: that one day, just like Mariah Carey, she will have what she calls her Emancipation of Mimi moment. I immediately knew what she meant, because The Emancipation of Mimi was one of my most impactful musical albums; it was the first CD I remember ...
Thomas Gainsborough (03/25)
Emily Howes' enthralling debut novel, The Painter's Daughters, features a fictionalized version of the lives of Molly and Peggy Gainsborough. Their father, Thomas Gainsborough, was one of the most influential British painters of the 18th century.
Gainsborough, born in 1727, was the youngest of John and Mary Gainsborough's nine ...
A World Not Built for Women: Gender Bias in Medicine & Science (03/25)
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 ...
The Erasure of Eileen Blair from Orwell's Homage to Catalonia (03/25)
Readers might be forgiven if, in reading George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, they miss the fact that his first wife, Eileen Blair, was in Spain with him, working for the Republican resistance against Franco's fascist forces. As Anna Funder points out in Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell's Invisible Life, when George does refer to her, he does not ...
Cape Horn (03/25)
David Grann's The Wager is a nonfiction book about events surrounding the 1741 wreck of the British ship the HMS Wager, which met its doom while rounding Cape Horn, a rocky headland at the southernmost tip of the Chilean archipelago Tierra del Fuego, where the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans meet. With this book, Grann sheds light on one ...
Dala Horses (03/25)
In Shelby Van Pelt's novel
Remarkably Bright Creatures, Tova Sullivan treasures her collection of Dala horses brought to the United States from Sweden decades ago by her mother.
A Dala horse, also known as a Dalecarlian horse (or 'Dalahäst' in Swedish), is a type of hand-carved, painted statuette in Swedish culture. According to
...
Popular Dances of the 1960s-70s and Ballet (02/25)
In The Swans of Harlem, Karen Valby explains how Arthur Mitchell sought to make ballet appealing and relevant to a Black audience. He and his dancers regularly visited schools to give talks and performances. Mitchell loved to point out how ballet could help the students in their daily lives. He'd tell the boys how much higher they could ...
Books of Stories Centering Black American Life (02/25)
Diane Oliver's Neighbors and Other Stories is a collection delving deep into the corners of Black American life in the 1950s and '60s that were not and are still not usually part of the public conversation. Historical and academic writing that discusses the situations of marginalized people often does not touch on the intricacies of their...
From Stagecraft to Spy Craft: Celebrity Spies (02/25)
The history of celebrities dabbling in espionage is a fascinating one. As Ronald Drabkin illustrates in Beverly Hills Spy, famous people often have opportunities to gather intelligence from high-value sources. Who would not want to socialize with a beautiful or handsome star?
One of the most audacious celebrity spies during World War ...
No-Tech Time Travel Books (02/25)
Exploring alternate realities through time travel is a familiar subject across fiction. Traditionally, the mechanism for making such a feat possible is the invention of a new technology: a time machine, a spaceship that can go faster than the speed of light, etc. Yet books built around these high-tech means often come with a mind-bending ...
Cats in Japanese Literature (02/25)
Japanese people have been writing about cats for a long time. In 889, Japanese Emperor Uda wrote in his journal: 'Taking a moment of my free time, I wish to express my joy of the cat.' He proceeded to then describe the animal in thoughtful detail, including a humorous remark that will resonate all too well with cat owners: 'I affixed a ...
A Brief History of Events Leading Up to the Russia-Ukraine War (02/25)
Victoria Amelina (1986–2023) was a Ukrainian novelist. She spent the last months of her life researching war crimes committed by Russian soldiers during their invasion of her country.
Those of us in the United States probably think of the Russia-Ukraine War as beginning on February 24, 2022, when Russian president Vladimir Putin ...
A Short History of Vienna After the Second World War (02/25)
The novel The Café with No Name is set in Vienna from 1966 to 1976. To fully immerse oneself in the atmosphere of the novel, it may be helpful to review a short history of Austria and its capital during and after the Second World War.
Austria was part of Nazi Germany from March 1938 until April 1945. When Hitler's troops ...
Dreaming About Video Games: The Tetris Effect (02/25)
In Dreamover, the dreamscapes Amber and Nico experience draw heavily from the imagery and mechanisms encountered in video games. In fact, within the past few decades, scientists and researchers have been investigating the relationship between video games and dreams.
One consequence of digital gaming on dreams is dubbed the Tetris ...
Is Tunisian Female Independence Slipping Away? (02/25)
The Republic of Tunisia is a small country in Northern Africa. It was the birthplace of the 2010-11 Arab Spring movement, which saw uprisings due to economic hardship and corruption. Though much of the world was taken off guard by the unrest, Tunisia has always been forward-facing. Once a protectorate of France, it gained its independence...
The Photography of Spencer Ostrander (02/25)
Thanks to the numerous photographs that accompany Paul Auster's prose, Bloodbath Nation reads like an extended photo essay, the combination of words and pictures creating a truly indelible work. The images were recorded by New York City–based photographer Spencer Ostrander, for whom this work is deeply personal.
Ostrander, who ...
The Memoir-in-Essays (02/25)
Compared to a traditional memoir, a memoir-in-essays allows for a more thematic approach and a diversity of styles and formats. It generally prioritizes ideas and memorable scenes or vignettes, and its essays might be linked or discrete. The essays in Alligator Tears by Edgar Gomez appear in roughly chronological order, but a memoir-in-...
Mobilian Jargon (02/25)
Joe Barrow, the protagonist of Francis Spufford's
Cahokia Jazz, does not speak the titular city's common language, Anopa. He learns bits and pieces of it over the course of the novel, at around the same pace as the reader (heeding the
suggestion of his friend Alan Jacobs, Spufford does not include a glossary). We learn the words for ...
Escape and Evasion Maps (02/25)
In Lea Carpenter's Ilium, some of the spies have escape and evasion maps. Also known as escape maps or silk maps, these are scarves imprinted with maps that intelligence officers and soldiers have historically used when they've ended up behind enemy lines. They offer information about how best to escape or at least find somewhere safe to ...
