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A Short History of the Cooking Show (05/25)
In Lessons In Chemistry, the main character is the reluctant host of a popular TV cooking show.
Gordon Ramsay, Bobby Flay and Rachael Ray are just a few of the many modern TV chefs who’ve become household names. Cooking shows are now not only daytime television staples; they're featured in the primetime lineup. Such was not ...
The Mommy Wars (05/25)
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 ...
Olivia de Havilland and the Studio System (05/25)
In the novella "Eve in Hollywood," in Amor Towles's Table for Two, Eve Ross becomes close friends with the actress Olivia de Havilland. It is 1938, and de Havilland's popular new film The Adventures of Robin Hood has just been released. All is not well in paradise, however, for the young star falls prey to blackmailers, ...
Queens of Rock: Women in Geology (05/25)
In Caoilinn Hughes' The Alternatives, Olwen is a geologist profoundly concerned with the effects of climate change. As in other sciences, women remain underrepresented in geology, even though they have been very much part of its development over the centuries.
St. Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) was a scholar of precious stones, to ...
Alison Bechdel's Early Work: Dykes to Watch Out For (05/25)
Alison Bechdel's new graphic novel
Spent revisits several of the beloved characters that Bechdel made somewhat famous in her long-running comic strip
Dykes to Watch Out For. Though it was never published in mainstream publications, the strip was a mainstay in gay and lesbian publications for over 25 years.
Dykes to Watch Out For ...
Self-help Cults (05/25)
Self-improvement is having a big moment. Life coaching is a multi-billion-dollar industry with more than 100,000 coaches practicing around the globe, self-help books are all over the bestseller lists, and "therapy talk" terms like "gaslighting" and "boundaries" are now firmly a part of the modern vernacular. ...
The Reality of Writing Workshops (05/25)
Several stories in Lori Ostlund's Are You Happy? follow characters who are either teachers or students in writing workshops. Writing workshops are intended to help students strengthen their writing process through guidance and feedback from professionals and within a community. Outsiders don't always get much insight into what these ...
The Nation of Islam (05/25)
Malcolm X rose to public prominence as one of the faces of the Nation of Islam, which is a Black nationalist and religious movement and organization. The Nation of Islam was founded in 1930 by Wallace D. Fard Muhammad, although he was soon succeeded by Elijah Muhammad, who grew the small group into an influential nationwide movement—...
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair (05/25)
In The Corruption of Hollis Brown by K. Ancrum, Walt, a ghost who was born in approximately 1916, shares a body with Hollis, a teenage boy he possesses in order to survive. As the two are still working out how to exist as one person, communicating through their shared mind with tensions and resentments lingering between them, Walt peers ...
Librarians-Turned-Novelists (05/25)
Douglas Westerbeke, author of the debut novel A Short Walk Through a Wide World, did not start his career as an author. In fact, he is a librarian in Ohio, at one of the largest libraries in the United States. After spending the last decade on the local panel of the International Dublin Literary Award, he decided to try his hand at ...
The Promise and Peril of the Haber-Bosch Process (05/25)
As Ferris Jabr describes in Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life, he and his spouse discovered an all-too-common problem when they tried to plant a new garden—ruined, lifeless soil. Despite our millions of acres of farmland, the intensity of modern agriculture, grazing, deforestation, and land disturbance have severely ...
Cyanide Toxicity: How It Works (05/25)
Death in the Jungle tells the true story of Jim Jones, the preacher-turned-cult-leader who founded the infamous Jonestown settlement, a socialist community that became a site of mass murder. Jones was interested in 'revolutionary suicide' and asked Jonestown doctor Larry Schacht to find a method for it; Schacht began researching the use ...
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 ...
Fusion Science as a Clean Energy Source (05/25)
Joe Mungo Reed's novel
Terrestrial History begins with a fusion scientist named Hannah, who has retreated to her cottage in the Scottish Western Isles to finish a review of 'computing challenges in confinement models.' Upon reading this, I realized I had no idea what it meant to be a fusion scientist, what a 'confinement model' would be...
How to Become a WWE Star (05/25)
BJ, one of the characters in Ocean Vuong's The Emperor of Gladness, aspires to become a professional wrestler for World Wrestling Entertainment — more commonly known as the WWE.
Merriam-Webster defines professional wrestling as 'a form of athletic theater where performers engage in staged mock combat, emphasizing entertainment ...
A Women in Resistance Reading List (05/25)
Suzanne Cope's Women of War details the efforts of four female resistance fighters in Italy during World War II, but it also highlights the efforts of countless unnamed women who supported revolutionary efforts. For those interested in learning more about the role of women in resistance movements, the following books explore stories ...
"Native American" Is Complicated (05/25)
In the 1960s and 1970s, the term 'Native American' was popularized. It became the politically correct way to refer to the hundreds of tribes that make up the Native population in the United States, often replacing 'Indian.' But many Indigenous people resent the classification of Native American because it was a name given to them by white...
The Lost Continent of Lemuria (05/25)
Amy Carlson, the leader of the Love Has Won cult, claimed to have been many different figures in past lives—Jesus, Cleopatra, and Marilyn Monroe, to name just a few—but one of her most eyebrow-raising claims was that she was once the Queen of Lemuria, an ancient, hyper-advanced kingdom that originated the human race before ...
Fan Culture and Parasocial Relationships (05/25)
For those living in the dystopian world of Soyoung Park's Snowglobe, the main source of entertainment is reality television shot within a climate-controlled dome. The lives of the actors on these shows are on 24-hour display to be consumed obsessively by the fans in the icy world beyond the dome's barrier. Every detail of the stars' lives...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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...
"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...
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 ...
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...
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
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