No Planet B (06/26)
The title of Earth 7 raises the question, right away, of more than one Earth. 'Earth 7' is not another planet, however; in the book, that name refers to a collection of Earth 'traces,' the preserved genetic materials of various Earth lifeforms. The people of Mars are intent on collecting these traces, so they might be able to mimic Earth-...
Red Lines and Anticipatory Obedience (06/26)
In Ali Smith's Gliff, two children living in a sinister surveillance state in the not-too-distant future return home to find a line of red paint circling their house. In this dystopian society where all-pervasive technology tracks and controls every aspect of people's lives, these red painted lines are used to flag those who have been ...
Social Media Influencing: A New Type of Career (05/26)
As popular social media websites, like Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Twitter (now X), have grown in the past two decades, their popularity and ubiquity have given rise to a whole new type of career: the 'content creator' or 'influencer.' According to a
2023 study, an estimated 27 million people in the US, or 14% of people aged 16 to 54,...
Oil, Gas, and the Environment: The Good, the Bad, and the Alternatives (05/26)
Oil and gas companies make the fuels that power our trips, deliver our groceries, keep the lights on in our houses and factories, and keep our hospitals running. However, they're also the largest contributor by far to pollution. They heat up the planet, dirty our air and seas, and ultimately destroy beyond repair our only home, the Earth....
MLMs and Moms (05/26)
In the novel Mothers and Other Strangers, Sydney, an expectant mother without a successful career, is involved with a multi-level marketing company. She's recruited by her own mother, who found her way to the company while seeking meaning and community. The book's portrayal of how these companies work—and who they target&...
Fathers. Gay Sons. Silence. (05/26)
The night terrors began when Davis Freeman was five years old, after his mother died of lymphoma. While he lay in the dark, his body felt like straw. His screams, catastrophic and haunting, echoed throughout the house, prompting Davis's father, the Reverend, to sprint into his room to comfort him. To tell him it was okay. To dry his tears...
Community Land Trusts and Housing Affordability (04/26)
Lina Rodriguez Armstrong, the community organizer at the heart of Abigail Savitch-Lew's debut novel Livonia Chow Mein, knows she's landed on a solution to the skyrocketing real estate prices and rampant speculation that are displacing Black and Brown folks in Brooklyn's Brownsville neighborhood. Now if only she can get the decision-makers...
The Great Migration and Chicago (03/26)
In Nikesha Elise Williams's novel The Seven Daughters of Dupree, Gladys, the fifth generation of Dupree women, leaves southern Alabama for Chicago with her new husband, Eugene, in 1953. Eugene worked for the railroad, ferrying passengers between the Midwest and the Deep South but also carrying news of northern cities that offered ...
Countertexts and Shifting Perspectives (03/26)
Dark Laboratory is an incredible reconfiguring of a historical moment that provides a new understanding of the current climate crisis and how it is intertwined with the legacies of colonialism. One way of thinking about the book is as a countertext to commonly taught histories of globalization, colonialism, and climate change. A ...
Atlanta's Black Bourgeoisie (03/26)
In Tayari Jones's novel
Kin, Black characters have varying experiences of class and privilege in the South in the 1950s and '60s. Coincidentally, I was reading Margo Jefferson's 2015 memoir
Negroland at the same time, and in it I came across a reference to E. Franklin Frazier's
Black Bourgeoisie (1957). The title intrigued me and seemed ...
The Signs and Effects of Emotional Abuse (03/26)
Ciara Fay, the protagonist of Roisín O'Donnell's novel, Nesting, is the victim of emotional abuse, although she remains unaware of this for most of the book. Also referred to as psychological abuse or psychological aggression, this behavior erodes another person's sense of self-worth until they develop a psychological dependency on ...
Women and the Cultural Salon (01/26)
In Gertrude Stein's salon, where every Saturday the leading artists of the time gathered, along with writers, film directors, painters, sculptors, and even bullfighters, a portrait of Stein painted by none other than Picasso (and surrounded by Matisses and Cézannes) presided over the room, just as
Stein dominated the space. This was ...
The Racialization of Disease (12/25)
One idea that stuck with me from John Green's book Everything Is Tuberculosis was how TB became racialized. And a brief look at history shows the same pattern occurring not just with tuberculosis but with nearly every major outbreak. Which means that pathogens and bacteria weren't and aren't the only things that spread during such ...
"In This House, We Believe" (12/25)
In One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, Omar El Akkad levels several critiques against Western liberalism and its contradictions. One of the most damning is this: 'It's difficult to live in this country in this moment and not come to the conclusion that the principal concern of the modern American liberal is, at all times...
Suicides Among Cab Drivers (11/25)
Abdul Saleh was fifty-nine when he
died at home in Brooklyn in 2018 after working as a cab driver for thirty years. His roommate found him hanging from an electrical cord. His shifts had lasted as long as twelve hours but financial difficulties plagued him. It was hard to stay afloat in the era of Uber, Lyft, and rideshare companies that ...
Activism for Iranian Women's Rights (10/25)
Before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran had started taking significant steps to improve women's rights. Under
Reza Pahlavi, many reforms were implemented, increasing women's access to education, work, and public life, while also protecting their freedoms in the private sphere. With the Family Protection Law (1967, 1975), for example, the...
The Rise of Gang Violence in Modern Haiti (10/25)
Emmelie Prophète's novel Cécé lays bare the hardship of day-to-day life in modern Haiti, as seen through the eyes of the titular heroine. Cécé bears witness to widespread poverty, rampant drug abuse, and deadly gang warfare. Despite how brutal this may sound, Cécé sees her life as 'a very ordinary story,...
Pets and Poverty (09/25)
It's a standard feel-good trope of countless viral YouTube videos and the central narrative of many animal rescue marketing campaigns: a suffering dog or cat found in a horrifying state—emaciated and filthy, abandoned, neglected, or abused—is saved by a heroic rescuer and adopted into a new, loving home where it lives happily ...
The Mental Health Crisis Among American Youth (09/25)
In C. Mallon's debut novel Dogs, we follow a group of young people who feel lost and forgotten, chasing artificial highs through drug and alcohol abuse. Chief among them is Hal, whose internalized childhood trauma and identity struggles have led to major issues with depression and self-harm. Though the exact timeframe of the novel is not ...
Marriage as a Path to American Citizenship (08/25)
In Elaine Hsieh Chou's short story collection Where Are You Really From, 'Mail Order Love' examines certain realities of American 'green card marriages' and 'mail-order' brides (women seeking long-distance romantic connection and marriage through a service, typically to men from other countries), despite some very fictionalized elements. ...
Trans People Have Always Played Sports: Women Breaking Barriers (07/25)
In Hot Girls with Balls, author Benedict Nguyễn chooses to depict her protagonists, two star athletes who happen to both be Asian trans women, as competitors in the professional men's volleyball league rather than the women's. This choice is a gesture toward the manufactured controversy surrounding trans women competing against ...
The Sociological Work of Pierre Bourdieu (06/25)
In addition to being a novelist, Édouard Louis, author of Change, is a scholar of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Louis's scholarly work has explicitly informed his novels, which are about the violence and indignity of poverty, the racism and homophobia of his working-class childhood, and the difficult act of moving between ...
Community-Based Resources for Aging in Place (06/25)
In Awake in the Floating City, Bo is an artist who supports herself by working as a caregiver to home-bound elderly clients. Remaining in one's own home, often living alone and having caregiver help, is referred to as 'aging in place,' and is frequently preferable to living in a nursing home or assisted living facility; according to the ...
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 ...
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. ...
"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 ...
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...
Civil War in the Republic of Georgia (01/25)
In Leo Vardiashvili's Hard by a Great Forest, young Saba and his brother and father flee their home in Tbilisi, Georgia, when the city erupts in violence. "We heard gunfire by night and saw brass twinkling on the pavement in the mornings, as though it had rained shell casings all over Tbilisi," Saba says. "[W]hen a ...
Abortion in Ireland (01/25)
In 2018, in a culturally and historically significant move, the Irish public voted in favor of overturning the country's long-held ban on abortion, with more than 66% supporting the repeal. This victory for improving access to healthcare for millions was by no means an overnight success, however.
On the contrary, the fight to legalize ...
Emergency Powers (12/24)
In Paul Lynch's novel Prophet Song, the enactment of an Emergency Powers Act sets in motion a sequence of destabilizing events that will eventually lead to societal dissolution and civil war. The Act provides the legal justification for an authoritarian government, through its newly formed secret police force and military, to bypass ...
Barikamà: An Italian Workers' Co-operative (11/24)
A radish farm worker in Celina Baljeet Basra's Happy relays a tale of injustice at his previous job: a group of exploited immigrants, an attack, and an uprising. This story is one we might imagine to be derived from a compilation of worker mistreatments, but the specifics are based on a true story of immigrant fruit pickers in Rosarno, in...
The American Diet Industry (11/24)
In
Hot Springs Drive, main characters Theresa and Jackie attend a dieting support group. In the United States, commercial diet plans like these are a big business. The research firm Custom Market Insights
estimates the industry was worth $135.7 billion in 2022 and predicts that it will continue to grow, with Herbalife, NutriSystem and ...
Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit People (10/24)
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 ...
The World of Food Delivery App Work (09/24)
One story in Jamel Brinkley's collection Witness is about a woman who keeps receiving friendly notes from the same food delivery person and drafts long, personal letters in reply. In her letters, Gloria, a room service server at a hotel, reflects that food delivery apps are responsible for eliminating jobs like hers, but expresses ...
Ted Bundy and the Myth of the Charming Serial Killer (09/24)
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 ...
The Legacy of the Fourteenth Amendment (08/24)
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 ...
Bookshare and Accessible Reading Sources (08/24)
In
The Country of the Blind, Andrew Leland sings the praises of
Bookshare, an electronic repository of accessible-format books for the disabled. Bookshare was launched in 2001 by Jim Fruchterman, the leader of Benetech, a Palo Alto-based nonprofit that develops technologies to assist those with physical and learning disabilities. The ...
How Mothers Affect Daughters' Body Image (07/24)
In Age 16 by Rosena Fung, we see body image issues play out across generations. Characters make disapproving comments about their daughters' bodies or encourage them to diet because they think they are being helpful. Lydia models diet culture for her daughter by criticizing her own body and openly counting calories.
As is apparent...
Minorities in Birding (07/24)
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...
Non-Speaking Authors Writing About Experiences of Language (06/24)
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...
Religious Deconstruction (06/24)
The heart of the story in The Wings Upon Her Back lies in Zenya's hard-fought battle with her faith. Indoctrinated into the service of the mecha god in her youth, she has only ever known faith without question. The deconstruction of that faith and the rebuilding of her identity as a freethinking woman with agency isn't entirely assured by...
Harm Reduction (05/24)
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 ...
Cuban Refugees in Costa Rica (05/24)
In 1893, Cuban poet and revolutionary José Martí met for the first time with the exiled general Antonio Maceo Grajales in San José, Costa Rica. Martí, who had spent much of his life in peripatetic exile, had founded the Cuban Revolutionary Party on 10
th April, 1892, and Maceo had fought two failed wars fighting...
Underrepresentation of Women in News and Media (04/24)
In The House Is on Fire by Rachel Beanland, the character Sally grows increasingly disgusted by the way men's actions on the night of the 1811 Richmond theater fire are glorified in the local media, while women's experiences go completely unnoticed.
As far back as Biblical times, women in much of the world have been underrepresented ...
Classical Culture and White Nationalism (03/24)
The hands of history have reshaped the Greek past for centuries, sculpting it into an idealized version credited with birthing a myriad of ideas and concepts, notably identity. Certain contemporary political currents claim that Hellenic identity was what we would today consider white, although Greece was a multiethnic society that did not...
Houston, We Have a Problem (03/24)
In 2017, Hurricane Harvey dumped more than 50 inches of rain on Houston, Texas. It was the biggest rainstorm in United States history and
the third major storm of its kind to hit the city in as many years. Huge swathes of Houston and its surrounding suburbs were submerged. Floodwater laced with toxic runoff, sewage and debris inundated ...
Missing People in the U.S. (02/24)
The number of active missing persons cases in the U.S. has declined steadily since 1997. This is due in large part to improvements in connectivity and communication, with cell phones and other handheld devices making it considerably easier to track a missing person's potential whereabouts. While this decline is cause for celebration, it ...
The Uphill Climb for Sub-Saharan African Girls' Education (02/24)
In the short story 'Dark Matter' from Gothataone Moeng's collection Call and Response, which takes place in Botswana, childhood friends Tumo and Nametso love swimming in the river and they love school. Daughters of teachers, they are inseparable until Tumo's mother is transferred. The girls meet up again at university in Gaborone. In her ...
Consensual Non-Monogamy in Literature (02/24)
Recent research suggests about 4-5% of Americans are currently in relationships that break the convention of monogamy. While there is some fluidity to the terms used for different types of non-monogamy, an open relationship often refers to a couple being romantically and emotionally, but not sexually, monogamous, while polyamory often ...
