Fantasy maps are invented, but not all that inventive. Virtually all of them repeat certain features. The way coastlines, mountain ranges, and islands are arranged follows rules. For instance: a surprising number of fantasy worlds contain vast landmasses in the east, but only an endless ocean to the west. Generally speaking, if a fantasy world… Continue reading Friday Finds
Category: documentary
Friday Finds
Readers who studied John Updike are conditioned to find those kinds of admissions adorably annoying, charmingly childish. Rich and his fictional brethren, from Alexander Portnoy all the way back to Peter Pan, are the man-boys we love to hate. Women and nonwhite men don’t have it quite as easy. If boys will be boys, then… Continue reading Friday Finds
Friday Finds
Because as soon as the embargo for Logan broke, my feed was filled with film writers, including many female film writers, claiming that Laura was “kick-ass,” “a little badass,” or “#goals.” Gut reactions don’t lie, but I couldn’t help but think that here we are, a bunch of smart, opinionated adult women, identifying with a… Continue reading Friday Finds
Sunday Circle: what I’m writing this week
For background on the Sunday Circle, see this post. What am I working on this week? I'm tidying up some of the loose threads on the Big Damn Literary Novel this week and then, hopefully, getting back into pitching freelance work. I took a bit of time off over the new year from pitching as I… Continue reading Sunday Circle: what I’m writing this week
Friday Finds
Why am I here? Oh my gosh, it starts way back when I was a little girl—it was born in me. You can't take what's in you away, and that's your spirit, [knowing] your ancestors and your families have suffered enough. I have suffered enough. Natives are not going to take it anymore because you… Continue reading Friday Finds
Friday Finds
Historically, one of the most powerful (and dangerous) statements for a woman to make was to proclaim herself a witch—as recently as the 1940s, self-identification could have warranted imprisonment. “Choosing to practice witchcraft can still be a very subversive act in certain communities because it often means rejecting patriarchal ideology and embracing female agency, whether… Continue reading Friday Finds
Friday Finds
In many villages, when a person died, they would be cooked and consumed. It was an act of love and grief. As one medical researcher described, "If the body was buried it was eaten by worms; if it was placed on a platform it was eaten by maggots; the Fore believed it was much better… Continue reading Friday Finds
Friday Finds
To achieve today’s desirable veneer of innocence, the industry recommends a practice of constant, self-diagnostic work. This is not new, of course. “We are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism,” Donna Haraway wrote in “A Cyborg Manifesto,” her classic feminist essay, first published three decades ago. Haraway imagined technology as a… Continue reading Friday Finds
Friday Finds
Our own dead women, instead, reflect our own values. Death transforms them into sacrifices to a social order we know to be true, one that we hope we can counteract by naming it; we make political sense of their deaths in order to make them seem less senseless. Through news stories of the immortalized dead,… Continue reading Friday Finds
Friday Finds
But always one comes back to Kerouac. For two reasons. Because he was the most important writer — on the basis, for me, of a single book. And because there has never been a better-looking male writer. The Kerouac of the 1950s — athletic, muscular forearms emerging from plaid shirt, dark hair roughly quiffed —… Continue reading Friday Finds
Sophie Overett 