Angeline was mixing up the medicine from her shelves stacked with mason jars full of herbs and roots and eye of newt. A smile on her face. No sandwich made with hate, here, but a humming lovely music in the background of redbird warm mist as the dream potion bubbled and alchemized under her hands. […]
Essays
Persian Night
Firewatch as Dating Sim + Whether It Can Heal Broken Hearts
by Clement Obropta
Dating sims, first-person shooters, life simulators—video games give us ritual spaces for vicarious expression. They let us hold things we cannot otherwise hold. A few days ago, I thought about Robin, a girl I fell in love with in college, for the first time in a long time. Though she was the same year as […]
You’d Just Be Different, That’s All: Revisiting Catcher in the Rye in 2020
by Sam Rebelein
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know about is that crumby article I found a few years back. It was a really phony piece, in The Guardian or something and all, written by this very intellectual guy who says he re-reads Catcher in the Rye every […]
Being Fred
by Leslie Absher
Being Fred My Dad’s first CIA field assignment was in Athens, Greece. It was the late 1960s when my uncle Tom came to visit our family. He didn’t know his older brother was a spy then, though he suspected it. “One day your father and I were about to enter a store,” he told […]
Waves of Sea Glass
by Liz Kerr
My nursing career began in a pandemic. As a student nurse, I was assigned a clinical rotation on the HIV/AIDS unit at the former Graduate Hospital in Philadelphia. At that time, before fully funded research and clinical trials and antiretrovirals, there wasn’t much more we could do for our patients beyond comfort care. So you […]
6,746 Miles To My Happy Place
by Kara Donovan
Before going to Korea, I hated being Asian. Growing up in a very white community didn’t help either. I grew up where we rarely learned about other cultures, and when we did, I was beyond anxious. I thought of myself as being white, and when someone brought up my being Asian, I would be so […]
Feminist Flashback: The Woman’s Film
by Jennifer Gauthier
I can’t remember precisely the first time I saw The Woman’s Film, a collaborative short documentary made by San Francisco Newsreel in 1971, but I do remember being struck by its boldly feminist mode of address and content. It has stuck with me for years and now I use it in class anytime I can. […]
Moxie’s Militant Millennial Feminism
by Jennifer L. Gauthier
In 1913, suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst famously said, “You cannot make omelettes without breaking eggs.” The protagonist of Moxie, Amy Poehler’s new film on Netflix, doesn’t break any eggs, but she does smash the principal’s “Best Principal” trophy, en route to “smashing the patriarchy.” Vivian (Hadley Robinson) learns this phrase – and goal – from her […]
Sell Outs: 1970 – Love Story: The Year When a Screenplay-turned-novel Almost Broke the National Book Award
by Kirk Sever
Welcome to Sell Outs: 50 Years of Bestsellers, the feature where we pore over the best most popular fiction in America from the last half-century, one year at a time. * For our first installment, we visit an all too familiar setting: a United States fed-up-with and angry about government ineptitude and civil rights inequalities. […]
The Po’ele Box
by Kirby Wright
I SWEATED IT OUT on the floral-print couch between Troy and our mother. We were waiting for my old man to get home. My brother gnashed his gum. Jenny was visiting her friend Heidi Bathen and I was glad she was gone. I saw our reflection in the living room mirror—we had looks of impending […]
