Dr. Evil

Very British Villains (and Other Anglo-Saxon Attitudes to Accents)

What do peoples' accents really reveal about them? The villainous British accent crystallizes the love-hate special relationship between the US and the UK.
JSTOR Daily Friday Reads

Literature as Resistance

What does it mean to have a literature of resistance?
Jack London

Jack London’s Double

Catfishing, imposters, and mistaken identity are par for the course in the internet age. But it turns out ...
Zora Neale Hurston

Voodoo and the Work of Zora Neale Hurston

Author Zora Neale Hurston, born on January 7, 1891, is perhaps best known for Their Eyes Were Watching ...
JSTOR Daily Friday Reads

Roxane Gay

An interview with award-winning author Roxane Gay, plus one of her short stories.
JSTOR Daily Friday Reads

The Revelatory Rabbits of Watership Down

On Christmas Eve we lost Richard Adams, the British writer whose 1972 novel Watership Down became one of the bestselling children’s books of all time.
Christmas Carol illustration

How Charles Dickens Set the American Christmas Dinner Table

How did a religious celebration turn into a holiday that is all about home, family, and Christmas dinner? Turns out Charles Dickens has a lot to do with it.
Portrait of The Bard cut up symmetrically

The Art of Cutting Up Shakespeare

We should acknowledge the connection between cuts as bodily violence and cuts as violent ways of making art.
JSTOR Daily Friday Reads

Avi

The beloved and prolific children's literature author Avi was born on December 23, 1937.
Murió la Verdad (The Death of Truth)

The Collapse of Meaning in a Post-Truth World

2016 was certainly an unstable time in history. Even the way we use language to convey our collective fears about the state of society seems fractured.