Culture wars: Trump’s takeover of arts is straight from the dictator playbook
“US president’s attempt to control or dismantle cultural institutions plays into a long history of authoritarians using arts to push their agenda”
Sorry not sorry: Prepare to be harangued for the next 4 years. We’ve moved way past politics now here in the U.S. Now it’s a question of morality. The former English teacher in me needs to keep reminding people that words matter, even though actions speak louder than words.
How Homer’s Epics Survived After the Fall of the Ancient Greek World
A short history of how Homer’s epics Iliad and Odyssey survived to influence Western civilization for centuries.
He was created to be a bloody monster. Now he’s an internet hero.
In the more pathological corners of the manosphere, a “sigma male” is the alpha male’s introverted cousin. While the alpha male effortlessly commands the respect of his peers, the sigma is a lone wolf figure so hypermasculine and independent that he needs no human connection and thus is superior to everyone else.
Constance Grady examines how Patrick Bateman, created by Bret Easton Ellis in the novel American Psycho and further popularized by the film starring Christina Bale, has grown into an internet meme, the “sigma male.”
The Fantasy of a More Neighborly Past
A Florida retirement community might be an unexpected setting for a novel written by a Finnish Swedish children’s book author. But in 1976, Tove Jansson, who is best-known for her whimsical hippo-esque characters, the Moomins, published an adult novel set in the fictional Berkeley Arms in Florida. The book, Sun City, was inspired by a late-career trip to the Tampa Bay area and examines the isolation of older Americans—a part of stateside life that, as Lauren LeBlanc writes in her recent essay, “often goes unseen.”
‘Reading is part of my identity’: the woman taking on Goodreads owner Amazon
For those who want to replace Goodreads for tracking their reading, StoryGraph is one of the most often suggested choices. In this article from The Guardian, Nadia Odunayo, a software engineer and developer, explains why she developed StoryGraph. Despite all the work involved in running StoryGraph, she says her own reading has increased dramatically: “I’m now the CEO of a company that’s a reading tracking app. So reading is now part of my whole identity.”
In Purging Language About Trans People, Donald Trump and Elon Musk Are Trying to Purge the People Themselves
“Gabrielle Bellot on the Radical Power of Words As Weapons”
Here’s an explanation of how marginalized people get erased from history. Words matter. Language matters. Be on the lookout for the ways government uses language to forestall dissent and control the social and political narrative.
“Who Made These Rules?” Claire Messud on What’s Distracting from Good Writing
Academician Sean Hooks interviews author Claire Messud about the current state of writing, publishing, and literary criticism. In particular, they discuss the current emphasis on the artist rather than the art work and whether the very act of interviewing writers emphasizes the authors rather than their books.
Allen Eskens on the Power of Research
“In researching his latest novel, the author met people whose stories would change him forever.”
Writer Allen Eskens describes the profound effect upon him of hearing survivors of the Bosnian war talk about their experiences:
I needed to do my level best to write The Quiet Librarian so that my readers could walk in that world as well. There needed to be a reverence to my depiction, one that would honor those who survived that terrible war as well as those who did not.
Under-Read: Five Underappreciated Excellent Books
Sometimes I get the feeling that the whole world is recommending the same few books; and then, like magic, those few books disappear from consciousness and a new clump of books takes over, until they also disappear, replaced by the latest hot publications . . . and so on.
In this article Diane Parrish recommends what she calls underappreciated books: “Although they’ve been celebrated in some corners of the literary world, they deserve a bigger audience.”
© 2025 by Mary Daniels Brown
