Dear Reader, Octogenarian Haze Evans believes that curiosity is the collagen of the mind, staving off mental sags, droops, and wrinkles. She doesn’t care that Society reserves its pompom waving and back flips for those who’ve yet to cross the 40-year line; as a newspaper columnist, she’s got people to listen to, stories to write, … More Letter from a Radical Hag
BY SETH PERLOWGeorgetown University One book, written by a computer, could have killed us all. What do you do when you’re the only country in the world with atomic bombs? You make them much, much bigger. That was the US strategy right after World War II. The Cold War was beginning, and by 1952 the … More The Most Dangerous Book in the World
People will be reading Adrienne Kennedy’s works for centuries to come. —Henry Louis Gates, Jr. *** Adrienne Kennedy has been a force in American theatre since the early 1960s, influencing generations of playwrights with her hauntingly fragmentary lyrical dramas. Kennedy is a three-time Obie-award winning American playwright whose works have been widely anthologized and performed … More #UPWeek | #ReadUP | University Press Week: Adrienne Kennedy inducted into the 2018 Theater Hall of Fame for Lifetime Achievement
BY NAOMI MORGENSTERNAssociate professor of English at the University of Toronto From a podium in Central Park West, a student activist from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School declared: “The adults failed us and now seventeen people are dead.” During a day of nationwide actions, a coalition of youth would point to the “failure” of adults … More The Child at the Social Limit
BY JAMES P. LENFESTEYExcerpts from the introduction to If Bees Are Few It is said there are twenty thousand species of bees in the world, a genus fifty million years old, but in the fertile imagination of the world’s poets, there is no beginning and no end to bee buzz. As Rilke wrote, poets are … More Let’s hear it for the bee.
BY JEFF SOLOMONAssistant professor of English and women, gender, and sexuality studies at Wake Forest University Truman Capote and Gertrude Stein should not have been famous. Both secured their reputations between the Wilde trials and Stonewall, when the most widely available understandings of homosexuality were inversion and perversion, and when censorship prevented the public discussion … More Exclusively gay, remarkably famous: The "fabulous potency" of Truman Capote and Gertrude Stein.
BY CARL H. SEDERHOLMProfessor of interdisciplinary humanities at Brigham Young University Under the right circumstances, certain texts suggest a “weird realism,” circumstances (as described by Graham Harman) when language either struggles to describe the impossibly real or when it overflows with multiple possibilities. One of H. P. Lovecraft’s strengths as a writer lies in his … More Alive in the Age of Lovecraft
A fishing boat in Norway’s Lofoten Islands. Author Eric Dregnispent a year on a Fulbright Fellowship in Trondheim, Norway, where his first child was born.Images courtesy of the author. ——-This is the first in a series running this week on authors’ favorite holiday recipes.——-BY ERIC DREGNI The fishmonger at the Ravnkloa seafood shop in Trondheim tricked me. … More Recipe spectacular: Bury your fish for better flavor and other questionable Norwegian advice.
T.S. Eliot astride a John Deere tractor.Photo remix by David S. Roh. BY DAVID S. ROHAssistant professor of English at the University of Utah What does T.S. Eliot have in common with a John Deere tractor? Quite a bit, as it turns out. The John Deere company (owned by General Motors) recently set the blogosphere … More On the perils of absolute ownership, tractors, and T.S. Eliot
The North Dakota frontier from Bentley, ND, in 2007. The state is currently experiencing phenomenal growth, and Dean Hulse looks at the environmental consequences of such growth. Photo from afiler via Flickr. Murmurings about North Dakota’s current oil boom began to surface in late 2008. While a global financial crisis was under way, North Dakota’s … More Sustainability and North Dakota’s oil boom
