Kate Hopper is author of Ready for Air: A Journey through Premature Motherhood. During the month of October, she is participating in a blog tour and running a contest in which entrants have the opportunity to have Kate visit their book club in person (locally) or via Skype. Enter here. ——- What inspired you to … More Breaking down motherhood myths: A Q&A with Kate Hopper
The astronomical system of Ptolemy, in which the Earth is at the center of the universe. A model of Copernican heliocentrism, published in 1543, in which the sun is at the center of the universe, with Earth and other planets revolving around it. As Copernicus’ model followed earlier challenges to that of Ptolemy, so university … More Cosmologies and the future of scholarly communication
Vidar Sundstøl in Two Harbors, Minnesota. Photographs by Shea Sundstøl. BY VIDAR SUNDSTØLAcclaimed Norwegian writer and author of the Minnesota Trilogy The last seven years of my professional life in Norway have been focused on writing or speaking about the North Shore of Lake Superior. The people, the forest, the lake, the history. However, I … More "The landscape with its special magic and the people with their stories": How Minnesota’s North Shore inspired Vidar Sundstøl’s chilling Minnesota Trilogy.
… and other forms of racial capitalism in Breaking Bad, by Drug Wars author Curtis Marez writing for Critical Inquiry. In preparation for his showdown with Tuco and his posse, Walter shaves his head, making him resemble the Latino gangsters he confronts . . . For the remainder of the series Walter’s shaved head, combined … More On the significance of Walter White’s shaved head
An excerpt from The Inconvenient Indian by Thomas King. ——- What remains distressing is that much of what passes for public and political discourse on the future of Native people is a discourse of anger, anger that Native people are still here and still a “problem” for White North America, anger that we have something … More What do Indians want? An excerpt from Thomas King’s The Inconvenient Indian.
Kate Hopper teaches writing online and at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. Her just-published memoir Ready for Air: A Journey through Premature Motherhood discusses her poignant journey before and after the early delivery of her firstborn, Stella, who turns 10 today. Dear Stella, I know I’ve been talking a lot lately about how grown-up … More A letter to my daughter on her 10th birthday.
BY GILDA L. OCHOAProfessor of sociology and Chicana/o–Latina/o studies, Pomona College Twenty years after I graduated from high school, I returned to a Southern California school as a researcher. On campus, the brick buildings, school bells, lunches, and overall rhythm of the day were familiar. So was the clustering of different students across campus, and … More Listening to students—especially the most marginalized.
This post is excerpted from the essay “Syria” by Paulo Gabriel Hilu Pinto, which appears in Dispatches from the Arab Spring (UMP, 2013). ——-A long history of resistance and opposition to the Baathist regime existed in Syria before the uprising that began in 2011. While both secular and religious political movements had tried to counter … More Syria: Traditions of Protest and the Reconfiguration of Baathist Authoritarianism
In 1972, Julie L. Davis and her grandmother discuss the merits of good storytelling. BY JULIE L. DAVISAssociate professor of history at the College of St. Benedict/St. John’s University In the last years of her life, a conversation with my grandmother inevitably led to her asking me, “So how is The Book coming?” Each time, … More Telling true stories about the past
Courtyard of the Place of Hidden Waters, Tacoma, Washington. This is thefirst tribal building to be certified LEED Platinum. BY JOY MONICE MALNARAssociate professor of architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and co-author, with Frank Vodvarka, of New Architecture on Indigenous Lands The result of six years of travel, interviews, email correspondences, and … More On cultivating culturally responsive architecture while designing for modern needs
