At Tor.com, Chris Lough writes about the problems with J.K. Rowling’s “The History of Magic of North America.” “Fiction is a story we create, and history is a story we find, but the opposite is also true, and this makes the structure of both very similar. In this […]
At Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, author Nisi Shawl offers “A Crash Course in the History of Black Science Fiction.” In 1909 Harvard’s president, Charles W. Eliot, issued a 51-volume anthology he claimed could provide its owners with a complete liberal arts education. In the same vein, I’ve pulled […]
At Autostraddle, Beth Maiden writes about the life of Patricia Colman Smith, illustrator of the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot deck and an innovator in Tarot card design. “Colman Smith studied to be an artist at the experimental, avant-garde Pratt Institute in Brooklyn but didn’t graduate — nonetheless she became an […]
London’s Wellcome Museum has released 100,000 images from their collection for your use. “[T]he Wellcome Library houses objects and artworks that range across the spectrum of history, art, culture, and, above all, the curious.”
Jackie Ormes drew comics for Black newspapers from the 1930s through the 1950s. She was popular and well known, even friends with people like Lena Horne, who might’ve influenced her most famous creation, Torchy Brown, and Eartha Kitt. But Ormes disappeared like so many talented women and men […]
At Mythcreants, Chris Winkle writes about the difference between overland travel in fantasy and in historical reality. “Many fantasy stories involve traveling from one city to another, often in worlds without engine technology. Before cars and trains, traveling over land was exhausting and dangerous. The logistics of a […]
Find t-shirts, mugs, totes and more at our new Guttermart location at Teepublic!
The Cultural Gutter 