Debbie Moon ponders the “Hyper-Capable Wounded Sparrow” and Captain America: The Winter Soldier: “The Hyper-Capable Wounded Sparrow is always male, and he’s that guy who can kill a roomful of people without breaking a sweat – but who is massively emotionally vulnerable, has no social support system, and […]
Maureen Ryan writes about Tyrant and the lazy use rape as a trope. “I’m just so tired of violence against women being used as storytelling No-Doz–something to juice up the proceedings and then discard at will.”
We all know what we thought before we did that thing we really shouldn’t have done. We had a reason. Maybe it wasn’t a good reason, but unless we’re in an existentialist novel it wasn’t completely random and without motivation. Our understanding of why we do things is […]
Scouting NY writes of the difficulty of finding a Chinese restaurant that satisfies directors’ ideas of a Chinese restaurant in New York, because that restaurant doesn’t exist. “Literally every time I get asked to find a Chinese restaurant, it’s the same description. ‘I want a place with really […]
Joe Lansdale writes about the last minstrel show in East Texas. “I never saw any African-American minstrel shows, but I heard about them from those who had. I certainly saw a white minstrel show. I saw it in a time when public places sported ‘white’ and ‘colored’ water […]
African-Canadian writer and artist Nalo Hopkinson talks about her fabric designs at The New Yorker’s Book Bench: [B]oth my writing and my designs are fuelled by the same passions and obsessions of mine…. I’ve been on a mission for the past few years to find historical depictions of […]