How often are nonconformity and defiance of social norms dismissed as madness by those focused on maintaining the status quo? Last month’s exploration of madness in fiction focused on The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which I read many years before. …

That which the gods would destroy, they first make mad… One of my literature classes this semester focuses on the depictions of madness in fiction, with a reading list that includes King Lear, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Wide Sargasso Sea, The Bell Jar and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s…

Elon Musk is a bad Person of the Year… but not for the reasons you think. I’ve written this column before. In fact, I think I’ve written it several times. …

How to survive a horror movie Halloween 2021 edition Once upon a time, my father the film professor wrote an academic research article analyzing the behavior of horror movie victims in the light of Darwinian theory. He titled it, “Don’t Do That, You Twit!” It got published. In an academic journal. As I was the biggest…

I spent much of my summer in a sincere effort to broaden my horizons and watch stuff that’s outside my usual fare. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still delighted by science fiction and horror, and it’s so much fun to watch a mediocre-to-lame haunted-house movie with my husband and we…

I have a confession to make. I haven’t actually read Michael Chabon. Once upon a time, a friend gave me a copy of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. I… always meant to read it. …

News organizations are doing incredibly valuable work, almost entirely unappreciated by the public that benefits from them. It’s awards season, and as usual I am flabbergasted by the enormous array of investigative work done by news reporters and how little the public realizes they benefit from them. Time after time…

My MFA writing professor has been assigning us experiments on pretty much a weekly basis, and several of them have come from a book titled The 3 a.m. Epiphany. …

As a distraction from the ongoing drama of the election, we could talk about something almost as controversial: Nanowrimo. In case you’re one of those blessed not to know anything about Nano, it stands for National Novel Writing Month. It started sometime in the early 2000s as a challenge to…