There’s a little coffeehouse in Our Town that has been intermittently responsible for much of my writing career. It’s been in business forever, even before we moved here. It’s on Our Town’s little Main Street, across from the historic old theater and a few blocks away from the Route 66…

It’s something to be halfway through a semester studying the works of Toni Morrison when you read of the boneheaded decision of the Wentzville (Mo.) School District to ban The Bluest Eye from classrooms. It never ceases to amaze me that people think young readers need to be sheltered from…

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. This time we’re focusing specifically on…

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. I mean, I was grateful, it looked cool and I flipped through it, but…

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…