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Independence - Would You REALLY Have Rebelled?
- Featured, History, Politics, Uncategorized
- July 4, 2025
Several times a year I require my students to memorize a poem. Sometimes I choose for them (say, “Death Be Not Proud,” by John Donne). Sometimes I hand them an anthology and let them choose. I don’t explain rhyme scheme or poetic devices. I only ask that the students know the meaning of every word
READ MOREAuthor Sarah Wilder published an article on this site last week titled, “BookTok and the Destruction of Literature,” lamenting a TikTok trend among mostly female readers who share an obsessive fascination with sexually explicit fantasy novels. “The decline in reading in America is a troubling fact,” notes Wilder, an avid reader of classic literature, “so a social
READ MOREThe decline in reading in America is a troubling fact, so a social media trend that encourages people to frequent bookstores and read well into the night should be a welcome one, right? Yet “BookTok,” a TikTok term that refers to a community of mostly women who read dark, sexually-explicit fantasy novels, is anything but
READ MORE“April is the cruelest month,” begins T. S. Eliot’s poem, “The Waste Land.” Literal-minded folks living in Minnesota in January or Alabama in August might get a few chuckles from that line. Cruelty and chuckles aside, April is also National Poetry Month (NPM). Initiated in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets, “National Poetry Month
READ MOREIn January, my young friend Anna and I inventoried authors by gender on the “New Fiction” shelves of our public library. That count came to 123 novels and short story collections written by women, 64 authored by men. The disparity came as no thunderbolt to me, as I’d noticed for several years the number of
READ MOREIf literature were a food pyramid, a ranking of vitamins and nutrients for the mind and soul, the classics would be the equivalent of steak, eggs, and fish, books high in intellectual protein like Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace,” Sigrid Undset’s “Kristin Lavransdatter,” and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.” Next would come the fruit
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