Articles & Essays

THROUGH A LOOKING GLASS DARKLY

How (and how not) to be certain of yourself. When I was a little girl, my favourite book was Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. As much as I disliked cats, the Cheshire Cat defied all expectations with his wisdom. Alice is lost in the woods,…
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November 12, 2020
Articles & Essays

Awakening from Digital Slumbers

When I was rereading Homer’s The Odyssey, I noticed a curious fault in the hero—Odysseus falls asleep at the most inopportune times. At the start of his adventures, he dozes off when the ships are in sight of Ithaca, the pilgrim’s destination. Hoping that by overexerting…
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October 30, 2020
Articles & Essays

O’Connor and Race

In 1974, ten years after Flannery O’Connor died, Alice Walker visited O’Connor’s farm in Georgia. It was located minutes from the sharecropper shack where Walker had once lived. ­Walker had read O’Connor voraciously but put her stories away when she discovered other writers, whom she…
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August 7, 2020