Mark Twain

Was Mark Twain a Con Man?

A man named Samuel Clemens received funds from the radical abolitionist Boston Vigilance Committee in 1854. It may have been Mark Twain, pulling a prank.
paragraph book

What a Paragraph Is

On the controversial directive that a paragraph must contain a topic sentence, an idea that theorists, writers, and students have questioned for decades.
King Arthur Harry Potter

Harry Potter, the Arthurian Romance

Perhaps the Harry Potter stories are so potent because they rework the iconic hero stories of medieval French Arthurian romances.
Hollywood's disappearing lesbians

American Film’s Disappearing Lesbians

In the 1990s, lesbian characters were repeatedly transformed into "close friends" in film adaptions of LGBTQ-themed books.
Little Plume and son Yellow Kidney seated on ground inside lodge, pipe between them in a Piegan Lodge.

Edward S. Curtis: Romance vs. Reality

In a famous 1910 photograph "In a Piegan Lodge," a small clock appears between two seated Native American men. In a later print, the clock is missing.
Arif Anwar The Storm

The Bright Future of Bangladesh: Researching The Storm

An interview with Arif Anwar, whose debut novel covers sixty years of Bengali history in five love stories.
Mechanical Turk

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk has Reinvented Research

Online services like Amazon's "Mechanical Turk" have ushered in a golden age in survey research. But is it ethical for researchers to use them?
1970s singer songwriters

How Female Singer-Songwriters Taught Us to Love in the 70s

Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Carly Simon offered a way to imagine more modern ideals of romance and sexual relationships.
Phantasmagoria

The Magic Lantern Shows that Influenced Modern Horror

Eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century audiences were delighted and horrified by these spectral apparitions conjured in dark rooms.
Little Women movie

My Summer of Watching Little Women

What the author learned from her mother, a feminist academic doing a research project on film adaptations of Little Women.