In this essay, Andrew Strombeck considers how Severance reminds its viewers that the Always-Be-Hustling era masks grim truths about work. As long as we view work as a place to find our best selves, we...

Emily Friedman explores friendship and pleasure in roleplaying games, as viewer and player. An introduction to "actual play" livestreaming on Twitch and YouTube, including the shows produced by Critic...

Robert I. Lublin has loved J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings series since he was 10 and re-read it often—but after finding comfort in Tolkien’s novels for so many years, he was dismayed to find...

Miranda Hoegberg considers how couples learn about each other through watching reality dating shows—and what this might mean about how we learn in general from didactic forms like the realist novel. A...

Shel Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends remains an unparalleled classic of children’s literature. On the occasion of its 50th anniversary, poet Ty Holter reflects on the book’s resistance to commer...

Hot girl summer gives way to sick girl winter in the long wake of COVID-19. Julia Kendal, a writer and social justice advocate, explores the phenomenon of “succubus chic” by connecting contemporary we...

Abigail Spencer revisits Paula Danziger’s Amber Brown series and finds kinship with a childhood not often depicted in children’s fiction. An only child of divorced parents, Amber manages her father’s ...

On the 20th anniversary of the hit TV show Lost, author Samantha Colicchio examines the series through the lens of her experience at NYU’s acting conservatory. She explores the show’s philosophical qu...

Jillian Caddell writes about Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows for The Rambling.

Where does language come from? Courtney Weiss Smith has found answers in Enlightenment philosophy of language and current evolutionary science. But she’s also a mother, watching as language comes for ...

In this essay, Lucina C. Schwartz offers new insights and historical contexts for understanding the foppish characters of the hit show, Our Flag Means Death—and why fabric is Stede and Ed’s love langu...

The ongoing webcomic Superpose (a piece of “trans-gay sci-fi”) takes place in the partially redacted year of 198X. A historical fiction about the 1980s that crosses the wires of the virtual and the re...

Current moral panics obscure the fact that trans children are nothing new. In Histories of the Transgender Child, Jules Gill-Peterson focuses on the role that trans children played, often reluctantly,...

Towards A Theory of Digression —but this is a digression from my subject—no matter for that, a digression is quite the thing in a history, and surely it must be much more so in a meditation. What’s a ...

(A Listicle) The things you think of to link are not in your control. It’s just who you are, bumping into the world. But how you link them is what shows the nature of your mind. Individuality resides ...

In the years before I started grad school, I worked for a time at a French bakery on the ground floor of a five-star hotel. It was essentially a fast-casual restaurant dressed up with ornate lettering...

Elisa Oh writes a poem reflecting on the nature of academic labor, the academic and scholarly writing process, as well as writing in a second language.

Discussing Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues, Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s ghost story, “The Cold Embrace,” and the bureaucratic tasks required to get divorced, this essay considers how nineteenth-cen...

David Eddings was a best-selling writer, a convicted child abuser, and one of the chief literary influences of my childhood. Thirty years after falling in love with his shlocky but influential brand o...

In this essay, Julia Ftacek writes about the surprising similarities between the eighteenth-century Irish satirist Jonathan Swift and popstar Taylor Swift, arguing that both artists use vulnerability ...

In this brief lyric essay, Rachel Feder writes about Mary Shelley’s daughter-in-law, Jane, Lady Shelley, her relationships, and her previously unpublished poem.

“With glittering prose, your novel recreates the darkest corners of American life in an unforgettably tender portrait of the fragile consequences of ambition and regret.” Find out what reviewers will ...

In the Senate Judiciary Hearing held after Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s report that Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her became public, Kavanaugh famously declared: “Yes, we drank beer. I liked beer....

Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette and the Tradition of Women’s Satire Laughter is powerful, and it’s often touted as the best medicine. But as we know all too well from the recent news cycle, the power of laugh...

(On Losing the Sequel to Wuthering Heights) This month marks the 200th birthday of Emily Brontë, author of Wuthering Heights. Brontëphiles can be sorted into Team Charlotte and Team Emily. Those on Te...

Erin A. Spampinato got over searching for Mr. Darcy in her romantic life long ago; so why did she retain the fantasy, against all possible evidence, that a perfect academic job would come along to sol...

In this essay, Lucina C. Schwartz offers new insights and historical contexts for understanding the foppish characters of the hit show, Our Flag Means Death—and why fabric is Stede and Ed’s love language.

A year after the publication of Devoney Looser’s Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës, Bethany Creed sits down with the author for a conve...

In this (re)reading of Louisa May Alcott’s novel Little Women, Megha Agarwal unravels the shapeshifting nature of narratives and the self, asking such questions as: How do the stories that transform...

Lee Reilly rereads Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle, which she first read and stole at the age of ten. A lifetime later, the real reasons for stealing Dodie Smith’s coming-of-age novel suddenly ...

In this personal essay, Matthew Luter revisits a favorite children’s book of his youth, Beverly Cleary’s Dear Mr. Henshaw, discovering anew how Cleary’s book was a gateway to some of his favorit...

How does the story of a boy and a horse sustain the romance of a girl stepping out into her own island world? Alison Conway’s personal essay considers how reading a work of children’s literature, ...

In this personal essay, Katherine Nolan writes about her experience teaching Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go to high school students—and about falling back in love with novels after complet...

In “I Am Elinor Dashwood,” Shawn Lisa Maurer explores her deep affiliation with the caretaking older sister of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, unpacking how Elinor’s emotional suppression...

In “I Am Elinor Dashwood,” Shawn Lisa Maurer explores her deep affiliation with the caretaking older sister of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, unpacking how Elinor’s emotional suppression...