On Pageantry, the Virgin Mary, and the Smart Girl
...Christmas pageant, 1930, plus witch. My parents raised me in the Methodist church, halfheartedly. The “halfhearted” part would come as no surprise to anyone seated within two...
Picture Pluperfect
...now consider us, positioning ourselves precisely away from the complexities of reality and staring into our glowing, well-connected digital Claude-glass screens. This is contrary to the belief that the Internet...
Beauty Blogosphere Break
...at the same time without growing roots at my computer.) So the Beauty Blogosphere is on hiatus for a bit longer. It will return—I love finding and curating these...
Come Down With Fire
...led our hapless narrator to possibly some sort of commune dwelling, where he hears someone's — a roommate’s? lover’s? — sinister laughter “in another room” while she cooks up and...
"Mad Men" Beauty Musings
...even though the crude comments at the meeting were aimed almost entirely at Joan. The women are clawing at each other on the surface, but the way in which they...
Grudge Lust
...mortify the other.” Outsiders socially, Shonagon and Hazlitt must have felt further alienated because they were writers. If writers are paying the least bit of attention, then they must grapple...
The Mask of Zelda: Dark Eternities
It was just an ordinary day in the world of Legend of Zelda. Then everything went topsy-turvy. Content Warning: Violence of every kind.
Sunday Reading: April 30, 2023
...became a regular feature at TNI, and it is in that same spirit of sharing motivated purely out of a desire to connect over some common impulse, interest, or learning,...
Reader's Digest
...fellow citoyens. For them, however, such knowledge lay not in dope but in dinners. As if skeptical of that bit of scriptural wisdom that teaches, “By their fruits shall ye...
They Were Like Us & We Were Like Them
...charting the irreversible damage Romand inflicted on his community (where children will never unquestioningly trust their parents again), but Carrère soon abandons Luc’s point of view, realizing that he is...
Dark Pages
...intended to be a bit gimmicky, it has the effect of bringing into sharp contrast the rhetorical differences between the two documents. Where the reports are clear and detailed, almost...
Cool Front/
Hot Mess
...costs. No wonder that, in fashion, fronting is traditionally accepted at face value. Even obvious lies, with repetition, are somehow treated as revelatory dissidence, when in fact they are commonplace....
This Week in Art Crime
...woke up the entire place was in darkness. It was just a bit eerie, being there all alone. I wandered around for 10 minutes looking for a security guard to...
Against Students
...Complaining, censorious, and over-sensitive, university students are destroying their own institutions. Wait, seriously? People think that? An earlier version of this essay was posted at the blog feministkilljoy What...
Alone Again Or
...bit creepy. He leaves her with a present: a colorful beanie with a visor. But there are no womp womp sound effects; the story closes with, “She had no idea...
Too Foreign
...turning point in the novel: Sousa: “At this moment, now, a doubt overtakes me. God, or whatever You are called: I now ask only one bit of help: but it...