On the one hand you have feminism. On the other, you have romance and comedy. Assuming both hands belong to the same person – say, Anne Tyler – together they reveal more of the human condition than either could on its own. Welcome to Vinegar Girl, a slender volume that might be heftier than you […]
Author Archives: Eve Shulmister
Everybody knows the story of the Three Little Pigs. Or at least they think they do. But I’ll let you in on a little secret. Nobody knows the real story, because nobody has ever heard my side of the story. So narrates A. Wolf in The True Story of the Three Little Pigs. In this […]
Part One Take the Fair Face of Woman, and Gently Suspending with Butterflies, Flames, and Jewels Attending, Thus Your Fairy is Made of Most Beautiful Things. She is young and blonde (or raven-haired) and beautiful – always beautiful. That is unless she’s old and grey and stout. She sleeps or runs or tiptoes through the […]
Standing on the second floor, looking for the third, I saw the up-escalator wasn’t working. Couldn’t find a clerk, so I headed for the moving stairs that were coming down from third. Why should I ask for directions? The last clerk had been rude and insolent – like it was my fault she hadn’t had […]
The trouble with oral cultures is they leave so little behind. Apart from ruins and religious art there isn’t much we can use to get inside their minds. Take the Minoans, whose entire civilization rose and fell nearly 1500 years before the birth of Jesus. What remains suggests a culture that prized women and may […]
Times are strange: our government can spy on us and say it’s for our protection. The folks who hold that abortion is murder also claim the right to carry guns. And a white woman (who claimed that she was black) gets elected local president for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Strange times […]
“It begins with Peter, a devoted man of faith, as he is called to the mission of a lifetime.” Thus boasted a blurb on the back of the book. When folks talk religion, I often get squeamish – especially when they speak with missionary zeal. So when someone handed me The Book of Strange New […]
There are two strains in American print journalism. One is persuasive and opinion-based (like blogs); the other is sourced in fact and offers multiple perspectives (like metropolitan newspapers). In Part One of this series I traced the history of each, then promised to describe the current changes: opinion-based reporting is on the rise, while so-called […]
Five years ago, when I taught Journalism, my syllabus was set. We began with a brief discussion of colonial gazettes, then focused on objective news. Until recently I hadn’t connected those two dots – how American news writing evolved from opinionated essays to what is now considered fair and accurate reporting. This connection turns out […]
I was eleven years old – perched at the edge of puberty – and supposed to be having the time of my life. At sleepaway camp the pleasures of summer beckoned: horses, archery, a lake. Yet I was miserable. Slightly homesick, yes, but even more obsessed with a question – Why do bad things happen […]
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