Chicago -
By SIU Press
Moving between the languages of love and war, Jehanne Dubrow’s latest book offers valuable testimony to the experiences of military wives.
Frequently employing rhyme, meter, and traditional forms, these poems examine what it means to be both a military spouse and an academic, straddling two communities that speak in very different and often conflicting terms.
Posted on September 29, 2017
By The Society of Midland Authors
In an event presented by the Society of Midland Authors, Megan Stielstra will discuss her new book The Wrong Way to Save Your Life, an insightful collection of essays about life and death, marriage and motherhood, joy and sorrow. It’s warm, witty and wise.
“For its wisdom and compassion, honesty and courage, Stielstra’s stellar essay collection is a lifeline and a microscope, a means of examining the dread of whatever one finds daunting and a manner of exorcising demons through the sheer power of commitment and desire,” says Booklist.
Posted on September 26, 2017
Quimstagram!
It’s a mad, mad, nymphomaniacal world.
Posted on September 25, 2017
By Tricia Bacon/The Conversation
Sixteen years ago, on September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda conducted the most destructive terrorist attack in history.
An unprecedented onslaught from the U.S. followed. One-third of al-Qaeda’s leadership was killed or captured in the following year.
The group lost its safe haven in Afghanistan, including its extensive training infrastructure there. Its surviving members were on the run or in hiding.
Though it took nearly 10 years, the U.S. succeeded in killing al-Qaeda’s founding leader, Osama bin Laden.
Since 2014, al-Qaeda has been overshadowed by its former ally al-Qaeda in Iraq, now calling itself the Islamic State.
In other words, al-Qaeda should not have survived the 16 years since 9/11.
So why has it?
Posted on September 22, 2017
By Cathy Schlund-Vials/The Conversation
In America’s imagination, the Vietnam War is not so much celebrated as it is assiduously contemplated. This inward-looking approach is reflected in films like The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now, best-selling novels and popular memoirs that dwell on the psychological impact of the war.
Was the war worth the cost, human and otherwise? Was it a winnable war or doomed from the outset? What are its lessons and legacies?
These questions also underpin Ken Burns’ Vietnam War documentary, which premiered Sunday. But many forget that before the Vietnam War ended as a Cold War quagmire, it began as a clear-eyed anti-communist endeavor.
As a child, I was always fascinated by comics; now, as a cultural studies scholar, I’ve been able to fuse this passion with an interest in war narratives.
Comics – more than any medium – reflect the narrative trajectory of the war, and how the American public evolved from being generally supportive of the war to ambivalent about its purpose and prospects.
Posted on September 20, 2017
By Jack Linchuan Qiu/The Conversation
Ten years ago the first iPhone went on sale. The iconic product not only profoundly altered the world of gadgets, but also of consumption and tall corporate profit; this world would be impossible without the toiling of millions along the assembly line.
I look back at the first 10 years of the iPhone and see a bloody decade of labor abuse, especially in Chinese factories such as those run by Foxconn, the world’s largest electronics manufacturer. At one point Foxconn had more employees in China than the U.S. armed forces combined.
Foxconn makes most of its money from assembling iPhones, iPads, iMacs and iPods. It’s notorious “military management” was blamed for causing a string of 17 worker suicides in 2010.
Posted on September 19, 2017
By Ed Simon/Aeon
The Jacobean playwright Thomas Middleton invented the concept of “white people” on October 29,1613, the date that his play The Triumphs of Truth was first performed.
The phrase was first uttered by the character of an African king who looks out upon an English audience and declares: “I see amazement set upon the faces/Of these white people, wond’rings and strange gazes.”
As far as I, and others, have been able to tell, Middleton’s play is the earliest printed example of a European author referring to fellow Europeans as “white people.”
Posted on September 14, 2017
By SIU Press
An endangered right whale attempting to nurse her new calf in the December ocean, foxgloves blooming in different places from year to year, or the rescue of imperiled Kemp’s ridley sea turtles – the bounty and cruelty of nature infuses this latest collection of poems from Brendan Galvin, which takes as its maxim finding the extraordinary in the ordinary all around us.
Posted on September 12, 2017
By Kath Kenny/The Conversation
Once a week, during electives at primary school in 1980, I walked with a group of girls to the local hairdressing salon where we were taught how to apply eyeshadow, lipstick and smooth foundation onto our perfect skins. We also played AFL with the boys during sports period, but the news from women’s liberation about makeup and women’s oppression hadn’t yet arrived at my little school in the sleepy seaside town of Sorrento.
Second-wave feminism, to a large extent, defined itself against the beauty industry. As Susan Magarey writes, one of the Australian Women’s Liberation movement’s first actions was a 1970 protest against Adelaide University’s “Miss Fresher” beauty contest. It was inspired, in part, by a protest in the U.S. against the 1968 Miss America pageant.
Women’s liberationists did have their disagreements about individual choices and tactics. Anne Summers, writing in the newsletter MeJane in 1973, said she was abused for wearing makeup at a Women’s Liberation conference. Carol Hanisch, a member of the New York Radical Women group behind the 1968 protest, argued later that protesters should target not the women who enter beauty contests but “the men and bosses who imposed false beauty standards on women.”
In 1963, Betty Friedan had argued women’s magazines were central to creating the feminine mystique, an infantilizing image of womanhood built around a myth of beautiful women in beautiful homes tending to handsome husbands and beautiful children.
Posted on September 11, 2017
