When Taylor Swift’s song “Anti-Hero” dropped earlier this year, the song seemed to be about Taylor Swift — and all of us — who are sometimes so self-centered, we don’t realize we are the cause of our own problems. In the video, Swift arrives at the door as her superstar…

Winner of the 2019 Palme d’Or Award at the Cannes Film Festival and nominated Best Foreign Film by the Academy Award in 2019, director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters is a slow-burning film about a family of shoplifters. The family eat together, each bring in money for the family, go to the…

Crash Landing Into You, a 2020–2021 K-drama written by Park Ji-Eun and directed by Lee Heung-Hyo, re-imagines communist North Korea as a magical Oz. The analogy is intentional. In the very first episode when Yoon Se-ri is caught in a tornado, she sees a red tractor from Dorothy’s farm flying…

An excerpt adapted from the book Engendering Cosmopolitanism Through the Local by Jacquelyn Chappel (2019). Since the 1990s, scholars in English have been debating the relative importance of the literary “canon” with some arguing for cultural literacy and others arguing for the importance of representation and cultural relevance. Recent scholarship…

An excerpt adapted from the book Engendering Cosmopolitanism Through the Local by Jacquelyn Chappel (2019). “World Literature” is a course that has been offered in many high schools and even post-secondary English programs since WWI. The term first arose in the early 19th-century but gained resurgence after WWI and WWII…

Reviewers of Spirited Away often comment on how visual stunning the film is. Indeed, in the film, Miyazaki and his Studio Ghibli offer stunning animation of magical places and creatures. Lost in all the phantasmagoric eye candy, it’s easy to walk from this film and have no idea what this…

Dorothy Rice’s art book/memoir The Reluctant Artist shares the story of her father, a talented artist active in the Bay area during the 1950s-early 1990s, who never showed his work in a major museum. …

Last winter in the middle of a snowstorm, Kirun Kapur, author of Visiting Indira Gandhi’s Palmist, answered questions about her latest book. — The book, mainly about her family’s experience escaping the Partition of India in 1947, the largest human migration in modern history, presents a speaker searching for answers about her family’s past. The book is lovely. If you say you enjoy poetry, you should read it.

Kids 20 years later: Kids Commentary on Rape I never saw Kids when it first came out in 1995. Living in New York shortly after college in the late 90s, however, I was familiar with the power couple Harmony Korine and Chloe Sevigny and with Rosario Dawson, who graced the…