Lynn Lawrence // The face is a picture of the mind with the eyes as its interpreter. — Marcus Tullius Cicero, “Orator”[1] Photographers deal in things which are continuously vanishing. —Henri Cartier-Bresson, “The Mind’s Eye” Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. — Arthur C. Clarke, “Profiles of the Future” The first…
Author: guestwriter
Review: Kate Bowler, “No Cure for Being Human (And Other Truths I Need to Hear)”
Cherie Henderson // Duke Divinity School historian Kate Bowler is the kind of person who surprised her parents by renovating their basement while they were out of town. She hopes they didn’t need that treadmill; it didn’t work with her new layout, so she ditched it. She’s the kind of person who makes lists and…
Anti-Life Legislation: How the reversal of Roe v. Wade may impact IVF viability
Rachel Sender // My senior year of college I was sent to the hospital after fainting in a lobby. I had sudden severe abdominal pain, nausea, and had just begun my period. After ruling out appendicitis and ovarian cysts, the doctor told me that I most likely had endometriosis. This diagnosis was unsurprising as my…
Epidemics, Social Welfare, and “Condition of England” Literature
Benjamin Schacht // When an epidemic sweeps a community—or a pandemic sweeps the globe—the health, but equally the living conditions and resources of others suddenly take on an existential significance. The Covid-19 pandemic has recently made this significance plain in a particularly dramatic way, but long before early 2020, the observation that illness signifies our…
Lucid Dreaming: The Unexpected Drawbacks
Manaal Siddiqui // An expansive hall full of laughter, jeers and people running and jumping. Fluorescent lights bounce off the walls. All different colors. Pink, yellow, red, purple. A young woman realizes that she is present amidst the chaos. She feels queasy, not sure how to handle the fact that her family is casting spells…
The Long Read: Spaces of psychosis and poetics in Tove Ditlevsen’s novel “The Faces”
Anders Juhl Rasmussen // In this article, my aim is to investigate how space and place have a special significance for the protagonist of The Faces, an autobiographical novel by Danish author Tove Ditlevsen published in 1968. The Faces describes a psychotic attack and subsequent recovery at a hospital. My argument is that Ditlevsen’s description…
A Model for Humble Commitment in Medicine
Vishesh Jain // Ostensibly, Wintersmith is a novel about witches. It follows young Tiffany Aching as she works as an apprentice and learns how to manage the vast and unexpected responsibilities of witchcraft. The reader, like Tiffany, may expect magic spells and supernatural phenomena to fill her life, but these constitute a fraction of her…
How 27 Years in Prison Prepared Me for Coronavirus
Lawrence Bartley // If there’s one thing people who spent a long time in prison have acquired, it’s the ability to adapt. Originally published in The Marshall Project on April 7, 2020. Republished with permission from the author. When I need to go to my local supermarket, I suit up with latex gloves I got…
Displaced and Confined: Impossible Subjects and the Politics of Abolition in COVID-19 Times
Martha Balaguera[1] // The COVID-19 pandemic has shed new light on the paradoxes of our time. Consider the great vulnerabilities of so-called “essential” workers in farms, factories, hospitals, schools, daycares, slaughterhouses, delivery warehouses, as well as in marginalized “hot-spot” neighborhoods of segregated urban areas. At the same time, vulnerable groups with essential needs of international…
LOOKING INSIDE: Portraits of Women Serving Life Sentences
Sara Bennett // More than 200,000 people in the United States are serving life sentences, a punishment that barely exists in other Western countries. I’ve long believed that if judges, prosecutors, and legislators could see people convicted of serious crimes as individual human beings, they would rethink the policies that lock them away forever. Before…