At the heart of Christine Kalafus’ upcoming memoir Flood (2025) is a powerful image: a rush of water, not a deluge from the skies but a slow rising from below, invisibly soaking through the porous foundations of an old house until, before you know it, you are wading ankle deep in what was the solid…
Author: Naomi Michalowicz
Naomi Michalowicz holds a PhD in English from Columbia University, where she is now teaching a Core Curriculum literature course. Her dissertation project explored the concept of intelligence, and how the tumultuous history of intelligence definitions, testing, and measurement has shaped representations of human minds in 20th-century novels. Naomi’s interests focus on the intersection of literature and cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and developmental and educational psychology, as well as the disciplinary history of those fields. She is a mother to one, wonderful, small human.
“Intelligence If Anything is a Handicap”: How Elizabeth Bowen Reimagined Cognitive Difference
// Early in Elizabeth Bowen’s novel Eva Trout (1968), two adults meet to discuss the strange behavior of the eponymous young protagonist: her guardian, Constantine Ormeau, put in charge of her care after the death of her father, and Iseult Arble, Eva’s former teacher with whom Constantine has placed Eva as a payed guest, until…
Book Review: I Cannot Control Everything Forever by Emily Bloom
Spidersilk Towards the end of her memoir, I Cannot Control Everything Forever, Emily Bloom evokes the image of a spider as a way to reflect upon the duality of motherhood. Moving from Ovid’s myth of Arachne through Louise Bourgeois’ giant spider sculpture “Mother of All,” Bloom lands on an investigation into how spiders in nature…
Some Perspectives on Prophecies
Naomi Michalowicz // Now direct your eyes here, gaze at this people, your own Romans. Here is Caesar, and all the offspring of Iulus destined to live under the pole of heaven. This is the man, this is him, whom you so often hear promised you, Augustus Caesar, son of the Deified, who will…
The Language of Smell
Naomi Michalowicz // My two-year-old daughter has two words with which to describe food: yummy and yucky. For sound, she can distinguish between “big noise” and “very quiet.” She has a significantly broader vocabulary when it comes to sight: big and small, green, blue, or red, and the capacious description that may apply to anything…
Stranger Things; or, Why ’80s Nostalgia is Good For You
Naomi Michalowicz // Stranger Things, Netflix’s hit show about kids fighting eldritch terrors in 1980s suburbia, has just concluded its fourth season. An obvious appeal of the show is its shameless indulgence in ’80s nostalgia, hitting every cliche of representing the decade—bicycles, arcades, music, quaint technology, bad hair, and of course, the full range of…
From Jane Austen to Chatbots: Using Conversation to Judge Intelligence
Naomi Michalowicz // Chatbots, those little pop-up virtual assistance you encounter at the bottom of every page on every website of every company, who cheerfully ask “what can I help you with?”, are not as smart as we’d like them to be. Often frustratingly obtuse, the virtual assistant is incapable of answering your questions or…
Is Your Baby Even Human? The Science, and Science Fiction, of Observing Babies
Naomi Michalowicz // Babies are full of potential. Every parent, looking at their infant child, will inevitably ask themselves, who will this baby become? What will he like doing? What will her strengths, abilities, and skills, turn out to be? It’s impossible not to wonder what the future holds for a small baby when their…