Urban Gothic
Cities veer in the public imagination from weird and enchanted to crime-ridden and drug-addled.
Ben DeVries (’15) graduated with degrees in literature and writing. He and his wife Jes, a fellow Calvin grad, live in Champaign, Illinois, where Ben is looking to add some letters behind his name. On the academic off-seasons, he reads fantasy and works as a glorified “go-fer” at the Champaign Park District. He’s been known to make a mean deep-dish pizza.
Toxic Foodborne Fungal Event
Beyond the walls, the infected lurk—zombies in all but name.
Mastered by Some
Their poems a problem to be intimidated by, and then picked apart, and then finally, exhaustingly brute-forced into yet another five-paragraph essay.
Siri Goes to School
ChatGPT can compose serviceable feminist criticism, of the kind I’d expect to receive from my first-year undergrads.
Career Diversity
On good days, I remember that a job is just a job and that sometimes jobs change.
The Doomsday Clock
the Clock has given vent to a slowly spiraling sense of despair.
Before and After, Pre and Post
How do you narrate to yourself how you have changed?
What I Read over My Summer Vacation Is…
Kimmerer’s book is—I should stop myself. It’s one of those books that’s easy to lapse into cliché when describing.
Notes from the Road: Conversations That Exasperate My Wife
I don’t see what the big deal is.
Tone, Not Substance
The denomination would like for things to be settled.
Even So
What does it mean to try to persuade when you don’t think you can?
Sakura
It’s the quiet sense of time slowed down, of time doubled back on itself, that I enjoy about this morning walk
Binging with Babish
Words like fond, roux, and laminated dough mean something to me now.
The Conquest of the Sower
Missionary Conquest’s colonialism for Christ is not exceptional at all.
Podcast Pedagogy: An Intro to Leftist Podcasts
In the US, opposition to the left is as American as apple pie and as invisible as water is to a fish.
White Christmas
I’m not much for that old chestnut: that those who don’t know their history are doomed to repeat it.
Jes Grew Vegetables, and Sometimes I Helped
Sometimes opacity can be an ethic.
Library for the Future
It is growing, the poem, quick as trees.
The Ones Who Sit and Fret
Inertia doesn’t require much, after all. It never does.
Packaged to Gogh
Zeroing in isn’t always the solution.
Karl and Me
This essay is not about Marx.
Retrospect
In the stage play of my life, I am always the most vivid, the most fully realized, actor.
The Weird, the Bleak, the Now: Jeff VanderMeer’s Hummingbird Salamander
In many respects, Hummingbird Salamander is a typical VanderMeer story. Except when it isn’t.
So the Monster Will Not Break You
I found that I could barely bring myself to open it. The thought of reading it just felt … wrong
Time, Stalled
In a happy marriage of Star Wars and Friedrich Nietzsche: the abyss strikes back.
Parable of the Sower
People are storied, first, before they are instructed.
Immunized
In the end, the crisis I fretted over, the risk I hoped to mitigate, never quite materialized.
Ghost in the Machine
Silicon is, I think, a good standard-bearer for the present, because it reminds us that the abstract and the concrete are always intertwined.
Wolverine Watchmen, HBO’s Watchmen, and the Politics of White Resentment
Law and order, but only certain laws and certain orders.
Looters Get Shot
I’m not convinced that looter’s increased presence in my life is the result of a newly expanded horizon of awareness.
