Immunized
In the end, the crisis I fretted over, the risk I hoped to mitigate, never quite materialized.
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.
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.
Not Quite: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
Set roughly sixty years before the Hunger Games trilogy, Ballad is, essentially, two origin stories in one.
The House on Elizabeth Lane
Remember when Grandma, a model of self-restraint, shrieked so loudly you could hear her from across the lake?
Tweety Birds
What about this particular tweet and this particular act of terror—over all the other tweets and all the other acts of terror, domestic and international, that routinely dominate our feeds—prompted 2.4 million Twitter users to tap a heart-shaped icon?
Smash That Like Button
It’s one thing, after all, to recognize that people can be dupes. It’s quite another to believe that they must be.
Reading Post-apocalyptic Fiction during COVID-19
These days, the opening chapters of Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 novel, Station Eleven, are enough to take your breath away.
Grandma’s Bread
If terroir survives the conceptual transplant from grape-growing to bread-baking, then it’s no surprise that I’ve failed to replicate my grandma’s bread.
Liver and White and Everything Nice
She was also, I should add, a very bad little dog, at least in the day-to-day business of dogging.
Interpreter of Maladies
I’ve kept revisiting the fact of Jes’s sickness, worrying it as I would a loose tooth, over and over again, in one essay after another.
Same as It Ever Was?: A Millennial’s Retirement Plan
Can you mourn a future you haven’t lived?
Headshot
Much as I enjoy teaching novels and short stories, video games do something special when played with a group.
Plan B or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Special Fields Exam
An unexpected call, just before the exam starts. A worried glance down at a phone, a quick “excuse me.”
R is for Rapture
Maybe my own childhood obsession with Jesus’s nuke-bright descent onto little Lansing, Illinois, reflected my peripheral engagement with wider, turn-of-the-millennium Evangelical culture
Jes
Between the Jes I think I know and that other Jes, the inexhaustible Jes, the one who slips briefly into view whenever she offers an unexpected comment, a laugh out of place, a sideways glance.
Palate Cleanser, Palate Changer
Although my diet has, in some respects, shifted closer to the views I first formed in college, it has remained effectively the same.
The Goats, the Sheep, the End
I’d go as far as to argue that we crave fictions of the end.
Beelzepup: One Year Later
So here I now find myself, a year later, not with a record of instances—some long calendar of thresholds met and surpassed by Jes and me and Toph—but with the accretion of slow change.
The King Is Dead. Now Bury Him.
What would it mean for Game of Thrones if, after expressing such disillusionment with the myth of the rightful ruler, it conjured up exactly that ruler to conclude its story?
The VeggieTales Effect
I want to get at the heart of your questions by offering some modest but practical advice for cultivating a more omnivorous media diet.
Going Back
So what happens, then, when this desire for mastery, reinforced by habit and nourished by the stories we tell and the media we consume, begins to look elsewhere for fulfillment?
Aquaman and Its Discontents
While the film isn’t without interesting ideas—the notion of an environmental reckoning, for one—these ideas dart, glimmering and mostly unconsidered, through the nets that Aquaman reserves for its preferred but drabber game: the return of the king.
All I Want for Christmas Is You (and Single-Payer Healthcare)
We call this tradition—because why wouldn’t we—our “Filling Out of the Carle Foundation Hospital’s Application for Financial Assistance Christmas Tradition,” or FOCFHAFACT, for short.
Imagining the End
What matters here instead is the implicit challenge, the casual middle finger, that the novel tosses off at the rest of the genre.
Wish It Was Sunday
“I think the water’s boiling, Jes.”
“Can you get that?”
“Caffeine or decaf?”
Cthulhu Fhtagn
So, we should ask again, and with renewed urgency: why Lovecraft? In the face of his cultural saturation and manifest awfulness, how do we account for and reckon with his appeal?
Pete
All I know about the donut scene in Champaign, Illinois, I owe to a man named Pete.
Read fantasy. Not much else. Mostly Tolkien.
For a long time, my reading habits resembled a Michael Pollan polemic, if Michael Pollan had been trying to cure the Western diet with genre fiction instead of carrots: Read fantasy. Not much else. Mostly Tolkien.
