The ‘Cancelling’ of Flannery O’Connor? It Never Should Have Happened

I regularly teach Flannery O’Connor, and assign a whole book of her short stories when I taught an American Lit 1915-Present course. Now that I’m teaching “American Lit 1776-Present” I keep her stories in rotation, but I have more material to cover, so I have to be more selective. O’Connor’s fiction contains many themes and shining moments that celebrate and repudiate and transcend the Southern culture that formed her, the…

I went with frisse.

German uses esse “to eat” for people, but frisse “to feed on” for animals.   This is a bear, so “I am eating a potato” should naturally be “Ich frisse eine Kartoffel.”   But it’s an anthropomorphized talking bear, which implies the self-awareness of “Ich esse eine Kartoffel.”   But surely a bear that knows German grammar this well would chafe at the demeaning spectacle of performing for the privilege…

This Woman Inspired One of the First Hit Video Games by Mapping the World’s Longest Cave

The Medium headline calls Colossal Cave Adventure “one of the first the video games,” but it’s a stretch to use “video” to describe the modality of a command line text parser game. The former Patricia Crowther was very helpful to me when I interviewed her by telephone for my DHQ article. I could have written quite a lot more about her as a technologist, rather than mostly as a caver,…