In every culture, the monsters were defeated, usually slain, by heroes whose courage reaffirmed the moral order. The creatures’ wickedness didn’t arise from trauma or poor life choices. Otherness alone was enough.

Tools break and containers change, but the urge to tell stories remains. Containers and content can be used to mutually inform the shape of their counterparts, expressing a tender, anti-heroic, communal, and present side of storytelling in place of our received understanding of historical material as heroic, individual, disconnected, and past. As... See more

what will happen to the “the writers, the thinkers, and the pundits,” as Ta-Nehisi Coates put it, “who cannot separate the great crime of Kirk’s death from the malignancy of his public life?” Will they retreat further away from anything resembling criticism? And then who will pin this moment to the spider’s web? Who will marshal the context and... See more