Category Archives: Myth + Spirituality

Woman-as-monster: Medusa, bronze medallion from Pompeii, photo Gary Todd via Wikimedia Commons

Reclaiming the Monster

Women can be monsters too. From snake-haired Medusa to the horrifying mama-alien of the Alien movies, female monsters have often embodied male fears of women’s ...
The Only Harmless Great Thing cover

Elephants and Radium Girls

In The Only Harmless Great Thing, Brooke Bolander has taken on two strange and disturbing events from the early 20th century: the willfully negligent poisoning of ...
Trinity fireball, with lightning storm behind

Doctor Atomic’s blast zone

The latest production ofDoctor Atomic, the opera about the birth of the Nuclear Age by composer John Adams and director/librettist Peter Sellars, saw it coming ...
A 19th-century stone carved angel in a cemetery

American Bardo

As I read George Saunders’ daring first novel Lincoln in the Bardo recently, I was struck by its strangely close parallels with another memorable and ...
Image of Earth from space

Thinking about Gaia

In this month of Earth Day and marching for science and climate, I’m thinking about Gaia. A hashtag popped up on Twitter last week: #ifonlytheearthcouldspeak ...
The witches of A Wrinkle in Time

The radical leaps of A Wrinkle in Time

I was in sixth grade when I was swept up in the world of A Wrinkle in Time, part of the first generation of girls ...
Elegy for Tesla, installation by Jeanne Jaffe at Rowan University Art Gallery, detail

An elegy for Tesla

Jeanne Jaffe’s ambitious Elegy for Tesla is a high-tech, dreamlike and heartfelt meditation on Nikola Tesla, the legendary scientist and inventor. Jaffe’s multimedia installation fills ...