Dressed.So and blogging!

Happy Halloween, everyone! I’ll be updating tomorrow with some costumed goodness, but for today, check out this guest blog I did for my friends at dressed.so! If you’ve never heard of Dressed.So before, it’s a site where users can post daily outfit pictures and get feedback. The blog covers everything from the style news of … Continue reading →

Making the Classroom Digital; or, “BYOT”

We all remember being in high school, right? It was a magical land of constant comparisons–in terms of clothes, grades, achievements, cars, etc. Do students really need another shiny yardstick with which to measure each other? Do you learn better then your classmate if your dad buys you a Macbook Air? Continue reading →

How To Train Your Dragon 2

**potential minor spoilers Dreamworks’ original How To Train Your Dragon was a very simple and beautiful movie. Its simplicity brought out the best in its other aspects. I think often the best “children’s” stories are ones that allow a few central relationships to really develop and shine–an opinion that holds true for me in everything from … Continue reading →

The Grand Budapest Hotel

Wes Anderson’s film The Grand Budapest Hotel hardly needs another glowing review, as it is already a critical darling. It boasts all the signature Anderson touches–but exceeds, in crucial ways, its most recent counterparts. Unlike Moonrise Kingdom, the film that preceeded it, The Grand Budapest Hotel avoids being sickly sweet and twee. Or rather, it balances out that signature saccharine … Continue reading →

OTTW: The Souls of Black Folk

W.E.B. Dubois is one of those writers whom people seem to have read at some point, no matter their academic interest. But have you ever read him closely, savoring every word? I read Dubois in high school and was struck by the force of his content. But this second time around, it’s his language itself … Continue reading →

OTTW: Henry James and the Ladies

The end of last semester was marked by a painful slog through Henry James’s foggiest work, The American Scene. Late-career James was a bit of a windbag. Thankfully this semester is being ushered in by mid-career sassy James, who has this to say regarding his suffragette main-character in The Bostonians: “She thought him [her cousin, Basil Ransom] … Continue reading →

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

[minor spoilers, but nothing you wouldn’t get from the trailer] [by the by, this is my 100th post on this blog! Happy 100 posts.] The original short story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”, by James Thurber (read here), is a lean little tale about a fantasist weighed down with a nagging wife. Well-told and … Continue reading →