Gladiator II: I Swear It’s Not About the Sharks by Mo Halasey

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Watching Gladiator II without first watching its predecessor for beat-by-beat comparison or borderline masturbatory indulgence in nostalgia is a bizarre exercise in interpretation. It is watching shadows on the wall of a cave, an astute audience perhaps faintly aware that these shapes cannot possibly exist in a vacuum, that their movements and patterns are too strange, too specific, and too divorced from their context to belong solely to the wall, but with nothing else to draw from they are forced to accept these as a complete reality.…

Devotion and Disruption in Two Amazing Stories from The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen by Serena Sweeney (’26)

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The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen was originally titled An Intimation of Things Distant. It consists of five fiction stories by Nella Larsen that were written in the 1920s during the Harlem Renaissance, which was a movement to foster Black culture and pride through literature, art, and music. The pieces in her collection discussed tensions and hardships of the Black middle class in Harlem during the 1920s: restlessness, isolation, searching for belonging, psychology, marriage, race, and the complexities of having mixed-race heritage.…

What We’re Into (on Halloween): It, by Stephen King

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Recommended by Miranda Alvord 23′

A horror classic for a reason, Stephen King’s It follows a group of seven children who live in the small town of Derry, Maine, as they’re tormented by “It”, a malignant entity that changes forms according to each victim’s fears. The novel thrives in the genre partly because of the masterful world-building, crafted by King in a way that truly makes the reader believe in (and feel connected to) the town of Derry and its habitants.…

Giovanni’s Room is a story about homesickness – and it makes you feel right at home

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The time when I read Giovanni’s Room, an extraordinary novella by the even more extraordinary James Baldwin, could have been the worst possible moment – but, surprisingly, it might have turned out to be the best. I was living through my very first real winter – all the previous eighteen had been a collection of only slightly chillier and less rainy summer days, as every winter is in Rio de Janeiro.…

Who Needs Plot When You Have Alcott? By Emma Neeper ’21

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As a writing exercise, I was once told to pick someone in the room and describe them — what they wore, what they looked like, how they spoke, how they moved  — and then to invent a “why” for each observation. Why is he wearing that shirt? Because he keeps forgetting to do laundry and this was the last shirt that didn’t smell rancid.…

Let’s Hear it for the Little Struggles: Lisa Kogan’s Adventures in What it Means to be Alive by Anna Davies ’19

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There’s no shortage of seriousness in the modern landscape of creative nonfiction. Week after week, The New York Times’ Bestsellers List exalts narratives exploring the horrors of our world: Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me at 84 weeks on the list, Jeannette Walls’s The Glass Castle at 436 weeks on the list, and Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy at 119 weeks on the list, to name a few.…

Nervous Conditions: Reflections on the Diversity Summit by Adrian Burr ’19

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On a warm evening in early September, approximately eighty Ohio Wesleyan Students and eighty faculty members gathered in the Benes Rrooms for the school’s first Diversity Summit. The two dozen round tables were littered with small yellow pads and pens, boxed dinners, and signs with labels proclaiming such topics as “coalitions across student groups,” “Faculty and Staff collaboration,” and “Intersectionality.”…