The Rambling

Living to Work in Severance - The Rambling In this essay, Andrew Strombeck considers how Severance reminds its viewers that the Always-Be-Hustling era masks grim truths about work. As long as we view work as a place to find our best selves, we...

Season 2 of Severance comes out today (finally!). Here's a piece I wrote for @therambling.bsky.social about how the show reflects how attitudes about corporate work have evolved (and have not) since the 1950s and 1960s. the-rambling.com/2022/10/21/i...

Fantasy Friends - The Rambling Emily Friedman explores friendship and pleasure in roleplaying games, as viewer and player. An introduction to "actual play" livestreaming on Twitch and YouTube, including the shows produced by Critic...

Three years ago this week, my first public-facing piece on TTRPG Actual Play appeared in @therambling.bsky.social — on the end of @criticalrole.bsky.social Campaign 1 but more the stories AP tells about friendship.

I had no idea where this work would take me, personally or professionally.

Running Through Middle-earth - The Rambling Robert I. Lublin has loved J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings series since he was 10 and re-read it often—but after finding comfort in Tolkien’s novels for so many years, he was dismayed to find...

"The buds of spring seemed to defy the season of death that was spreading across the world." Robert Lublin on rereading The Lord of the Rings during the pandemic.

The Best Use of the Worst Story: Realism and Reality TV - The Rambling Miranda Hoegberg considers how couples learn about each other through watching reality dating shows—and what this might mean about how we learn in general from didactic forms like the realist novel. A...

"Why is it that so many reality dating shows use formats that recall the courtship rituals of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels?" Miranda Hoegberg compares forms old and new.

This Town Grows Old Around Me - The Rambling Shel Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends remains an unparalleled classic of children’s literature. On the occasion of its 50th anniversary, poet Ty Holter reflects on the book’s resistance to commer...

"Where the Sidewalk Ends proceeds relentlessly to poke fun at routine interactions and needless, exhaustive productivity in a world swarming with the detritus of accumulating waste." @tyholter.bsky.social revisits the Shel Silverstein classic on its 50th anniversary.

Sick Girl Winter - The Rambling Hot girl summer gives way to sick girl winter in the long wake of COVID-19. Julia Kendal, a writer and social justice advocate, explores the phenomenon of “succubus chic” by connecting contemporary we...

“The notion of living with actual illness is anathema to our self-directed, time-prizing society.” Julia Kendal on the intersection of illness and beauty trends, historically and now.

Seeing Red, Feeling Blue: Rereading Amber Brown - The Rambling Abigail Spencer revisits Paula Danziger’s Amber Brown series and finds kinship with a childhood not often depicted in children’s fiction. An only child of divorced parents, Amber manages her father’s ...

"I’ve spent many years searching for some version of my story, yet what seems a simple premise—'daughter carries on without father'—is not so simple to find in children’s literature." Abigail Spencer on the Amber Brown series

We Are Lost - The Rambling On the 20th anniversary of the hit TV show Lost, author Samantha Colicchio examines the series through the lens of her experience at NYU’s acting conservatory. She explores the show’s philosophical qu...

"By then, I knew that what I had always wanted from a story was what I had wanted from life: to make it mean something despite what seemed like utter chaos." Samantha Colicchio on her journey with the hit TV show Lost.
the-rambling.com/2024/11/23/i...

Turkey trot your way over to @therambling.bsky.social straight away, because our latest issue is out—from Lost to Lord of the Rings, reality TV to “succubus chic,” you will not lack for conversation at the dinner table after reading the essays at the-rambling.com. 🐌🦃

Give thanks—The Rambling is out! From Lost to Lord of the Rings, reality TV to “succubus chic,” you will not lack for conversation at the dinner table after reading our latest issue, now live at the-rambling.com.

snail riding a turkey

If you aren’t following @therambling.bsky.social yet, you might wanna do that before next week. #teaser

Jillian Caddell on Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows - The Rambling Jillian Caddell writes about Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows for The Rambling.

"Sometimes it’s easier to stay home, to embrace what was, than to face a present you don’t recognize." Jillian Caddell on the adult complexities of the children's classic The Wind in the Willows. 💙📚 #booksky

Courtney Weiss Smith’s List: Where Does Language Come From? - The Rambling Where does language come from? Courtney Weiss Smith has found answers in Enlightenment philosophy of language and current evolutionary science. But she’s also a mother, watching as language comes for ...

“It’s easy to treat language as something in our minds, as something other than the stuff of the world that it signifies. But Enlightenment philosophy of language started from an insistence that words are a kind of thing." @cweiss-smith.bsky.social's best reads on the origins of language. #c18th

Wow. #C18L

Our Flag Means Fop - The Rambling In this essay, Lucina C. Schwartz offers new insights and historical contexts for understanding the foppish characters of the hit show, Our Flag Means Death—and why fabric is Stede and Ed’s love langu...

"On Our Flag Means Death, the spirit of foppery, especially its gentler masculinity, is celebrated."

Circa 198X: Superpose, Science Fiction Histories, and the Trans Child - The Rambling The ongoing webcomic Superpose (a piece of “trans-gay sci-fi”) takes place in the partially redacted year of 198X. A historical fiction about the 1980s that crosses the wires of the virtual and the re...

"What are we looking for when we constantly bring the past into the present? Or try to make visible what kinds of pasts are always already stitched into a given present?" @tonyweiling.bsky.social

I loved writing this. It is all true.

My thanks to @crystal-b-lake.bsky.social and Sarah, as always, for the amazing @therambling.bsky.social

🥰🥰

Introduction - The Rambling Current moral panics obscure the fact that trans children are nothing new. In Histories of the Transgender Child, Jules Gill-Peterson focuses on the role that trans children played, often reluctantly,...

“The moral panic produced by the fallacy of misplaced scale obscures the fact that trans children are nothing new.” @jttremblay.bsky.social

Insensibly Led - The Rambling Towards A Theory of Digression —but this is a digression from my subject—no matter for that, a digression is quite the thing in a history, and surely it must be much more so in a meditation. What’s a ...

“Not all digression is literary, although it is perhaps the case that all literature is digressive. Not because it wanders or strays aimlessly, but because it does so with style, that is to say, with curious restraint.”

Books I'd Like to Write! - The Rambling (A Listicle) The things you think of to link are not in your control. It’s just who you are, bumping into the world. But how you link them is what shows the nature of your mind. Individuality resides ...

“What is it about keeping up that is so endemic to the life of a writer, to the career of an academic?” #AcademicSky @titachico.bsky.social

Dickinson’s Luxury - The Rambling In the years before I started grad school, I worked for a time at a French bakery on the ground floor of a five-star hotel. It was essentially a fast-casual restaurant dressed up with ornate lettering...

"This is what, in the end, I find so engaging about the film: this promise of the luxury to imagine and realize wilder, queerer nights for Dickinson, who otherwise is torn from her social and aesthetic worlds and, as Jackson suggests, made miserable for consumption."

To Encounter the Muse - The Rambling Elisa Oh writes a poem reflecting on the nature of academic labor, the academic and scholarly writing process, as well as writing in a second language.

"I muster a few self-deprecating mantras: 'Fool! Look in thy heart and write!'"

Lovely ugly words from @marymullen.bsky.social ❤️

The Importance of Being Earnest - The Rambling Discussing Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues, Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s ghost story, “The Cold Embrace,” and the bureaucratic tasks required to get divorced, this essay considers how nineteenth-cen...

“Figuring out just what words are doing is hard work. Are they acting? Preventing action? Are they distracting us from the actions that matter?” @marymullen.bsky.social

This is an excellent exploration of precisely the process I've gone through with Eddings.

A re-listen last year found the Belgariad / Mallorca just about tolerable, and the Elenium utterly beyond the pale, even for nostalgia.

First Loves and Bad Fantasy: Re-reading David Eddings - The Rambling David Eddings was a best-selling writer, a convicted child abuser, and one of the chief literary influences of my childhood. Thirty years after falling in love with his shlocky but influential brand o...

“To maintain loyalty to old aesthetic allegiances can be a manifestation of kindness towards our younger selves, a form of self-focused compassion. Even works of the most dubious merit have as their grace the fact that we remember them, and have attached to that memory a collection of others...” 💙📚

Jonathan and Taylor: The Two Swifts - The Rambling In this essay, Julia Ftacek writes about the surprising similarities between the eighteenth-century Irish satirist Jonathan Swift and popstar Taylor Swift, arguing that both artists use vulnerability ...

"What is it about these figures that keep us coming back again and again, even long after many had dismissed their careers as the artistic equivalent of junk food?" #c18th #TaylorSwift

Brightly Starred - The Rambling In this brief lyric essay, Rachel Feder writes about Mary Shelley’s daughter-in-law, Jane, Lady Shelley, her relationships, and her previously unpublished poem.

“Mary Shelley made Jane, Lady Shelley her death and Jane, Lady Shelley made Mary Shelley her life. You could call that love or you could say they made use of each other.” @rachelfeder.bsky.social
#c18th 💙📚

Lit-Fic-Rev-Engine - The Rambling “With glittering prose, your novel recreates the darkest corners of American life in an unforgettably tender portrait of the fragile consequences of ambition and regret.” Find out what reviewers will ...

“Find out what reviewers will say about YOUR novel … even if you haven’t written it yet!" #AmWriting

Liking Beer - The Rambling In the Senate Judiciary Hearing held after Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s report that Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her became public, Kavanaugh famously declared: “Yes, we drank beer. I liked beer....

“There is a through-line running from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century when it comes to the relationships that exist between drug use and power.” #c18th