Author: Kate
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Obligatory New Year Post
There’s this funny game I’ve been playing for the past few months. Imagine this: a supervillain wraps a hapless woman in chains, balances a set of spinning plates on a stick perched on the tip of her nose, sets her on a unicycle, and tells her to make her way across a tightrope. Or else…
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Hugs From Your Grandma: Favorite Tiny Desk Concerts
I’ve been spending my after-work hours browsing NPR’s rich and varied library of Tiny Desk Concerts. There have been many gems, but even in such fantastic company, the winners of last year’s Tiny Desk Contest stand out: Tank and the Bangas hail from New Orleans, Louisiana, and they play a luminous mix of rock, folk,…
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Rapid-Fire Thoughts: 2018 Read Harder Challenge Update
The Book Riot Read Harder Challenge continues. Since my last reading challenge update, I’ve finished: #2: A book of true crime I came to this title cold (pun unintended but appreciated). The most I knew about the book was that (1) it dealt with a murder of some kind and (2) it’s indisputably Capote’s magnum…
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Ode to Joy: Natalie Prass’ “Short Court Style”
The world is on fire. Or so the relentless news cycle would have us believe. Every hour comes with a litany of scandals, disappointments, and threats to life as we know it. All of us, the headlines scream, are doomed to wail, gnash our teeth, and scrabble at the edge of sanity with the tips of…
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Postscript: Understanding Comics
Towards the end of January, the 99% Invisible podcast ran an episode with eminent comics creator and scholar Scott McCloud about the design features of comics. It’s a great episode that provides a good thumbnail sketch of some of comics’ most important formal elements. I first read comics in grocery checkout lines. My grandmother used to…
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Read Harder #4: Dead Balagtas Vol. 1: Mga Sayaw ng Dagat at Lupa
It’s easy to feel divorced from history. As a kid, I saw all my history lessons at a remove: upheavals, struggle, significance occupied a different plane of existence, and they had no place in my humdrum life, as I had no place in theirs. An ignorant belief to have harbored, for sure, and one that…
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