Max Lerner

Crossword: Fresh Produce

Eat the men: The politics of feminine violence and rage in fiction

“I stabbed at his heart and struck the sweet spot between his ribs.” So reads a line from the opening chapter of Chelsea G. Summers’s “A Certain Hunger,” where food critic Dorothy Daniels recounts a life that has lately revolved around seducing, killing and eating men. Though gruesome, this novel is a quintessential work in the genre of femgore — a subgenre of body-horror fiction typically written by and about young women with female protagonists carrying out brutal, vicious crimes against the men in their lives. In recent years, its popularity has significantly increased — a trend irrevocably tied to the absolute battlefield of modern gender politics.

Say goodbye, good riddance to uniform art movements

Last semester, I visited the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum — now my favorite art museum — for the first time. Built by Gardner and her husband to display their vast art collection in a dignified and evocative manner, the museum is a masterclass in artistic harmony. Walking through the Gothic Room, I was struck by how seamlessly the different forms and aesthetics connected, creating a strong sense of continuity. Stepping out of the museum and back into the modern world, I couldn’t help but wonder if there were any such uniform art movements in the modern era.

Gen Z’s reactions to TikTok ban suggest growing need for simulated community

In August 2020, President Donald Trump ordered ByteDance — the parent company of TikTok — to sell their American assets. That order would prove to be a death knell for TikTok: Four and a half years later, in January, the Supreme Court upheld a law to ban it. On the app, and among the generation that uses it most, panic ensued.

‘New year, new me:’ Are New Year’s resolutions more toxic than constructive?

“Auld Lang Syne,” we sing as we clink champagne flutes and bid each other a happy new year; “Old Long Since” — when translated — suggests one final recognition of and reflection upon the year past. And yet, even before the cheers die down and the clock strikes 12:01 a.m., we turn our attention to the year ahead and make our New Year’s resolutions, pledging to change ourselves for the better.

The intersection of AI and the downfall of long-form literature

Although it seems to be the argumentative equivalent of spilling a glass of water into the Pacific with the goal of flooding Sydney, I’m voicing my concern for the humanities in the ever-expanding face of artificial intelligence. The arguments against AI’s encroachment in academic settings, though prolific, have done nothing to mitigate it. A similar source of adversity facing English departments in particular, is the growing inability of college students to read long-form literature. Note my usage of the word in ability; students are not expressing boredom or a lack of time in response to being assigned novels, but rather a complete inability to read them.

Getting real: An honest consideration of the college experience

College, as we think we know it before attending, is nothing more than the thirst-driven mirage leading us through the exhausting traverse of high school. It guides us through our teens to what is made out to be “the best four years of our lives.” Once we arrive, our own experiences inevitably fail to live up to the impossibly high standards that we have been conditioned to set.

Safeguarding the humanities as an obligation to ourselves

Steve Jobs said that among the most impactful classes he ever took in college was a class on calligraphy. It may be easy to turn one’s nose at this statement, writing it off as foolish or performative, or conclude that Big Calligraphy lobbied Jobs to share it. It is especially easy to do so if one subscribes to the idea that all education must provide a specific set of skills that one can lift straight from the classroom to a job site — or at least a graduate school application.