My food-in-literature obsession is Columbia University rejecting Chef Jacques Pepin's proposed diss on French food in literature for being “too frivolous for serious academic pursuit." What did Pepin plan on writing? And what a diss that would have been!

magazine.columbia.edu/article/art-...

Last spring I taught in 2 state schools--1 with recent retrenchments--on labor, & we soon went from analyzing the public argument: "No one wants to work" to "Children should work in bars, factories, meat-packing plants." The post-higher-ed future envisioned by the rich is monstrous.

My article on the influence of the Underground Railroad on Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady appears in the new issue of Novel: A Forum on Fiction.

I read the Albany house in The Portrait of a Lady as a spatial representation of the novel's plot.

read.dukeupress.edu/novel/articl...

For others in Maine, this article explains the Pine-Tree-Power vote. The constant, corporate ads have confused me (purposefully, obvs.). Pine Tree would be "nonprofit, publicly run utility," McKibben writes, "a huge step toward dealing with the climate crisis."

www.thenation.com/article/envi...

What a beautifully written essay about Malaga Island by Surya Milner with photos by Séan Alonzo Harris.

"A controversial community for its time, white and black residents married and lived together on the small island until the state of Maine evicted them in 1912."

www.bowdoin.edu/news/2020/11...