Even if you work very, very hard with your worldbuilding, you may not be able to get readers to interpret it the way you want them to. I’ve titled this essay “the past is a foreign country” because that’s a recognizable phrase (though few people know it’s from a book by the English novelist L. […]

“History is written by the victors” is a familiar adage, and it holds a lot of truth in it. But as an analysis of who specifically is writing the history, and what they’re out to do, it falls a bit short. First of all, we should acknowledge that history — like many intellectual fields, and […]

Up front, I should say that “the language of flowers” is mostly bogus. That’s not to say there is no symbolism in flowers and other kinds of plants! There absolutely is; in fact, there must be, so long as human culture has a tendency to trot out particular species or colors in particular contexts, and […]