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The Biology of a Myth: Dragons, Fossils, and the Human Need for Something That Breathes Fire
CONTINUE READING: The Biology of a Myth: Dragons, Fossils, and the Human Need for Something That Breathes FireThe first dragons were not cute. They did not purr emojis into your DMs or coil politely on YA dust jackets. They arrived as disturbances—fanged weather fronts, teeth set into the grammar of storm—so frightening that the earliest literary convention attached to angels (“be not afraid”) could just as easily have belonged to these other…
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When the Muse Has Wires: AI Love Poems, Dating-App Cyranos, and the Fate of Sincerity
CONTINUE READING: When the Muse Has Wires: AI Love Poems, Dating-App Cyranos, and the Fate of SinceritySay you’re in love and the words won’t come. Once upon a time you hired a poet. Petrarch farmed his longing out to the sonnet; courtly troubadours put silk on the tongue of men whose nerves were otherwise rubble. Shakespeare even wrote the instruction manual: Hang there, my verse, in witness of my love—Orlando pinning…
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The New Pilgrimage: Where the Spiritually Restless Are Going in 2025 (and Why)
CONTINUE READING: The New Pilgrimage: Where the Spiritually Restless Are Going in 2025 (and Why)If you squint past the clickbait, you can see it: a quiet migration of the spiritually restless, moving across borders of music festivals, ashram-adjacent retreats, moonlit parties, and plant-medicine sanctuaries. It isn’t a single scene so much as an ecosystem—a mycelial network of gatherings trading in awe, somatic release, and the soft afterglow of being…
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Quiet Quitting: Nothing New Except the Branding
Every few months, corporate media stumbles across an old labor practice, slaps a new label on it, and acts like it just discovered fire. “Quiet quitting” was 2022’s viral phrase for something workers have been doing for centuries: giving only as much labor as they’re paid for. Michael Hiltzik’s Los Angeles Times column argued the…
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Sabina Nessa: A Kind and Generous Soul, and the Story Britain Can’t Stop Forgetting
When 28-year-old teacher Sabina Nessa walked through Cator Park in southeast London in September 2021, she should have arrived at a pub five minutes later. She never did. Her murder became another entry in Britain’s grim ledger of women killed in everyday moments—walking home, going for a run, taking the shortcut everyone takes. A Life,…
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Jill Scott’s Anthem Remake: When “The Star-Spangled Banner” Sounds Like Protest
The national anthem has always been more litmus test than lullaby. At ball games, at graduations, in moments of national pageantry—it forces us to ask whose nation we’re celebrating. Jill Scott’s reimagining of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” first performed in 2020 and circulating again in cultural conversation, is less performance than protest. Where Francis Scott Key…
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23 Fun Telling Time Games and Activities (with Free Printables)
Ask any first-grade teacher: telling time is the unit where math meets existential crisis. Suddenly, kids realize their world is divided into invisible chunks—snack time, recess, “five more minutes.” Teaching it isn’t just about clocks, it’s about control, patience, and the first taste of scheduling. That’s why games and activities matter: they transform abstract numbers…
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Carolina Miranda and the Map of Los Angeles’s Art Worlds
Los Angeles is a city that resists singular stories: freeways cut it into ribbons, neighborhoods refuse to align, and art tends to bloom in the margins rather than in gleaming downtown towers. That’s precisely why Carolina A. Miranda, culture columnist for the Los Angeles Times, has become such an indispensable chronicler of the city’s artistic…
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26 Lining-Up Strategies That Keep the Chaos (Mostly) Contained
Ask any teacher: the most dangerous time of day isn’t the fire drill or the test—it’s the moment you tell twenty-five kids to “line up.” Suddenly the room turns into a rugby scrimmage with backpacks. Classroom management lives and dies in those few seconds. But lining up doesn’t have to be pure entropy; it can…
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Close Reading Strategies: A Step-by-Step Guide (That Won’t Bore Everyone to Tears)
Close reading has become one of those phrases that make kids groan and teachers roll their eyes, because somewhere along the way it got translated into “underline five verbs and call it a day.” But real close reading—the kind that actually slows students down and sharpens their critical thinking—is less about worksheets and more about…
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25 Hispanic Heritage Month Activities for Kids (That Aren’t Just Paper Flags)
Every September, classrooms break out the papel picado and the bilingual posters—and too often stop there. Hispanic Heritage Month deserves better than token mariachi playlists. The good news: kids are natural culture-sponges, and there are dozens of ways to make this month a genuine exploration rather than a laminated display. 1. Storytelling as Resistance Read…
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Death‑Defying Lectures and Dragon‑Demons: Why Romantasy and Dark Academia Are Publishing’s New Power Couple
Let’s launch straight into the stacks, because 2025 is doing that thing where the romance section collides with the fantasy wing and they emerge… handcuffed, eye‑sexing, and unstoppable. Welcome to the thick of the romantasy‑and‑dark‑academia mash‑up, where smoky libraries, forbidden love, and dragon‑ridden ballrooms are all in fashion. Let me walk you through the syllabus—and…
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Death by Spreadsheet: Meanjin’s Execution and the Hollowing‑Out of Literary Culture
I woke up yesterday to find that Meanjin—the octogenarian Australian lit‑journal that once printed Patrick White and, more importantly, introduced me to Judith Wright’s poem about a lonely kangaroo—had been slipped a lethal injection by Melbourne University Publishing (MUP). No funeral cortege, no last meal, just a curt press release citing “financial head‑winds” (translation: the accountants…
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The Biology of a Myth: Dragons, Fossils, and the Human Need for Something That Breathes Fire
CONTINUE READING: The Biology of a Myth: Dragons, Fossils, and the Human Need for Something That Breathes FireThe first dragons were not cute. They did not purr emojis into your DMs or coil politely on YA dust jackets. They arrived as disturbances—fanged weather fronts, teeth set into the grammar of storm—so frightening that the earliest literary convention attached to angels (“be not afraid”) could just as easily have belonged to these other…
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When the Muse Has Wires: AI Love Poems, Dating-App Cyranos, and the Fate of Sincerity
CONTINUE READING: When the Muse Has Wires: AI Love Poems, Dating-App Cyranos, and the Fate of SinceritySay you’re in love and the words won’t come. Once upon a time you hired a poet. Petrarch farmed his longing out to the sonnet; courtly troubadours put silk on the tongue of men whose nerves were otherwise rubble. Shakespeare even wrote the instruction manual: Hang there, my verse, in witness of my love—Orlando pinning…
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The New Pilgrimage: Where the Spiritually Restless Are Going in 2025 (and Why)
CONTINUE READING: The New Pilgrimage: Where the Spiritually Restless Are Going in 2025 (and Why)If you squint past the clickbait, you can see it: a quiet migration of the spiritually restless, moving across borders of music festivals, ashram-adjacent retreats, moonlit parties, and plant-medicine sanctuaries. It isn’t a single scene so much as an ecosystem—a mycelial network of gatherings trading in awe, somatic release, and the soft afterglow of being…