Mademoiselle: Coco Chanel and the Pulse of History by Rhonda K. Garelick. I’m usually wary of celebrity biographies but this one is great. It’s thoroughly researched and unflinching in its coverage of Chanel’s ties to Nazis and her role as an agent for the Vichy occupation.…
Month: March 2017
It’s spring and a time to refresh and renew. For me, the new year starts now, not in the depths of January when the mornings are still dark and cold. (Not that it ever gets THAT cold where I live, I grant you.) As I…
My day job is teaching game design. In our program we use a design methodology called playcentric, developed by Tracy Fullerton (and detailed in her excellent book, Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games.) The core idea is the experience of playing the…
Watching this now and finding it really interesting. I’m working on a few stories set in a secondary world where matriarchy is the norm, and I’ve been thinking a lot about what female power looks like — or more specifically, what power divorced entirely from…
My sister lives in Brooklyn, and so last Friday D and I headed out to visit her and her family. There’s a new two-month-old baby we had to meet, and also we’d missed the winter holidays with them so it seemed like a good time…
I started writing something and I don’t know where it’s going to go. I don’t know if you still can, but back when I smoked, you could get these crazy amazing cigarette brands in Japanese convenience stores. Slender peach-flavored cigarettes for young ladies, mellow vanilla…