ByMichelle Vider

Michelle Vider lives in Philadelphia. She has a master's degree in English, but she's feeling much better, thank you. She tweets here.

  1. Previously in this series: If Sarah Polley Were Your Girlfriend If the velociraptor from Jurassic Park were your girlfriend, you would have the weirdest meet-cute. You’re a handler on Muldoon’s staff. Handlers are classified as Essential Personnel so when the evacuation call comes, you stay. Your team splits up to put out fires around the island, but you’re the only one who returns to the visitors’ center. You see two raptors swarming with a…

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  2. For a cosmic hot second in the 200+ years between Eliza Haywood’s death in 1756 and feminism rising from the murky depths of literary scholarship, we lost sight of her work and its role in the development of the English novel. The biographical facts of her life are hard to come by and harder to confirm, but what we do know portrays her as the 18th century’s J.K. Rowling: a single mom with two

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  3. For better and for worse, we’re living in an age of remakes, reboots, and re-imaginings. We absolutely should comment about the shortage of original material, but we can’t let the products of the remake machine go to waste. Everything we produce reflects something of our time and quality back at us, something we should understand and take with us. Remakes are necessary things that give us new lights and angles where we can examine stories.

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  4. Ever After: A Drew Barrymore Jawn has a complicated relationship with my brain and my heart. The year it came out, I was 12 years old with a dedicated subscription to Seventeen and its monthly updates on what all the cool public school kids were wearing while me and my Catholic school uniform looked on in envy. Seventeen ran ads and features for this weird Cinderella movie with the girl from Scream, and it looked like it would…

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  5. DADS--what a bunch of goofballs, at least in contemporary narratives. If a dad isn’t a doofus, then he’s terrible with that terribleness compounded because he plays against the audience’s built-in expectations of dads portrayed as kind, well-meaning people who don’t quite understand the creatures they spawned but support them all the same. Those goofy dads exist within the construct that a father’s place is outside the home. Even in current works that exist in this…

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