Miss Havisham presides over Great Expectations like a great, ill-willed fairy queen. She is, by turns, the novel's resident corpse, its ghost, its fairy godmother, and "the Witch of the place"—a fury dressed up in a tattered, yellowed wedding dress. She stands, in the Dickens pantheon, alongside Scrooge, the Artful Dodger, and Uriah Heep as one of his most memorable characters.
Katie here. I was just searching our archives -- can you believe we've been emailing each other nonstop for 12 years? It's like, Wanna Feel Old? (That's a Twitter joke lol.) Email feels super antiquated to me, tbh. It's like, it's 2016.
If you pay attention to the emoji news, you've probably heard the statement that "emoji will cause the death of English". You've probably sensibly rejected this as doom-mongering hyperbole already. Which it is, so good job you.
There is one moment from the cross-country trip I took with my mother in 2007 that will probably forever live in my mind. We were on Highway 80 going through Nebraska in the middle of a blizzard. The road was invisible, buried under a sheet of snow.
The punishment of Prometheus (he was chained to a rock and had his eternally-regenerating liver torn out by an eagle every day) has always been a popular topic for Western artists, and why not; it's full of action poses and furious birds and gave everyone the chance to draw hands. A real win-win! And yet: Over time, folks got a little sloppy, and eventually, more often than not, Prometheus and the eagle looked like boyfriends…
I was born with a strip of red hair that my parents liked to fashion into a Mohawk until it finally reached the rest of my head. My father’s grandfather had red hair, and someone on my my mother’s side must have—it’s a double-recessive trait, meaning it has to be passed along on both sides.
If you’re like me (constantly hungry, bespectacled, obsessed with dogs), your formative makeup years were not the blazingly bright 1980s or the “various shades of morose brown” early 1990s but the shiny, proto-futuristic, low-waisted years of the early 2000s.
In the middle years of the 1930s, when everyone was unhappy and the history books have pictures to prove it, my father rode the rails from coast to coast and town to town learning to hate the many and varied relations on whose charity he lived. He started out a boy of eight, holding onto a small sister with one hand and a smaller dog with the other, and ended a boy of twelve.
