Popular Culture
Pippi Longstocking Goes to War
(Okay, I admit it. That’s an inaccurate, click-bait of a title.) Today Astrid Lindgren is famous as the creator of Pippi Longstocking: the red-headed quirky rebel who proclaimed herself the strongest girl in the world.* In World War II, Lindgren was a 30-something housewife and aspiring author. Her war diaries, published posthumously in Sweden and…
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“A Ramayana of One’s Own”
I’ve written about the Ramayana before here on the Margins. It’s a big enough topic to consider again whenever I stumble across a way for a new audience to come to it. As I’ve said in a previous post, the Ramayana is a heroic epic, an important Hindu scripture, and a cultural touchstone for the…
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Word(s) With A Past: Left and Right as a Political Metaphor
As some of you may have noticed, here in the United States we’re coming to the end of a long, weird election season. A lot of labels have been thrown about with little reference to what they mean or why. At some point, when I had become almost numb from the rhetoric, it dawned on…
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