If America can be said to have a coherent, unified folklore of its own, then Mark Twain certainly has a place in its history and character…
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Yokai: The Folklore Roots of Pokémon
When Pokemon GO! released in the summer of 2016, it wasn’t my first encounter with a breed of monsters and ghosts unlike any elsewhere in the world: yōkai, the supernatural creatures of Japanese folklore…
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‘Fighting the Long Defeat’ : Nature and Grief in Tolkien and Medieval Poetry
Especially in The Lord of the Rings, medieval ideas of nature — from its decline and hostility to culture, to its own suffering alongside us — color Tolkien’s writing, where they ultimately develop into a reconciliation between wilderness and hearth…
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Sorrow and Light: Reflections on Rewatching Lost
Characters, not mythology. Mystery, not answers. Five years after Lost’s polarizing finale, I look into the eye of the Island again. How I felt then, why I drifted away from the show, and what I saw when I came back to rewatch it — all six seasons — for the first time since “The End.”
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