Sarah Underwood— Reading poetry normally does not make me hungry, but after “Lake of Little Birds,” poet Katherine Larson had me ready for “[s]wordish/ drizzled with virgin oil, rubbed with/ mint and saffron”…and several other dishes. The 2010 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize uses her experience as a biologist to compose [...]
Sarah Underwood— Who betrayed whom in Palestine? Many people with many purposes would call western nations like Great Britain or eastern powers like the Arab League the traitors, with Arabs and Jews alternating the position of betrayed. For Efraim Karsh, author of Palestine Betrayed, one important and forgotten answer is that pro-Arab propagandists betrayed their [...]
Sarah Underwood— Think back to yourself at age fifteen. That’s the age both the women profiled in David Margolick’s Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock were when Will Counts took his famous photograph. Many people assumed Hazel Bryan, the screaming, hateful white girl in the picture, had to be twice the age of [...]
Sarah Underwood— With Super Tuesday barely a week away, it’s time for media speculation to go from a sport to a circus. While news coverage in the months (and years) leading up to an election can seem repetitive, and while primaries are sometimes inconclusive indicators of the final candidate, the elections occurring just before and [...]
Sarah Underwood— “Integration was one of the worst things to happen to black kids. We lost our community,” said a former student whose segregated Floridian high school closed in 1969. It’s nearly impossible to read that without feeling troubled. Weren’t black communities oppressed during Jim Crow? How could anyone feel nostalgic for his segregated high [...]
Sarah Underwood— A lot more sheep were involved in my college experiences than is probably typical. Colonial Williamsburg overlaps the College of William and Mary’s campus, so my friends and I had easy access to the reconstructed historical buildings and gardens. Because I’m a nerd (typical of W&M), I toured almost every historical building in [...]
Sarah Underwood— ABC’s series Pan Am, which premiered last fall, follows several beautiful airline stewardesses from the 1960s whose careers are filled with enough to drama to crash a plane. The stewardesses’ lives, which have repeatedly been called “glamorous” by reviewers, create a good platform for addressing contemporary social issues. Meanwhile, author Craig Harline has [...]
Sarah Underwood— Sometimes, the forgetting of history is accidental and gradual—a lost document, a mistranslation, or the unfortunate lack of a written record in the first place. On other occasions, events do not have to pass into history before they are forgotten. Those are the ones that are concealed from the start and for a [...]
Sarah Underwood— The ancient philosopher Philolaus believed that the Moon was home to humans fifteen times larger than us as well as much larger animals and plants. He decided on the larger dimensions because the Moon’s days are so much longer than Earth’s. Nearly two and a half millennia later, speculation about life on the [...]
Sarah Underwood— After a year of protests, 2011 is closing with another round of political dissent, this time surrounding Russia’s parliamentary and presidential elections. Unhappy with the government’s corruption and misinformation, the prospect of Putin’s return to power, and human rights abuses, protestors have become highly visible over the past couple weeks. Russia’s middle class, [...]
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