LITERATURE & LANGUAGE

The 1985 edition hardcover of Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card (Wikipedia). The government lies to us. It’s reprehensible. It’s more blatant than ever. You know it. Your friends know it. Everyone knows it—Americans’ trust in the government is at a historic low, with just 17% who trust the federal government a majority of the time . With the conflicts surrounding Israel-Palestine, ICE, transgender rights, and—most recently—Iran, our president sits at a paltry 33% approval rat

American author James Baldwin “This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.” James Baldwin, “Stranger in the Village,” 1953. James Baldwin’s time in exile, as he refers to it, validated for him the uniqueness of the American people. Away from his home country, Baldwin offered a unique perspective from his new position of clarity, writing from the outside looking in. In Europe, he found a new type of white people — white people who had rarely, if ever, met

The Cover of Babel “Translation means doing violence upon the original, means warping and distorting it for foreign, unintended eyes. So then where does that leave us? How can we conclude, except by acknowledging that an act of translation is then necessarily always an act of betrayal?” -R. F. Kuang, Babel In her 2022 epic historical fantasy novel Babel, or The Necessity of Violence , R. F. Kuang explores the intersection of colonialism, language, translation, and racism, amo