Dark Waters: Compelling Storytelling Provides a Harsh Dose of Reality

Mark Ruffalo produced Dark Waters and played the main character, environmental attorney Rob Bilott who fought DuPont for 20 years in a class action lawsuit that aimed to put an end to the human and environmental devastation caused by DuPont’s use of deadly chemicals, such as PFOA, in its plants in Ohio and West Virginia.

Relishing Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

When you're writing, it helps to have a dog by your side.

I got off to a slow start with Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, until I found some passages that almost made my heart stop. Most of my college English Lit classes bored me, so it was nice to experience a stellar English professor through his collection of sixteen essays, akin to a […]

Reading Between the Lines of 9 ½ Weeks

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However, as a work of fiction, it stands as exquisitely powerful storytelling of a woman who willingly gave up everything in her world, except for her job, for a relationship with a man that had nothing to do with intimacy and everything to do with chasing a high.

The Stories We Need to Hear About Mental Health

May, mental health awareness month, makes me more aware than usual of the standard narrative that goes along with mental health—medication and therapy are the fixes. This May 60 Minutes aired U.S. kids grappling with mental health crisis made worse by the pandemic and it focused on the months-long wait time for teens to receive […]

Perspective Please: Bad Vegan fails to address addiction and mental health

Netflix nailed handling how the nuances of racism played out in the two-hour documentary The Rise and Fall of Abercrombie and Fitch yet failed to address the mental health and addiction issues in the 2022 four-hour long Bad Vegan: Fame. Fraud. Fugitives. docuseries. Bad Vegan focuses on the rise and fall of New York City […]