Latest news with #SylviaPlath
Times
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Julia Stiles: Nineties female characters were either sexy or had glasses
It is, amazingly, a quarter of a century since a 17-year-old Julia Stiles redefined the rom-com heroine in 10 Things I Hate About You. Surly, bookish and magnificently uninterested in being liked, Kat Stratford, the lead character of Gil Junger's high-school take on The Taming of the Shrew, became a feminist icon for millennials. Kat read Sylvia Plath, kicked mocking classmates in the balls and dismissed Earnest Hemingway as an 'abusive, alcoholic misogynist who squandered half his life hanging around Picasso, trying to nail his leftovers'. Sweet and pliant she was not. 'Teen romantic comedies were very popular in the late Nineties and the female character was either sexy or had glasses on,' Stiles says, speaking from New York, where she was born
Forbes
10-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
NYT ‘Connections' Hints And Answers For Sunday, May 11th
Connections hints and answers are here. Looking for Saturday's NYT Connections hints, clues and answers instead? You can find them here: Welcome back to the NYT Connections Weekend Edition, dearest Connectioneers. I'm your Sunday host, Erik Kain, and I'd like to wish all you mothers out there a very happy Mother's Day. That goes doubly for my own mother. Happy Mother's Day, mom, if you're reading this. Even if you're not reading this. In any case, it's a day for mothers and I'm sure that means that most of you are quite busy getting ready for brunch or afternoon tea or something of that nature, so I'll keep this introduction brief. I'll leave you with a poem before we get to the day's Connections. This is 'Morning Song' by Sylvia Plath, one of my very favorite poets of all time. FEATURED | Frase ByForbes™ Unscramble The Anagram To Reveal The Phrase Pinpoint By Linkedin Guess The Category Queens By Linkedin Crown Each Region Crossclimb By Linkedin Unlock A Trivia Ladder Alright, let's solve this Connections. Connections is the second-most popular NYT Games puzzle game outside of the main crossword itself, and an extremely fun, free offering that will get your brain moving every day. Play it right here. The goal is to take a group of 16 words and find links between four pairs of four of them. They could be specific categories of terms, or they could be little world puzzles where words may come before or after them you need to figure out. And they get more complicated from there. There is only one set of right answers for this, and you only get a certain number of tries so you can't just spam around until you find something. There are difficulty tiers coded by color, which will usually go from yellow, blue/green to purple as difficulty increases, so know that going in and when you start linking them together. You pick the four words you think are linked and either you will get a solve and a lit up row that shows you how you were connected. If you're close, it will tell you that you're one away. Again, four mistakes you lose, but if you want to know the answers without failing, either come here, or delete your web cookies and try again. If you want to play more puzzles, you can get an NYT Games subscription to access the full archives of all past puzzles. These are the hints that are laid out on the puzzle board itself, but after that, we will get into spoiler territory with some hints and eventually the answers. Today's Connections Today's Bonus Clue: There is a Mother's Day theme here, in purple. Alright, the full spoilers follow here as we get into what the groups are today: The full-on answers are below for each group, finally inserting the four words in each category. Spoilers follow if you do not want to get this far. The Connections answers are: Today's Connections I got the green words first today. These were pretty obviously all about evading. Dodging out of the way, ducking for cover, shaking your opponent, skirting danger. I screwed up once on the yellows, however, because suit threw me off. While delight and tickle and please all indicate one affecting someone pleasantly, suit feels a bit more pedestrian. 'That suits you,' one might say, but it's not the same as tickle. The blues were also fairly obvious thanks to the term 'power-up' which is so very, very video game. You also level up in a game, or beat levels, and you have health which is often depleted in a boss fight at the end of a level. It helps to have power-ups in order to defeat the boss by separating him from his health. Which left purple, as is so often the case. I didn't see the connection here until it was staring me in the face. Mother Goose, Mother Earth, Mother May I?, Mother Superior. Today's Connections Bot How did you do on today's Connections? Let me know on Twitter, Instagram, Bluesky or Facebook. Also be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel and follow me here on this blog. Sign up for my newsletter for more reviews and commentary on entertainment and culture.
Yahoo
01-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Who Gets Panzer Tattooed on Their Arm?
On the long list of reasons the United States could have lost World War II—the terribly effective surprise Japanese attack, an awful lack of military readiness, the relatively untrained troops—there is perhaps no area in which Americans were more initially outmatched than armament. Americans had the M4 Sherman, a tank mass-produced by Detroit automakers. Germans had the formidable panzer, a line of tanks with nicknames such as Panther and Royal Tiger that repeatedly outgunned the Americans. In the 1940s, you couldn't pick up a newspaper in the United States without reading about the panzer's superior maneuverability and robust armor, qualities that made it especially hard for Americans to stop. 'This doesn't mean our tanks are bad,' The New York Times reported in January 1945. 'They are the best in the world—next to the Germans.' The panzer invoked Nazi might and aggression even decades after the war ended. Sylvia Plath's 'Daddy,' first published in 1965, contains this stanza: 'Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You—— / Not God but a swastika / So black no sky could squeak through.' In the 2000s, popular video-game franchises—including Call of Duty, Battlefield, and Medal of Honor—released installments set during World War II that featured the panzer, etching it into the collective consciousness of a new generation of Americans. So you can see why it's noteworthy that Joseph Kent, Donald Trump's nominee to head the National Counterterrorism Center, has a panzer tattoo. Last month, Mother Jones's David Corn uncovered a shirtless picture of Kent from 2018, in which he has the word PANZER written down his left arm. Why? It's not clear. Kent did not respond to multiple requests for comment, and the Trump administration hasn't offered an explanation either. Olivia C. Coleman, a spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, directed me to a post on X in which Ashley Henning, a deputy chief of staff at the agency, calls Kent a 'selfless patriot who loves this country and his family.' Kent's tattoo is all the more curious considering his background. A former member of the Army Special Forces who twice ran for Congress in Washington State, he has had repeated interactions with far-right extremists. During his unsuccessful 2022 congressional bid, Kent consulted with Nick Fuentes, the young white supremacist, and hired a campaign adviser who was a member of the Proud Boys, a violent far-right group. (Kent ultimately disavowed Fuentes, and his campaign said that the Proud Boys member, Graham Jorgensen, was a low-level worker). The tattoo 'could mean that he's glorifying the Nazis. Or it could have a different context,' says Heidi Beirich, a co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, an organization that tracks right-wing extremism. Despite what the word evokes in history, panzer references are not common on the far right, Beirich told me. 'I don't think I've run across a panzer.' Other discernible possibilities make less sense. Right-wing accounts on X have spread the claim that Kent has jäger—German for 'hunter'—tattooed on his other arm. The two tattoos together would add up to 'tank hunter.' The accounts claim that heavy-anti-armor-weapons crewman was one of Kent's jobs in the Army. It's oddly specific enough to sound plausible, except that I couldn't find any evidence that Kent was part of an anti-tank unit—let alone one that would be targeting German tanks—or that he even has a jäger tattoo on his other arm. (Let me point out that Kent could resolve all of this by simply rolling up a sleeve.) There aren't many other explanations. The United States Army has an installation on a base outside Stuttgart, Germany, called Panzer Kaserne, but there's no information to suggest that Kent was ever deployed there. All we're left with is a strange tattoo associated with Nazi Germany. Of course, people frequently make strange tattoo choices. Some get ones they come to regret, and plenty have tattooed foreign words onto their body that they don't fully understand. Yet it's reasonable to wonder about the messages a person decides to make permanent on their body. Tattoos can connote in-group belonging or membership to a subculture. Olympians are known to get tattoos of the Olympic rings to commemorate competing in the games. Bikers famously love getting tattoos of skulls and flames. And then there are white supremacists, who have emblazoned themselves with swastikas, Norse runes, the SS logo, and other symbols. Why settle for a T-shirt or a flag when you can carve your values into your skin? The Trump administration seems to strongly agree with the notion that tattoos are meaningful—but only when convenient for the president's agenda. Consider Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland resident the Trump administration deported to El Salvador's Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, prison camp last month. Garcia was living with protected legal status in the U.S., and the government's own lawyers have acknowledged that he was deported because of an 'administrative error.' Trump loyalists have doubled down on Garcia's detention, in part pointing to his tattoos. On Truth Social, Trump posted a picture of Garcia's knuckle tattoos—a leaf, a smiley face, a cross, and a skull. The photo was altered with text above each symbol to spell out M-S-1-3, suggesting Garcia's tattoos are a code for the gang MS-13. (Criminal-justice professors doubt that claim.) In an interview with ABC this week, Trump insisted it's 'as clear as you can be' that Garcia has MS-13 tattooed on his knuckles, even as ABC's Terry Moran noted that the actual M-S-1-3 in the photo Trump has distributed clearly is Photoshopped in. [Read: An 'administrative error' sends a Maryland father to a Salvadoran prison] At least some of the hundreds of other immigrants who have been deported to CECOT appear to have been targeted simply for having the wrong tattoos. Andry José Hernández Romero, a makeup artist with no confirmed gang affiliation, was deported after his crown tattoos were reportedly mistaken for symbols associated with Tren de Aragua. Neri José Alvarado Borges, according to his family and friends, was deported for his tattoos, including an autism-acceptance symbol that he got in support of his younger brother. Tom Homan, the White House's 'border czar,' has claimed that tattoos alone are not being used to label people as gang members. I reached out to the White House for comment, but received only another response from Coleman, the ODNI spokesperson, pointing to another post on X by Henning. This post mocks the fact that The Atlantic had contacted them to ask questions. In reference to Kent's tattoo, Henning wrote, 'Should we just reply that it's photoshopped?' and then included a video clip of Trump's ABC interview. To put this in plain terms: I asked the administration to address concerns that one of the president's nominees has a tattoo associated with Nazis, and its response was to make a joke. Trump's secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, has some questionable tattoos of his own. On the right side of his chest, Hegseth has a large Jerusalem Cross: It has even sides and looks like a plus symbol, with four smaller crosses in each quadrant. On his right arm, Hegseth has a large tattoo of Deus vult (Latin for 'God wills it'), written in Gothic script. Also on Hegseth's right arm is a tattoo of the Arabic word Kafir, which commonly translates to 'infidel' or 'unbeliever.' Both the Jerusalem Cross and Deus vult date back to the Crusades, the bloody series of wars between Christians and Muslims during the Middle Ages. But modern extremists have co-opted them to invoke a new war on Muslims. Insurrectionists who mobbed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, flew a Deus vult flag and wore shirts that featured it and the Jerusalem Cross. The Trump administration defends Hegseth's ink: In an email, Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson said that Hegseth's tattoos 'depict Christian symbols and mottos used by Believers for centuries,' and that 'anyone attempting to paint these symbols and mottos as 'extreme' is engaging in anti-Christian bigotry.' [Read: A field guide to flags of the far right] The Jerusalem Cross is still occasionally used in non-extremist religious contexts, Matthew D. Taylor, the senior Christian scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies, in Baltimore, told me. 'If that was the only tattoo he had, I'm not sure how I would interpret that,' he said. But Taylor finds Hegseth's Deus vult tattoo to be noteworthy. 'Deus vult is not a common symbol. It has very strong connotations,' he said. During the Crusades, Deus vult was the 'phrase that sanctioned violence against Muslims.' Other members of the military have also tattooed Kafir on themselves, reportedly in an act of defiance against Islamic terrorism, especially those who have seen combat in the Middle East, as Hegseth has. An American soldier with a Kafir tattoo might be interpreted as a provocation—essentially, I'm an infidel. Come and get me. Taylor reads Hegseth's Kafir tattoo as 'a signal of aggression towards Islam and embracing Islamic aggression towards himself.' When Hegseth's three tattoos are taken together, Taylor said, 'it's not hard to interpret what he's trying to signal.' Maybe both Hegseth and Kent have bad luck and got their tattoos without knowing what they might signal. Maybe they just don't care about the possible darker implications. But this is the constant problem of trying to make sense of the signs from people in Trump's orbit—the recurrent use of white supremacists' favorite sequence of numbers, ambiguous (and sometimes unambiguous) Nazi salutes, and other dog-whistling. How much benefit of the doubt really should be given? At some point, there's not a lot of room to interpret things any other way. As of 2024, Hegseth was a member of the Tennessee congregation of an Idaho-based church run by a Christian nationalist. He has appeared to express support for a relatively niche theocratic ideology that advocates for laws to be subordinate to the perspectives of Christian conservatism. Kent, in addition to associating with Fuentes during his first congressional campaign, was interviewed by the Nazi sympathizer Greyson Arnold. (Following the interview, a campaign spokesperson said that Kent was unaware of Arnold's beliefs.) Trump's White House operates on inconsistency. High prices on consumer goods are bad, unless they are the result of the tariffs. Unelected bureaucrats must be excised from the government, unless they are Elon Musk and his team at DOGE. Free speech is a tenet of American values that is to be vehemently upheld, unless people say things that Donald Trump does not like. Tattoos matter. Except they also don't. They are a sufficient admission of guilt—sufficient enough to disqualify you for due process, even—unless you are part of Trump's team. If you're on the losing side, there is no recourse. If you're on the winning side, there are no consequences. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
01-05-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
Panzer Man
On the long list of reasons the United States could have lost World War II—the terribly effective surprise Japanese attack, an awful lack of military readiness, the relatively untrained troops—there is perhaps no area in which Americans were more initially outmatched than armament. Americans had the M4 Sherman, a tank mass-produced by Detroit automakers. Germans had the formidable panzer, a line of tanks with nicknames such as Panther and Royal Tiger that repeatedly outgunned the Americans. In the 1940s, you couldn't pick up a newspaper in the United States without reading about the panzer's superior maneuverability and robust armor, qualities that made it especially hard for Americans to stop. 'This doesn't mean our tanks are bad,' The New York Times reported in January 1945. 'They are the best in the world—next to the Germans.' The panzer invoked Nazi might and aggression even decades after the war ended. Sylvia Plath's ' Daddy,' first published in 1965, contains this stanza: 'Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You—— / Not God but a swastika / So black no sky could squeak through.' In the 2000s, popular video-game franchises—including Call of Duty, Battlefield, and Medal of Honor —released installments set during World War II that featured the panzer, etching it into the collective consciousness of a new generation of Americans. So you can see why it's noteworthy that Joseph Kent, Donald Trump's nominee to head the National Counterterrorism Center, has a panzer tattoo. Last month, Mother Jones 's David Corn uncovered a shirtless picture of Kent from 2018, in which he has the word PANZER written down his left arm. Why? It's not clear. Kent did not respond to multiple requests for comment, and the Trump administration hasn't offered an explanation either. Olivia C. Coleman, a spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, directed me to a post on X in which Ashley Henning, a deputy chief of staff at the agency, calls Kent a 'selfless patriot who loves this country and his family.' Kent's tattoo is all the more curious considering his background. A former member of the Army Special Forces who twice ran for Congress in Washington State, he has had repeated interactions with far-right extremists. During his unsuccessful 2022 congressional bid, Kent consulted with Nick Fuentes, the young white supremacist, and hired a campaign adviser who was a member of the Proud Boys, a violent far-right group. (Kent ultimately disavowed Fuentes, and his campaign said that the Proud Boys member, Graham Jorgensen, was a low-level worker). The tattoo 'could mean that he's glorifying the Nazis. Or it could have a different context,' says Heidi Beirich, a co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, an organization that tracks right-wing extremism. Despite what the word evokes in history, panzer references are not common on the far right, Beirich told me. 'I don't think I've run across a panzer.' Other discernible possibilities make less sense. Right-wing accounts on X have spread the claim that Kent has jäger—German for 'hunter'—tattooed on his other arm. The two tattoos together would add up to 'tank hunter.' The accounts claim that heavy-anti-armor-weapons crewman was one of Kent's jobs in the Army. It's oddly specific enough to sound plausible, except that I couldn't find any evidence that Kent was part of an anti-tank unit—let alone one that would be targeting German tanks—or that he even has a jäger tattoo on his other arm. (Let me point out that Kent could resolve all of this by simply rolling up a sleeve.) There aren't many other explanations. The United States Army has an installation on a base outside Stuttgart, Germany, called Panzer Kaserne, but there's no information to suggest that Kent was ever deployed there. All we're left with is a strange tattoo associated with Nazi Germany. Of course, people frequently make strange tattoo choices. Some get ones they come to regret, and plenty have tattooed foreign words onto their body that they don't fully understand. Yet it's reasonable to wonder about the messages a person decides to make permanent on their body. Tattoos can connote in-group belonging or membership to a subculture. Olympians are known to get tattoos of the Olympic rings to commemorate competing in the games. Bikers famously love getting tattoos of skulls and flames. And then there are white supremacists, who have emblazoned themselves with swastikas, Norse runes, the SS logo, and other symbols. Why settle for a T-shirt or a flag when you can carve your values into your skin? The Trump administration seems to strongly agree with the notion that tattoos are meaningful—but only when convenient for the president's agenda. Consider Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland resident the Trump administration deported to El Salvador's Terrorism Confinement Center, or CEC OT, prison camp last month. Garcia was living with protected legal status in the U.S., and the government's own lawyers have acknowledged that he was deported because of an ' administrative error.' Trump loyalists have doubled down on Garcia's detention, in part pointing to his tattoos. On Truth Social, Trump posted a picture of Garcia's knuckle tattoos—a leaf, a smiley face, a cross, and a skull. The photo was altered with text above each symbol to spell out M-S-1-3, suggesting Garcia's tattoos are a code for the gang MS-13. (Criminal-justice professors doubt that claim.) In an interview with ABC this week, Trump insisted it's 'as clear as you can be' that Garcia has MS-13 tattooed on his knuckles, even as ABC's Terry Moran noted that the actual M-S-1-3 in the photo Trump has distributed clearly is Photoshopped in. At least some of the hundreds of other immigrants who have been deported to CECOT appear to have been targeted simply for having the wrong tattoos. Andry José Hernández Romero, a makeup artist with no confirmed gang affiliation, was deported after his crown tattoos were reportedly mistaken for symbols associated with Tren de Aragua. Neri José Alvarado Borges, according to his family and friends, was deported for his tattoos, including an autism-acceptance symbol that he got in support of his younger brother. Tom Homan, the White House's 'border czar,' has claimed that tattoos alone are not being used to label people as gang members. I reached out to the White House for comment, but received only another response from Coleman, the ODNI spokesperson, pointing to another post on X by Henning. This post mocks the fact that The Atlantic had contacted them to ask questions. In reference to Kent's tattoo, Henning wrote, 'Should we just reply that it's photoshopped?' and then included a video clip of Trump's ABC interview. To put this in plain terms: I asked the administration to address concerns that one of the president's nominees has a tattoo associated with Nazis, and its response was to make a joke. Trump's secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, has some questionable tattoos of his own. On the right side of his chest, Hegseth has a large Jerusalem Cross: It has even sides and looks like a plus symbol, with four smaller crosses in each quadrant. On his right arm, Hegseth has a large tattoo of Deus vult (Latin for 'God wills it'), written in Gothic script. Also on Hegseth's right arm is a tattoo of the Arabic word Kafir, which commonly translates to 'infidel' or 'unbeliever.' Both the Jerusalem Cross and Deus vult date back to the Crusades, the bloody series of wars between Christians and Muslims during the Middle Ages. But modern extremists have co-opted them to invoke a new war on Muslims. Insurrectionists who mobbed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, flew a Deus vult flag and wore shirts that featured it and the Jerusalem Cross. The Trump administration defends Hegseth's ink: In an email, Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson said that Hegseth's tattoos 'depict Christian symbols and mottos used by Believers for centuries,' and that 'anyone attempting to paint these symbols and mottos as 'extreme' is engaging in anti-Christian bigotry.' The Jerusalem Cross is still occasionally used in non-extremist religious contexts, Matthew D. Taylor, the senior Christian scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies, in Baltimore, told me. 'If that was the only tattoo he had, I'm not sure how I would interpret that,' he said. But Taylor finds Hegseth's Deus vult tattoo to be noteworthy. ' Deus vult is not a common symbol. It has very strong connotations,' he said. During the Crusades, Deus vult was the 'phrase that sanctioned violence against Muslims.' Other members of the military have also tattooed Kafir on themselves, reportedly in an act of defiance against Islamic terrorism, especially those who have seen combat in the Middle East, as Hegseth has. An American soldier with a Kafir tattoo might be interpreted as a provocation—essentially, I'm an infidel. Come and get me. Taylor reads Hegseth's Kafir tattoo as 'a signal of aggression towards Islam and embracing Islamic aggression towards himself.' When Hegseth's three tattoos are taken together, Taylor said, 'it's not hard to interpret what he's trying to signal.' Maybe both Hegseth and Kent have bad luck and got their tattoos without knowing what they might signal. Maybe they just don't care about the possible darker implications. But this is the constant problem of trying to make sense of the signs from people in Trump's orbit—the recurrent use of white supremacists' favorite sequence of numbers, ambiguous (and sometimes unambiguous) Nazi salutes, and other dog-whistling. How much benefit of the doubt really should be given? At some point, there's not a lot of room to interpret things any other way. As of 2024, Hegseth was a member of the Tennessee congregation of an Idaho-based church run by a Christian nationalist. He has appeared to express support for a relatively niche theocratic ideology that advocates for laws to be subordinate to the perspectives of Christian conservatism. Kent, in addition to associating with Fuentes during his first congressional campaign, was interviewed by the Nazi sympathizer Greyson Arnold. (Following the interview, a campaign spokesperson said that Kent was unaware of Arnold's beliefs.) Trump's White House operates on inconsistency. High prices on consumer goods are bad, unless they are the result of the tariffs. Unelected bureaucrats must be excised from the government, unless they are Elon Musk and his team at DOGE. Free speech is a tenet of American values that is to be vehemently upheld, unless people say things that Donald Trump does not like. Tattoos matter. Except they also don't. They are a sufficient admission of guilt—sufficient enough to disqualify you for due process, even—unless you are part of Trump's team. If you're on the losing side, there is no recourse. If you're on the winning side, there are no consequences.
Boston Globe
16-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Who's afraid of Emily Brontë? On the recent termination of NEH Public Scholar grants.
We were three women biographers meeting for lunch on a Friday to discuss our projects: Heather Clark, a 2018 Public Scholar fellow for her biography of Sylvia Plath, 'Red Comet,' a Pulitzer finalist, at work now on a book about Anne Sexton; Abigail Santamaria, recipient of a 2022 Public Scholar grant for her biography-in-progress of Madeleine L'Engle; and me, a veteran biographer in quest of a new subject. But conversation stalled as we kept returning to the text of the letter Lutz had posted on Instagram that morning: 'Defending women'? Isn't that what we do? Isn't that what the NEH had done for us and our subjects by funding our books? Get The Gavel A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. Enter Email Sign Up I still remember the day in 1987 when I opened an envelope from the NEH telling me I'd been awarded an Independent Scholar Fellowship to support my biography of the Peabody sisters, three little-known women of New England's 19th-century cultural renaissance, Transcendentalism. I was two years into the project, which, due to the copious research required and the demands of parenting, would take another 18 years to complete. Advertisement The good news was an elixir that lasted. I used a portion of the NEH's roughly $20,000 in funding to hire a student researcher who photocopied articles and out-of-print library books I'd rely on in the years ahead. But most important, whenever I thought of giving up or feared I might never finish, I remembered that day and that letter and I kept going. Published at last in 2005, 'The Peabody Sisters ' was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in biography. I still remember the day in the late 1990s when the panel of judges the NEH had invited me to join debated the merits of an Independent Scholar Fellowship application from Stacy Schiff for a biography of Vera Nabokov. She got her letter. Her book won the Pulitzer. In 2014, a half-century after its founding, the NEH initiated the Public Scholar program, opening up funds for more writers like Schiff and me with 'grants to individual authors for research, writing, travel, and other activities leading to the creation and publication of well-researched nonfiction books in the humanities written for the broad public.' The first group of 36 fellows, who received their good-news letters awarding stipends of up to $50,400, included Carla Kaplan for a biography of Jessica Mitford, Anne Boyd Rioux for a book about 'Little Women,' and Gregg Hecimovich, for a biography of Hannah Crafts, author of 'The Bondwoman's Narrative.' Hecimovich's 'The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts,' published in 2023, received the National Book Critics Circle and Los Angeles Times awards in biography and an American Book Award in nonfiction. Advertisement Later NEH Public Scholar recipients writing on women include Janice Nimura, for 'The Doctors Blackwell,' a Pulitzer finalist; Natalie Dykstra, for 'Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner,' winner of the Marfield Prize for Arts Writing; and, along with Deborah Lutz in this year's class, Charlotte Gordon, for a group biography of abolitionists Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth, Lucy Stone, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. (Gordon's funding period ended in January; she was not cut loose.) All of these works took or will take many years, some more than a decade, to complete, with the NEH providing material support in the short term and moral support for the long haul. In one of the articles that my NEH-funded student assistant photocopied for me in the 1980s, 'Claims of the Beautiful Arts,' from the November 1839 issue of Democratic Review, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody argued that in the young American nation, arts and culture deserved government funding to replace the arbitrary and capricious system of patronage that held sway under European monarchies. The resulting works would represent the spirit of a democratic people and bolster its fledgling institutions. Capricious monarchal patronage? Acting chairman McDonald's termination letter fairly gloated at the chance to shove Lutz aside in favor of 'repurposing' the NEH's 'funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the President's agenda.' After the weekend passed, I phoned Lutz to ask how she was handling her loss of funds and the rude letter, so unlike the initial good news email from the old NEH. She thanked me, then brightened. By coincidence, the day she received the termination email was the date her final NEH lump sum payment of $20,000 was due to be released for direct deposit to her bank account. The termination email had not come from the secure '.gov' address from which all financial communications were meant to be issued. She guessed the new admins had failed to successfully navigate the secure system of payment set up by their predecessors. And lo, the $20,000 appeared in her bank account Monday morning. She quickly transferred the sum to a different account, having heard from another NEH fellow that their own 'pending' lump sum payment had disappeared. Advertisement Lutz is back at work on her biography, set for publication in 2026. By then, presumably, American women will have been secured against the threat posed by the likes of Emily Brontë, the Alcott and Blackwell sisters, Hannah Crafts, Sojourner Truth, and Isabella Stewart Gardner.
