Avidly

Books You Should Read: Tinkers, by Paul Harding

It was deep winter and dark seventeen hours a day. I was up every...

Dance, Dance, Revolution

At the age of nine, I went with my mother to see Footloose in...

Why The Kids (And I) Still Love Gatsby

One of my former colleagues used to say that all high school students love...

Janelle Monae’s Android Agenda

Janelle Monae’s new single poses, for us, a question: is an android performing as...

Steiner Crushes Derrida: Or, Veganism for Boys

I gave up vegetarianism after seven years for a boy named Sam, who wasn’t...

Books You Should Read: Tinkers, by Paul Harding

By Sarah Ahrens

May 16, 2013

It was deep winter and dark seventeen hours a day. I was up every two to three hours with my newborn son who had a tongue tie and was not gaining enough weight. There was so little day to confuse with night that neither of us felt the gradual shift toward light for weeks....
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Dance, Dance, Revolution

By Justine Murison

May 14, 2013

At the age of nine, I went with my mother to see Footloose in the theater. It made me giddy with a feeling of rebellion—and not just because the plot of Footloose poses rock music and dancing against buttoned-up small-town evangelicalism. I thought being in the audience itself enacted rebellion, one vividly symbolized for...
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Why The Kids (And I) Still Love Gatsby

By Megan Stephan

May 9, 2013

One of my former colleagues used to say that all high school students love The Great Gatsby, although he claimed that most of them love it for “the wrong reasons.” He’s right about the love. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel elicits more passionately positive reactions from a wider variety of adolescent readers than any other...
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Love in the Ruins: or, Should I Go To Grad School?

By Pete Coviello

November 13, 2012

On a late-spring day sometime in the mid-90s, I found myself sitting with a friend on a stone bench...
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Top Seven Ladies Who Could Have Used Obamacare’s Birth Control Mandate

By Sarah Mesle

November 2, 2012

Here’s a thing about my students: they cannot imagine a world without birth control. Or rather, it does not...
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On Connie Britton’s Hair

By Sarah and Sarah

October 16, 2012

In the opening scene of ABC’s new drama Nashville, Connie Britton takes down her hair. Well, it’s not totally...
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American Literature Girls

By Sarah and Sarah

September 7, 2012

“I’m holding out for a captivity narrative American Girl with a horse hoof in her pocket.” –Michael Snediker....
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About Avidly

Avidly in Review

As the year winds down, we here at Avidly would like to thank you for your amazing contributions and support and enthusiasm. We’d like to end the semester by looking back at a handful of excellent posts you might like to reread as you decompress from a busy fall. Note that this doesn’t aim...