Plot
Story Stream
Scholars Have Lost the Plot! April 17, 2025
Dear reader,I want to apologize, because we literary scholars have failed you. We’ve done so by praising and encouraging certain kinds of reading at the expense of others. In particular, in our writings, we’ve devalued one of the most popular kinds o...
The Radical Lord of Light Entertainment April 17, 2025
Music is extremely difficult to write about. First, because it has no plot, no figures, no images, and second, because it is, as the critic Walter Pater pointed out, the one artform to which all the others aspire. Remember those earnest mini-essays o...
Looking for Purpose in Thailand April 14, 2025
The most common complaint about The White Lotus’ third season was that it was just too slow, that it reveled in visual opulence while settling for a meandering plot. A memeable grin here or a lascivious monologue there notwithstanding, the HBO show d...
On Haley Mlotek’s 'No Fault' April 07, 2025
First came the marriage plot; then came the commercial divorce memoir, an epiphanic form relishing little pleasures and self-discovery afforded by international travel.Both genres were new once. Now, they each have their practitioners, who might upho...
The Movie That Missed Peak Woke April 01, 2025
Society hit “peak woke” sometime before 2025—but Disney’s new live-action Snow White missed the memo. This remake of the 1937 animated classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is a tribute to inclusivity, girl power, quirky “theater kids”—really anyth...
