Before I go translate stuff

The New York Times was on fire this week. All of the following articles raised some really interesting, important questions about a variety of issues, and I recommend them:

• Harold Bloom reviews Alan Julius' Trials of the Diaspora, about anti-Semitism in England
• Two books about Martin Heidegger's Nazism
• Irène Némirovsky's writing and Jewish identity
• In The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell, talking about spies and spycraft, hits it out of the park.
• And in the Arts & Culture section, this article talks about the borders of culture in a global age.

I was particularly interested in the Heidegger article because so many of the philosopher's ideas are central to modern critical theory and cultural studies; I actually asked peoppenheimer, since he's a professional philosopher, what he thought about it. My thoughts on the culture article are complex; I think the author makes and misses good points with equal frequency, for starters.

Bonus manga discussion rec! branchandroot talks about CLAMP's problems with women and with endings. I definitely have to agree with the discussion of women and girls getting the short end of the stick.

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This morning my dad and I went to Philly to run in the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure 5K, in honor of my mom. I ran the whole thing straight through because I was worried that my leg would stiffen up if I took a walking break, so I managed to finish in about 33:30, which is quite a lot faster than the last 5K I ran (five minutes faster, roughly). As they say, boo-yah! This one's for you, Mom.

Also the course was nice--down the Parkway, back up Market Street to just past 30th Street Station, then over the bridge and back down around the Art Museum to the Eakins Oval. I do love Philly quite a lot.

[3weeks4DW] Love's Labour Found: A Fan-Play (or, writing in the grey area)

I wrote the following in May 2003 for a one-act play contest at my high school; it won, and was produced at the same, which was pretty awesome. I am posting it here because it falls squarely into the AO3's "grey area" between original and fanfiction, and I wanted to explore that tension; on the one hand you could argue that it is entirely original, or on the other that it is a strange mixture of meta-drama and Author RPF. Also, I still enjoy it very much, despite the fact that I would write it differently were I writing it today--but then, I don't know whether I could write it today. In any event, I hope you enjoy it.

Title: Love's Labour Found
Fandoms: Shakespeare, Author RPF
Characters: Desdemona, Lady Macbeth, Beatrice, Rosalind, Ophelia, William Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf, the Playwright (female)
Rating: Gen
Additional tags: meta, feminism

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( The play's the thing )