Why Reread?

Anwen Crawford reflects on newly published letters from Sylvia Plath; “The belief among many of Plath’s devotees seems to be that if we can get clear of other people’s fingerprints on her texts, allowing Plath to ‘fully narrate her own autobiography,’ as the editors here describe it, we will at last solve the riddle of her. The extremities of her poetry will balance against the circumstances of her life; the latter will equal the former. But her griefs were ordinary; it is what she did with them that wasn’t. Plath turned her common sorrows—dead father, mental illness, cheating husband—into something like an origin story for pain itself, as if her own pain preceded the world.” In the New Yorker

You may have heard that Noah Berlatsky wrote a book about the early days of Wonder Woman. The book explores gender dynamics in Wonder Woman comics from the forties. At The Rumpus, Berlatsky talks with Arielle Bernstein about early comics, radical politics and the mind of William Marston.

Here’s everything you’ve ever wanted to know about the communion wafer’s place in free-market capitalism.