Click on the titles to read the full articles. Top 5 best witchy manga you can read right now You gotta love a good witch. In anime and manga, they’re kind of like the cousins of magical girls, though the latter is much more popular than the former. In a literal sense, they are magical girls; witch-centred manga can often emulate similar shojo-ish themes, but are usually quite different in terms of tone and worldbuilding. If you’re looking to get into the Halloween spirit a

First, let me set expectations. . . . I read almost anything about ancient Egypt and everything that even remotely touches on Isis and Osiris. I call it research. :-) That being said, I'm picky about what I like, and I'm often disappointed. A whiff of a camel plodding by the newly built Pyramids? Nope. Camels came with the Persians around 700 BC, and the Pyramids were built around 2500 BC. What about descriptions of tombs as cool and shady? You lost me. OK, they ARE shady,

A young neurosurgeon faced with a terminal cancer diagnosis attempts to answer the question: What makes a life worth living? in his posthumously published novel, When Breath Becomes Air. “I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed nothing and everything,” he wrote. “Seven words from Samuel Beckett began to repeat in my head: ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’” Paul Kalanithi was a neurosurgeon and writer. He graduated from Stanford wi

Just one peek, you say. Suddenly, there you are rubbernecking like the worst person in the world (or reading another book about the end of the Romanov dynasty). I read a British review of The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra by Helen Rappaport and pre-ordered the book. I'm glad I did. I might still be rubbernecking, but I learned some new things and came away with a better understanding of the daughters and the world they lived in af

First of all, I highly recommend this book. As a literature and rhetoric major, I knew about Abélard and Heloise, but their fascinating story never really piqued my interest until I read The Sharp Hook of Love by Sherry Jones. Second, as an aspiring novelist writing about star-crossed lovers, this book made me (no other phrase for it) green with envy. Abélard and Heloise star in one of history’s most passionate and romantic true love stories. The affair of the 12th-century