Now that you’ve had a chance to look over our most popular features from last year, here were the top five most-read essays from our blog:
Classroom. Photograph by Ryan Tyler Smith / Flickr
It’s a phrase that’s parroted endlessly, but is anyone quite sure exactly what it means?
A well-loved copy of Goodnight Moon. Photograph by Andrew Seaman / Flickr
Goodnight Moon was a runaway—and totally unexpected—success. The text remains bearable, charming, and even compelling after many, many readings. Anne E. Fernald investigates why.
Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett in Carol. Image courtesy the Weinstein Company
Carol, Todd Haynes’s adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel, The Price of Salt, has captured the imagination of critics like no lesbian-themed movie before it, but mainstream praise for the film adaption neutralizes its queer romance when it insists that the particular pleasures Carol offers are universal.
Algerian Harem (1852 or 1853). Source: gallica.bnf.fr / Bibliothèque nationale de France
Michel Houellebecq’s new novel, Submission, is preoccupied by a chauvinistic view of French men’s national decline and derogatory ideas about Muslims. Rather than offering productive insight for the future, his work is attached to an exclusionary fantasy of the French past.
An 18th-century painting by Dirk Valkenburg showing plantation slaves during a ceremonial dance. Photograph by Albert Eckhout
Robin Coste Lewis’s debut poetry collection, the National Book Award–winning Voyage of the Sable Venus, reveals, astounds, and lingers. 
