M
    Maddie Crum

    Maddie Crum

    Books and Culture Reporter, HuffPost

  • Comic Sans Creator Speaks Out About The World’s Most Hated Font

    Vincent Connare stands by his work: "I’m proud of Comic Sans."

  • 15 Beach Reads To Bask In This Summer

    The perfect beach read is in the eye of the beholder. For some, getting lost in a faraway fantasy world or suspenseful thriller appeals, and reduces the risk of dozing off, book firmly planted on face. Naked at Lunch by Mark Haskell Smith For many of us, being at a beach in the summer can feel weirdly like hanging out with a bunch of strangers in our underwear.

  • How To Win At Scrabble, According To Former Director Of National Scrabble Association

    As a self-professed Scrabble obsessive, John D. Williams Jr.’s new memoir Word Nerd caught my attention. Its subtitle -- Dispatches from the Games, Grammar, and Geek Underground -- intrigued me because when it comes to Scrabble play, I’m less interested in the art of constructing cool, esoteric words under given restrictions than I am in the art of winning at Scrabble. Although I’m passionate about language, I play Scrabble because it challenges my spatial skills, and taps into my competitive nature.

  • The Prickly History Of Tattooing In America

    Tattoos were once taboo in the West, even though body art is an ancient practice elsewhere. A new book, 100 Years of Tattoos, explores this decorous transformation, following tattoo art as it turned from an act of rebellion to a widely practiced personal statement. Meanwhile, the art of ink was in its fledging stages in America.

  • Deborah Levy's Strange Novels Are Not Your Mother's Book Club Pick

    “I need a lot of external stimulation bulleting into my life,” Richard Ford said in an interview with The Paris Review. Perhaps not coincidentally, Ford’s writing is complemented by the way it sounds. More so than the meaning they invoke, Ford chooses words for the feelings they stir up.

  • This Comic Book Is The Geeky, Feminist Answer To Bad Dating Advice

    "I think there are always such silly ideas out there of women being mysterious creatures when it's usually quite the opposite,” comic book publisher Hope Nicholson says. It’s this belief that propelled Nicholson to collect a comic anthology of female writers -- The Secret Loves of Geek Girls -- who will use the medium to tell their personal dating stories. "I think female creators have always gravitated towards non-genre types of storytelling," Nicholson told The Huffington Post.

  • Move Over, Kim K: This New Book Of Selfies Lets Women Reclaim Their Power

    A Google Image search for “babe” yields unsurprising results: an endless scroll of women who look both young and fertile. Petra Collins -- a 22-year-old photographer, filmmaker, and now editor of Babe, a collection of art by, for and about teen girls -- is aiming to change this conversation. “There’s definitely a romanticism of youth, like, everywhere,” she told The Huffington Post.

  • Photographers Address The Pain And Glory Of Violent Sports

    The photo is from a series of portraits taken by Amy Elkins, a photographer whose work often focuses on how we define masculinity. “Something about the mix of those two worlds clicked and made me want to make formal studio portraits like the ones I had seen but on the sidelines of these hyper-violent games, showing the wear and tear of the game on each player,” Elkins told The Huffington Post.

  • What Would Robot Poetry Look Like?

    This is one quality that separates search engines from humans, who are currently more capable of making connections between disparate meanings. While humans use metaphors informed by experiences, search engines -- which operate by recalling “tags” that have been given to images and other pieces of information -- are necessarily more straightforward. Corey Pressman, Director of Strategy at app developer Neologic, is at work on a project that aims to change all that.

  • This Summer Travel Read Is A Thrilling Emotional Journey

    The world of Vendela Vida’s latest novel, The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty, revolves, like a swirling washing machine working hard to renew and restore, around outfits. The Bottom Line is a weekly review combining plot description and analysis with fun tidbits about the book.

  • What Does Your Musical Taste Really Say About You?

    It was a smallish SUV that grumbled and shook like Anakin Skywalker’s dinky pod racer. University of British Columbia professor Gerry Veenstra surveyed a range of participants about their musical preferences, and found that likes and dislikes, from opera to reggae, are linked with wealth and education.

  • Indoor Rainclouds Created And Captured In Stunning Photo Series

    "Iwanted to see if it would be possible to exhibit a raincloud," Berndnaut Smilde said. To "create" an indoor cloud, conditions such as humidity and temperature must be carefully controlled. Once Smilde manages to construct the ideal environment, he emits a puff of fog from a fog machine, making a momentary cloud appear, seemingly out of thin air.

  • Eerie Portraits Of 'Toy' Soldiers Put A Haunting Spin On War Photography

    The subjects of Simon B. Thorpe’s photographs are real men, modeled to look like the symbols of so many childhood playtimes. Thorpe became interested in calling attention to the ongoing conflict in Western Sahara, a disputed territory which Thorpe says has received inadequate media coverage, after embarking on a project about land mine victims.

  • 10 Innovative Writers Who Are Shaking Up The Book World

    Merritt Tierce, for example, writes about the South, but she’s no Flannery O’Connor. Eula Biss and Maggie Nelson have lead the charge recently, with their respective personal stories peppered with data and historical context. Regardless of your genre of choice, The Huffington Post recommends several writers if you're looking to shake up your reading routine.

  • Poet Confronts Police Brutality Against Black Women

    Monet had written the poem -- a contribution to the #SayHerName campaign, a necessary continuation of the Black Lives Matter movement focusing on overlooked police violence against women -- earlier that morning. As a poet, Monet is prolific.

  • 10 Cuban Photographers You Should Know

    More than 100 years ago, a broad slab of concrete was placed along the seashore in Cuba, stretching five miles from Old Havana to the city’s business district. The Malecón was intended as a barrier -- it would protect Havana from high winds and high tides -- but instead became a bustling cultural landmark. Cuban street photographer Eduardo Garcia finds it ripe with fascinating subjects emblematic of the mood of his country.

  • A Brilliant, Star-Studded Novel To Add To Your Book Club List

    After failing an IQ assessment, Sophie Stark explains her problem with the test makers in her characteristically matter-of-fact tone, “They tell you stories that don’t make sense and ask you questions where the answer could be anything. The Bottom Line is a weekly review combining plot description and analysis with fun tidbits about the book.

  • 11 Fun And Fabulous Children's Books From Around The World

    The quaint cover of The Giving Tree, with its loosely sketched lines, speaks to the quiet power of the story. This is the basis for Martin Salisbury's new collection, humbly titled 100 Great Children's Picturebooks. Salisbury's selection includes works from around the world, the only criteria being that they were published within the last 100 years.

  • How Do You Photograph A Memory?

    A collage of faces, blurred or aged with time, lurk inside an eerie work by Sally Mann. Mann’s work, which aims to capture the atmosphere of the deep South, has been duly acknowledged in a big way this month with the release of her memoir, Hold Still. In it, she recalls the first time she embarked on a photography expedition: “I shot many of the same things I still focus on today: the landscape of the rural South, with its keen ache of loss and memory.” To that end, she’s captured angsty preteens pushing strollers and toting cigarettes, and contemplative, nude children pausing from a river jaunt.

  • This Grrrl Power Video Game Is Everything That's Right About The '90s

    Long before Zoe Quinn’s moving attempt to enlighten others about the experience of mood disorders through her interactive fiction game Depression Quest, Theresa Duncan was making waves with her feminist CD-ROMs. For those unfamiliar with Duncan: she was a Renaissance woman whose interest in writing didn’t stop at blogging. In the '90s, she created three groundbreaking video games that were designed to combat the overarching male influence on the industry: Smarty, Zero Zero and Chop-Suey, which was narrated by David Sedaris.