M
    Maddie Crum

    Maddie Crum

    Books and Culture Reporter, HuffPost

  • This New Graphic Novel Is A Stunning, Honest Meditation On Loss

    Read a chapter of Kristen Radtke’s "Imagine Wanting Only This."

  • Librarians Across America Are Using Their Powers For Political Good

    Whether it’s community organizing or battling untruth, they do far more than just shelve books.

  • Egyptian Street Photographer Explores Revolutionary Change In Cairo

    23-year-old Owise Abuzaid says, “The contradictions are everywhere. They are visible and invisible.”

  • Floating Library Proves Books Should Be Shared In Improbable Places

    Books ahoy! A floating library is setting sail in California.

  • Which Famous Paintings Are The Most 'Creative'?

    Wassily Kandinsky's eye for color might be explained by synesthesia. Ahmed Elgammal, associate professor of computer science at Rutgers, co-built an algorithm to quantify creativity, ranking art history's paintings based on their originality and impact. According to the formula, the artists who've spawned the most creative paintings of all time include Edvard Munch (of "The Scream" fame), Chuck Close, and M.C. Escher.

  • A Tree Grows On Instagram

    In sunlight, it's a vibrant green, and passersby guzzle beer out of glass bottles before resting underneath it. The account, @thebroccolitree, includes hundreds of photos taken from the same vantage point, at different times of the day and in changing climates.

  • NASA-Inspired Photo Series Captures The Everyday Beauty of Starry Nights

    Ellie Davies grew up in an ancient forest in England -- the sort of place where fairy tales, both dark and whimsical, are set. "We enter the forest laden with cultural reference points from fairy tales, history, myth and folklore," she told The Huffington Post. Which is why she graces her images with starry skies captured by NASA.

  • This Is What Dyslexia Feels Like

    Unlike most fonts, which prioritize easy and swift readability, graphic designer Daniel Britton's recent creation does just the opposite. Meant to raise awareness for dyslexia, the font strips letters of their qualities that make them easily recognizable. In a description of the font on his site, Britton writes, "What this typeface does is break down the reading time of a non-dyslexic down to the speed of a dyslexic.

  • For One Year, This Publisher Will Only Release Books By Women

    In 2014, only 27 percent of authors represented in The Times Literary Supplement were women, only 40 percent from The Paris Review, only 29 percent from The Nation. To begin to address these discrepancies, author Kamila Shamsie published "a provocation" in the Guardian this month: Let 2018, the centennial anniversary of women's suffrage in the U.K., be a Year of Publishing Women.

  • Here's Your Indie Alternative To Buying Books On Amazon

    Amazon -- the bookselling empire turned drone-building superstore -- has largely been bad news for the brick-and-mortar book business. Luckily, indie bookstores haven't suffered a similar fate just yet. The site and Google Chrome extension allows users to browse for titles, authors or interests on Amazon, and find indie stores with comparable or cheaper prices that are willing to deliver the titles to you.

  • Jonathan Franzen Explains Why He Hates The Internet

    In an interview with Salon co-founder Laura Miller, Jonathan Franzen fidgeted a little in his seat. Miller was asking him about Purity, his anticipated new novel, which is apparently a departure from his more cerebral, thematic stories. “I actually turned against plot very, very consciously and deliberately in writing The Corrections,” he said.

  • Why 'Millennial' Is A 'Garbage Phrase'

    Writer Alex Edelman is a millennial, but he doesn't like the label much, nor does he enjoy the way Generation Y is characterized in the media -- entitled, saccharine, out-of-touch. "I think that it’s pretty condescending that young people are kind of spoken to in a jargon-y way like we aren’t clever enough to see through it," he told The Huffington Post.

  • A Conversation With Adam Thirlwell About His Novel 'Lurid & Cute'

    Adam Thirlwell's novel Lurid & Cute is more than an homage to Lolita -- although it consciously references entire characters and scenes from the classic book. Nabokov's love letter to the beauty and power of language may be the gold standard as far as this theme is concerned, but Thirlwell contributes a worthy work to the canon. There's a giant rift between its unnamed protagonist's life and the ways he intellectualizes his life -- his actions and his thoughts.

  • 6 Things You Didn't Know About Salvador Dalí

    You’ve admired his mustache, you’ve marveled at his melting clocks, but did you know that he was utterly obsessed with cauliflower? To honor the day of Salvador Dalí's birth -- an event he claimed to remember in detail -- we've examined the lesser-known facts about his strange and enviable life. 1. He once collaborated with Walt Disney, and the result was beautiful.

  • These Words Don't Exist -- But They Totally Should

    The journey that a made-up word takes from invention to induction into a dictionary -- be it Oxford Online or Merriam Webster's even more selective print edition -- is arduous. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows -- a blog that evangelizes new words by constructing faux entries and accompanying videos -- has collected a few contenders.

  • Meet The Little-Known Artist Who Inspired Walt Disney's 'Bambi'

    The somber nature of the scene makes sense when taking Wong’s lonely upbringing into consideration. It was in the '40s when his work caught the eye of Walt Disney, eventually inspiring the look of Bambi.

  • The Most Romantic, Overlooked Relationship In Shakespeare's Plays

    The following is an excerpt from Tina Packer's Women of Will: Following the Feminine in Shakespeare's Plays. “Nothing” also means “noting” (as in, noting what other people do), and a lot of noting goes on in this play—Claudio and Don Pedro spying on someone they think is Hero in flagrante delicto. At the beginning of Much Ado, a visiting army—led by a Spaniard, Don Pedro—is coming to stay in Messina.

  • These Nostalgic Microsoft Paint Drawings Will Give You All The Feels

    A realistic, three-dimensional black rock juts out from placid water, towards a cold swath of blue sky and a perfectly round, red moon. “It started as a way to fill my lunch break,” Lorikeet told The Huffington Post. “It has limited tools, and for me that is the main selling point,” she said.

  • These Intricate Domestic Paintings Recall The Magic Of Everyday Life

    To look at one of Andrea Joyce Heimer’s paintings is to feel at once comforted and confused. Bold patterns clutter the walls of her domestic scenes, which lean at implausible angles, distorting your perception. “Everyday settings are where life happens,” she told The Huffington Post.

  • 'Autism In Love' Shows How Complex Romance Really Is

    Lenny, like one percent of the world population, has autism spectrum disorder. Fuller spoke with The Huffington Post about his ambitions for making the documentary. “Although we think about autism, and people with autism, in terms of a social impairment, the deficit isn't in desire,” he says.