Meghan Cox Gurdon

1 week ago | wsj.com | Meghan Cox Gurdon

When she learned she was pregnant, the author told an app before she told her husband. Then came changes in her social-media feeds. “It took forty-eight hours for the brands to find me,” Amanda Hess writes of the cascade of algorithmic changes that hit her phone when she learned that she was expecting her first child. As a 30-something in 2020, she was accustomed to seeing what she calls “millennial slop” in her social-media feeds. Now everything was about pregnancy.

2 weeks ago | wsj.com | Meghan Cox Gurdon

The human obsession with frightening creatures has given rise to ancient tales of dragons and werewolves, as well as to the horrors that stalk 21st-century screens.

3 weeks ago | wsj.com | Meghan Cox Gurdon

There is nothing more difficult to put into words than the sublime. The thing to be described might be a piece of music, a scenic vista or a jolt of transcendent love. The challenge of defining the indefinable helps explain why writing about art, nature or love can so easily tip into excess. The writer gropes for similes and metaphors, heaps up adjectives or perhaps hides his inability to find the right words behind a scrim of lyricism.

1 month ago | wsj.com | Meghan Cox Gurdon

In Buddhism there is a teaching: One’s antagonists are the best spiritual teachers because they are so good at providing opportunities to practice patience and kindness. It is an idea that Amanda Knox credits for helping her overcome years of torment, living “in the shadow of the worst thing that I never did.” Free: My Search for Meaning Grand Central Publishing 304 pages We may earn a commission when you buy products through the links on our site.

1 month ago | wsj.com | Meghan Cox Gurdon

In the annals of American literary culture, few have left as bold a mark as Edgar Allan Poe. In 1841, with the locked-room mystery “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Poe invented the genre of detective fiction. Four years later he introduced into poetry the indelible phrase “Quoth the Raven ‘Nevermore.’” In his macabre short stories, victims are chained, set aflame, buried alive, strapped to torture tables.