Valerie Stivers

Red Hook

Writer at Freelance

Catholic sensualist. Hostessing fundamentalist. Culture for all. Contributing writer @unherd. Food column @OSV

Articles

Trump's war on cheap plastic junk

2 weeks ago | unherd.com | Valerie Stivers

ChinaclimateClothesdeglobalisationfast fashionPoliticsSustainabilitytarriffsUS Last week, Walmart announced a plan to raise prices, setting off another round of criticism of President Trump’s tariff policy. In this case, the calculus seems particularly damning; Walmart serves middle- and lower-income Americans, who will be particularly affected by price hikes. And items imported from Mexico and Canada, such as avocados and raspberries, can be expected to cost more.
How ADHD medicine failed boys

3 weeks ago | unherd.com | Valerie Stivers

AdderallADHDBig PharmaCultureGen ZparentingThe New York TimesUS Last month, The New York Times Magazine published a comprehensive story by journalist Paul Tough, on the current state of research into Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, or ADHD. The piece reached stark and ground-breaking conclusions.
Rage against the mom machine

1 month ago | unherd.com | Valerie Stivers

diversehannah zeavinmomsmoral panicparentingSexismSocietyTechnology One of the speakers in The Symposium, Plato’s great dialogue on the characteristics of love, makes the point that what is “done well and rightly” is beautiful, and what is not rightly done is ugly. The proposition has more predictive power than we’d like to admit. Elite urban parenting, for example? Hideous. This makes no sense, given the resources involved, but so it is.
Rage against the mom machine

1 month ago | flipboard.com | Valerie Stivers

1 hour agoLife turns upside down when new parents bring their baby home, but they aren't the only ones adjusting to the massive changes. Pets also have to modify their routine and expectations to accommodate having someone new in the home, especially when that someone new is as noisy as babies tend to be. …
The Great American Novel Will Not Be Substacked

1 month ago | compactmag.com | Valerie Stivers

Major ArcanaBy John PistelliBelt Publishing, 352 pages, $24.95There’s been a recent trend of writers, mostly men, asserting the need for a new kind of fiction writing that will supposedly fix the publishing industry and draw in new readers. I am sympathetic to this movement, which I have been informally labeling “rebellion literature.” The better versions of it go beyond the standard anti-woke or reactionary talking points to offer ideas about what a renewal of the novel would look like.
Tea with Chesterton: The mystery of Father Brown's strawberry scones

1 month ago | oursundayvisitor.com | Valerie Stivers

To recreate Mrs. McCarthy’s very British scones for American readers took some sleuthing of my own, since baked goods in particular don’t always translate between American and British English. The British scone is more like an American biscuit, with the difference that you rub room-temperature butter into the flour mixture for a more cake-like texture, rather than cutting in cold butter for flaky layers. And unlike American biscuits, British scones aren’t generally served with savories.
The literary ruins of #MeToo

1 month ago | unherd.com | Valerie Stivers

In 2017, during the first wave of #MeToo, I was reluctantly noncompliant. On several occasions, I was approached by journalists to participate in stories about accused men in media, and declined to do so. As a lifelong feminist, I liked the idea of preventing powerful men from exploiting less powerful women for sex. Hence, the reluctance. Yet show trials and vicious public shaming didn’t seem like methods likely to improve society. Hence, my noncompliance.
Ross Douthat’s Serious Fantasy

2 months ago | compactmag.com | Valerie Stivers

What does it take to get a fantasy novel published these days, if not a famous name and a great manuscript? Judging by The Falcon’s Children, a high epic fantasy by conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, it seems the answer is a gimmick of some kind—ultra-violence, soft-core sex, identity politics.
Amanda Knox creeps me out

2 months ago | unherd.com | Valerie Stivers

amanda knoxCancel cultureCrimeCulturediverseFeminismItalyMemoirMurderPrisonTabloids Amanda Knox starts off her new memoir, Free: My Search for Meaning, with a barbed anecdote: her mother told her once when she was a child that she would have “an extraordinary life”. And she has, though not in the way that any mother would wish for.
The Girlfriend Experience

2 months ago | fairfieldsuntimes.com | Valerie Stivers

The zany and joyous female embrace of an extreme kind of porn-scripted sexuality is a new literary trend, or maybe a new life trend, seen recently in Miranda July’s All Fours, and now in the disturbing grunge confection Paradise Logic, by Sophie Frances Kemp.