Valerie Stivers

Red Hook

Writer at Freelance

Catholic sensualist. Hostessing fundamentalist. Culture for all. Food column @parisreview; Books column @compactmag_ .

Articles

Rage against the mom machine

1 week 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 week 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 week 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 week 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

3 weeks 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

1 month 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

1 month 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

1 month 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.
The gender vibe shift and its discontents

2 months ago | unherd.com | Valerie Stivers

andrea long chuautogynephiliaCatholicismChristianityCulturedetransitiondiverseHomosexualityMilo YiannopoulosTransgender Twenty-six-year-old Miles Yardley — formerly known in downtown New York City as a musician, influencer, and model named Salomé — publicly renounced his trans identity this year, sold his women’s clothing online, and began posting grim details to his 20,000 or so followers on X about how his medical transition as a teenager has affected his body over the past decade. Yardley...
Rich Kids Want to Die Too: Julia Kornberg’s Berlin Atomized

2 months ago | therumpus.net | Valerie Stivers

I used to play a game when I lived in Moscow in my early twenties. I would see how deep into a flirtation I could get while pretending to be a Russian girl; in actuality, I am American. My Russian-language skills were limited, but in a famously patriarchal culture, a young woman like me wasn’t expected to talk much.