The Broken Day
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Benandanti
13 min read
The article references 'nightwalking' like 'Friulian peasants used to do on their stalks of fennel' - a direct allusion to the Benandanti, a 16th-17th century agrarian cult in Friuli, Italy who believed they left their bodies at night to battle witches. This obscure historical phenomenon adds rich context to the narrator's metaphor for imaginative wandering.
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Vélodrome d'Hiver
17 min read
The article mentions 'the Jews rounded up at the Vélodrome d'hiver' - referring to the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup of July 1942, when French police arrested over 13,000 Jews for deportation to Nazi death camps. This was one of the largest mass arrests of Jews in France and represents a dark chapter of French collaboration that many readers may not know in detail.
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Order of the Eastern Star
13 min read
The narrator discovers commemorative plates from the 'Woodland chapter of the Order of the Eastern Star' with names inscribed along a pentagram. This Masonic-affiliated fraternal organization, open to both men and women, has an interesting history dating to the mid-19th century and uses symbolic rituals that would provide educational context for the article's themes of Americana and nostalgia.
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Hi, I’m Rawn. I’m honored today to be able to share my inaugural piece as The Hinternet’s new culture critic.
I admit this isn’t quite what I thought it was going to be when I applied for the position. You see, I spend an awful lot of time on the internet, just like all of you reading this, to the extent that at this point I have trouble hearing “culture” at all without “reaching for my revolver”, so to speak, which is to say without mentally adding a “wars” to the end. I thought they were recruiting me to share speculations about J.D. Vance’s Illuminati ring, or lists of the many ways Taylor Swift aids and abets white supremacy, or gleeful dissection of an Epstein e-mail seeming to hint at a history of sodomitic trysts between old Bubba Clinton and our current sitting president. But of course I should have known: this is JSR’s project, after all, and he would never wish to descend into such dirty business as that. So, instead of culture wars, upon being hired Managing Editor Hélène Le Goff asked me whether I might be willing to cover the novels shortlisted for this year’s Prix Goncourt.
“This year’s pre-what now?” I asked, and she could see I had no idea what she was talking about. She froze for a second, visibly winced, and then hissed at me: “Just write what you know.”
I’m happy to comply. The truth is what I mostly know is the inside of this house, especially the attic, where I spend most of my time rummaging through the contents of these old cardboard boxes: the shoehorn collections; the Reader’s Digest condensed large-print editions of Rob Roy, Anne of Green Gables, The Three Musketeers; Edgar Cayce Speaks, Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter-Skelter, Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock; commemorative plates from annual gatherings of the Woodland chapter of the Order of the Eastern Star, with the names of the Grand Matrons inscribed along the edges of a pentagram: “Patty, Bunny, Edna, Viv, Maureen. 1983.”
Downstairs the boarders remain slumped on the couch, all light dimmed by Minions bedsheets adapted into makeshift curtains, both virtually immobilized by their weight, fixed permanently ...
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