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The canon: From the Bible to Plato to …. Star Wars?

This month at Wired, my buddy Chris Baker meets Leland Chee, the Star Wars franchise continuity cop. Chee works for the licensing arm of Lucasfilm, and is tasked with ensuring that every Star Wars book, comic, game, and movie conforms to the preexisting continuity. Baker examines, among other things, how fans of genre fiction have co-opted the term “canon,” which . . .

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Dare you see a soul at the white heat?

Thomas Wentworth Higginson is best known as the man who discouraged Emily Dickinson from publishing in her lifetime and butchered her poetry once she died. Editing her work with Mabel Loomis Todd for posthumous publication, he cut Dickinson’s dashes and flattened her language. “My partially cracked poetess,” he called her — another marker of his condescension and cluelessness. Or was . . .

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Happy weekend from the witch trials survivor

My mother claimed to see demons lurking in corners, hiding behind TV anchors’ smiles, sitting on cashiers’ shoulders. The devil’s minions were always hovering, she said, waiting to leap the second you gave them an opening, which was easy to do. Letting a stranger touch your head, listening to rock music, or falling asleep with the TV on were just . . .

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