The Cher Manifesto
When Karl Marx wrote about the decadence of capitalism, he may have been imagining something like our current moment, in which a slew of...
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Journalist and author
The Line of Thought
. . . to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.
--Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
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Deborah Yaffe
- Nov 10, 2022
Baby Dionne
Last year, Alicia Silverstone got on TikTok and promptly started turning out Clueless-themed videos featuring her ten-year-old son. Now...
Deborah Yaffe
- Oct 13, 2022
The pendulum swings
The smashing success of Netflix’s Bridgerton has ushered in a new era of multiracial casting in Regency costume dramas. This is good...
Deborah Yaffe
- Dec 20, 2021
Austen women
Jane Austen isn’t just for girls, of course, but the Austenesque tidbits that the internet has tossed my way lately happen to focus on...
Deborah Yaffe
- Nov 22, 2021
Talking about "talking"
In the social world of Jane Austen’s Regency, young people navigated a complex set of unwritten rules for managing friendship and...
Deborah Yaffe
- Sep 2, 2021
Forever Cher
For an actor, it must be frustrating to realize that you will be remembered almost solely for a role you played at the age of eighteen....
Deborah Yaffe
- Jun 21, 2021
As if, again
“Seven years I suppose are enough to change every pore of one’s skin, & every feeling of one’s mind,” Jane Austen wrote to her sister,...
Deborah Yaffe
- May 24, 2021
Reboot, booted
Back in late 2019, when corona was just a neighborhood in Queens, the news broke that Hollywood was considering a television reboot of...
Deborah Yaffe
- Aug 27, 2020
New and/or improved
By now, we would all be happy to consign 2020 to the trash bin of history. Let’s reboot! Remake! Recycle and replace! Alas, another four...
Deborah Yaffe
- May 7, 2020
On and off
For those of us who love our Jane Austen adaptations, the coronavirus quarantine has been the best of times and the worst of times. The...
Deborah Yaffe
- Mar 12, 2020
Immortal, beloved
Twenty-five years ago this summer, we Janeites flocked to movie theaters to see a brand-new modernization of Emma, set among affluent...
Deborah Yaffe
- Nov 14, 2019
Hands off!
Why do people keep trying to mess with Clueless? Amy Heckerling’s 1995 movie, which updated the story of Emma to high school in Beverly...
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