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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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Janeite fun for all ages
Although Jane Austen didn’t write for children, many Janeites discover Austen during their tween or teen years, around the age when...
Deborah Yaffe
Jul 28
Clueless again?
The 1995 film Clueless is many things—a beloved teen comedy, the locus classicus for indispensable expressions like “As if!” and one of...
Deborah Yaffe
Jul 7
Back in the day
I still remember the first time I watched the BBC’s iconic 1995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice . At the time, my husband and I lived...
Deborah Yaffe
Jan 30
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...
Deborah Yaffe
Feb 9, 2023
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
Nov 10, 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
Oct 13, 2022
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
Dec 20, 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
Nov 22, 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
Sep 2, 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
Jun 21, 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
May 24, 2021
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
Aug 26, 2020
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