Literary Deep Dives

The man who invented “eyeball,” survived plagues, cursed his own grave, and may have named his greatest tragedy after his dead son William Shakespeare was an actor, poet, and playwright who wrote roughly 37 plays and 154 sonnets. Despite his colossal literary footprint, enormous chunks of his life remain completely blank — and the parts we do know are far stranger than anything on the school syllabus. 1. He Invented Thousands of Words You Use Every Day Shakespeare didn’t just write in the English language, he helped shape it. He is credited with introducing or popularizing somewhere between 1,700 and 3,000 words and expressions in English by converting nouns into verbs, combining words, borrowing from Latin, or creatively adapting existing language. In some cases he may have invented them; in others, he is simply the earliest surviving writer known to have used them. Words like “eyeball,” “bedroom,” “swagger,” “lackluster,” “addiction,” “lonely,...

A reckoning with the violence, injustice, and forgotten suffering endured by women throughout history History often celebrates kings, wars, and empires. Less often does it remember the women who suffered under systems designed to control, punish, or silence them. These are some of the most disturbing examples of violence and injustice directed at women, many of which occurred far more recently than most people realize. 1. The European Witch Hunts (1450–1750) The Salem Witch Trials are famous, but they were only a small part of a much larger tragedy. Across Europe, an estimated 40,000 to 60,000 people were executed for witchcraft , and roughly 75–80% were women . Many victims were widows, elderly women, healers, or those who lived on the margins of society. Accusations often stemmed from fear, superstition, personal disputes, or religious hysteria. Torture was frequently used to extract confessions before execution. What makes the witch hunts especially chilling is that they w...

How one book dismantled everything I thought I knew about “neutral” design There’s a particular kind of anger that builds slowly. Not the hot, immediate kind — but the cold, creeping kind that arrives when you realise the world you’ve been navigating your entire life was never actually designed with you in mind. Caroline Criado Perez’s Invisible Women: Exposing the Data Bias in a World Designed for Men (2019) is the book that delivers that anger — methodically, devastatingly, and with 650-odd footnotes to back it up. Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is not a polemic. It is a forensic investigation. And it is one of the most important books of the past decade. What the Book Is Actually About The title might suggest a book about women being overlooked in history — and while that’s partly true, Invisible Women is really about something more specific and more alarming: the gender data gap . Criado Perez’s central argument is decep...

  The Skin Tax: How the Beauty Industry Turned Women’s Faces Into a Never-Ending Debt There is a game women are asked to play every single day — and the rules are designed so they can never quite win. It starts early. A teenage girl notices a pimple and the world notices it with her — a relative’s unsolicited comment, a classmate’s glance, a magazine screaming “10 steps to glass skin!” from a social media feed. The message is quiet but relentless: your skin, as it naturally exists, is a problem to be solved. So she starts spending. A cleanser. A toner. A moisturiser. A serum. An SPF. And then — after all that — concealer to hide what the skincare couldn’t fix in time for the world to see her today. The Myth of the “Natural” Look Here’s the cruelest trick the beauty industry ever pulled: convincing women that the goal is to look like they’re wearing nothing at all — while selling them fifteen products to get there. “ Natural ,” “ no-makeup makeup ,” “ your skin but better ...

Being A Girl In 2026  By A Woman Who Carries Many I am one woman, but I am not only one story. There are other lives braided into mine — the girl who never made it home, the doctor who never woke after a hospital shift, the student who stopped writing because silence felt safer than being seen. They live in the way I move through the world. They speak through me even when I am quiet. This is what it means to be a girl in 2026. I learned to make myself small long before I learned to make myself proud. I learned to walk with my keys between my fingers before I learned to walk with my head up. Nobody explicitly taught me these rules. They arrived slowly — through warnings, through tone, through repetition, through experience. Through being told to be careful in ways no one ever said to my brother. This is not a complaint. This is a record of how we live. You will think you are safe because you cancelled your plans. Because you stayed home. Because you locked the door. Because you did ...