We are three English majors who started this blog in August of 2015 to indulge our respective penchants for criticism: of books, TV, movies, even music videos. We were raised on Television Without Pity and Stephen Fry, Pride & Prejudice and Bridget Jones, Emily Dickinson and Taylor Swift; and this blog aims to turn the same level of scrutiny and critical thinking on everything from the high-brow to the very, very low-brow.

Janes

Janes’ real name is Meredith, but she also answers to Janey, JT, Jane-Jane, Feminazi, the Emasculator, and the opening lick to “Janie’s Got a Gun.” She loves Milton, the Oxford comma, nineteenth-century novels, and nineties pop music. She is a firm believer that the word “summer” should never be used as a verb, that epic poetry should stage a comeback, and that the perfect date is April 25th, because you only need a light jacket.

Interests: Emily Bronte, Thomas Hardy, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Gilmore Girls, metaphysical poetry, John Milton, irreverent TV shows, movies about singing/dancing/cheerleading, depressing Russian literature, UnREAL, The Affair, The Americans, You’re the Worst, jokes about rich people, social justice, Grimms’ fairy tales, Joss Whedon, sci-fi without the word “star” in it, philosophy written by terminally maladjusted humans.

Keets

Keets heard his middle-school English teachers when they said that there wasn’t one right answer in literature, he just didn’t believe them. Now he works with computers, so that the only right answer is to stop trying, and in his spare time writes 5% as many blog posts as either Janes or Nerdy Spice.

Interests: John Milton, 17th-century lyric poetry, Latarian Milton, movies with explosions, TV shows with explosions (but really just 24), TV shows with wiseasses (but not Scrubs), criticism in general, philosophical criticism in particular, untenable conservatism, Yeats, Keats.

Nerdy Spice

Nerdy Spice (formerly kht) grew up playing Disney-movie-based games with her baby sister Janes. She majored in English in college, got a graduate degree in creative writing, and then found herself earning a living as a software engineer. She’s working on her second novel and querying agents for her first. She eats home-cooked meals only when her husband Keets makes them for her, and he is still trying to teach her how to turn on the oven.

Interests: Victorian novels, modern MFA novels and she’s not ashamed of it, super-long novels that aren’t by David Foster Wallace, Michael Chabon, Claire Messud, Henry James, feminism, movies with Robert Downey Jr. in them, TV shows with Connie Britton in them, Pacey Witter, 90s teenybopper movies with training montages, The Good Wife, Homeland, Tina Fey’s entire oeuvre, Mindy Kaling’s entire oeuvre, shows from the WB/CW circa 2004, and JJ Abrams.