From Chapter 6: Medea and Jason

When she met Jason, Medea was a very young woman, known to be a magician, yes, but only locally. I like to think of her as seventeen, but she might have been younger. She was a beauty and a follower of Hecate, a powerful goddess of the underworld. She was also the niece of the powerful witch Circe, who becomes...

Why do Americans go to the grocery store to buy wine from California, Italy, or New Zealand, when many of us can find an independent winery thirty minutes down the road? Why are locally grown and produced wines so often disdained when locally grown food is upheld as the gold standard? The U.S. wine industry has lagged behind Europe’s for far too...

Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist exposed a brutal but commonplace system of child exploitation to Victorian readers. Conditions in workhouses, factories, and child criminal gangs posed lethal and daily hazards to children born to poverty. Several much-needed reforms took place in the aftermath of Oliver Twist’s publication. But what were the...