Great Expectations
Charles Dickens pens his masterpiece
Poor boy Pip grows up infatuated with the privileged Estella who lives with her eccentric recluse aunt, Ms. Havisham. Only money can improve Pip’s lot in life and love. Dickens' richly-drawn characters and beautifully descriptive storytelling will pull readers into this tale of mystery, unrequited love, money, class, and morals.
About the Creator
Vivian R McInerny
A former daily newspaper journalist, now an independent writer of essays & fiction published in several lit anthologies. The Whole Hole Story children's book was published by Versify Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021. More are forthcoming.
Keep reading
More stories from Vivian R McInerny and writers in Critique and other communities.
Standing While Falling
Quotation from Friedrich Nietzsche "He who wrestles long with monsters should beware lest he himself become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you. Man is not destroyed by suffering, but by the meaning he makes of it."
By LUCCIAN LAYTH5 days ago in Critique
Angry People Click More: The Economics of Manufactured Dissent
(Ideas from the book The Economic Policy of Online Media: Manufacture of Dissent, Routledge, 2024) Abstract This article examines the formula ‘angry people click more’ as a core logic of contemporary online media and as a structural transformation of propaganda in the digital age. It argues that the defining feature of the current attention economy is not only the circulation of misinformation, but the systematic deployment of openly implausible claims designed to provoke moral outrage and sustain profitable engagement cycles. The analysis links Oxford’s 2025 Word of the Year ‘rage bait’ to earlier lexical markers of epistemic crisis such as ‘truthiness’ and ‘post-truth’, and situates this trajectory against the older ‘manufacture of consent’ model of Herman and Chomsky. While classical propaganda in totalitarian and mass-media systems sought ideological unity through censorship and the Big Lie, the emerging Propaganda 2.0 model, articulated by Peter Ayolov, monetises anger by manufacturing dissent and deliberately populating the public sphere with absurd, polarising narratives. The article interprets this dynamic through the allegories of ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ and Václav Havel’s greengrocer, showing how the move from fearful silence to permanent online rage changes both the psychology and political economy of propaganda. Drawing on Evgeny Morozov’s critique of fake-news moral panics, Frances Haugen’s disclosures about Facebook, and the documentary The Social Dilemma, it concludes that anger has become a tradable asset and that blatant lying has shifted from an authoritarian instrument of control to a market mechanism in a global ‘free trade in slogans’.
By Peter Ayolov3 days ago in Critique
The steps to losing a child
Step One: Lose a child. Not what anyone wants to happen and nothing you can do to change it, but you can go through steps to becoming happy again. You can go through steps to loving again. You can go through steps to become a new you because after losing a child you will never be the same person you once were.
By Tabitha Hinkley3 days ago in Fiction
Comments (1)
I've heard a lot about this but I've not read yet. Loved your review!