Easily Bridget

In  The Magicians , few characters are as sharp, glamorous, and terrifyingly competent as Margo Hanson. As High King of Fillory, Margo is fierce, loyal, and relentlessly stylish. She treats her wardrobe as seriously as she treats diplomacy or magical warfare. When Margo loses her right eye in Season 3, her identity and her relationship with her body begin to shift. What could have been portrayed as a purely tragic injury becomes a layered exploration of pain, resilience, and style as psychic armor. The sparkling, custom-made eye patches she wears are more than fashion. They are power. According to  The Magicians Fandom page , Margo sacrifices her eye in an act of political resistance, refusing to let the Fairy Queen use her vision for surveillance. It is a strategic loss, but not one she takes lightly. In the episode  We Have Brought You Little Cakes , Margo says, “It’s not the same. Let’s not pretend it is, okay? That makes it hurt worse.” She acknowledges the disfigurem...

In HBO Max’s  His Dark Materials , Mrs. Marisa Coulter is easily one of the most enigmatic and terrifying characters in the series. Beautiful, brilliant, and unrelentingly cruel, she exerts control over others—especially children—through manipulation and psychological warfare. But perhaps her most unsettling dynamic is the one she shares with her own daemon: a mute, golden monkey who rarely leaves her side and who suffers beneath the surface of every episode in which they appear together. The golden monkey, unnamed and unheard, is one of the only daemons in the world of  His Dark Materials  that does not speak. While daemons are external manifestations of the human soul, bound to their humans in both pain and emotion, Coulter’s relationship with hers is uniquely disturbing. She physically assaults the monkey. She rejects it. She locks it away. She seems to loathe it. And that loathing may be the key to understanding not only the daemon’s silence, but Mrs. Coulter’s deep p...

                        In his latest move to reorganize and change policy, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, announced the removal of all sitting members of the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP) on June 9 th .  Kennedy stated, “Today, we are prioritizing the restoration of public trust above any specific pro- or anti-vaccine agenda. A clean sweep is necessary to re-establish public confidence in vaccine science.” The seventeen members of the ACIP were replaced by eight members, four of whom share Kennedy’s anti-vaccine ideology, and all of whom took a critical stance against procedures used during the COVID-19 epidemic. This was not the first change pertinent to vaccines. In an editorial in The New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Vinay Prasad, Director of the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, and Dr. M...