Raritania

No literary work is ever perfect, and one need not retreat into fuzzy talk about human fallibility to understand why. The truth is that writ...

"Show, don't tell" is perhaps the most clichéd piece of writerly advice. It may also be the most useless . Yes, showing ha...

The top movie at the Japanese box office this year was the final Hayao Miyazaki movie, The Wind Rises . Of the top ten , eight were Japane...

The title of this post says it all--these are just three observations I had about the American box office this past year. 1. Hollywood Has...

In his 2003 Trojan Odyssey Clive Cussler makes reference to Rudi Gunn fighting in "the conflict to rid the [Persian Gulf] of Saddam Hu...

I got in my two cents on the summer of 2013 earlier than most last month , but wondered how other observers' takes compared, noticing in...

Paul Kinsey is Sterling-Cooper's resident liberal intellectual, considerably to the left of his mostly Republican colleagues in his poli...

(This review essay first appeared on this blog in four parts. Part One appeared on September 4. 2013, Part Two appeared on September 6, Part...

Yes, according to an essay Ryan Britt published in The Awl last month. In his thoughtful piece, with which I mostly agree, he discusses th...

In Japan, the conflict over history and militarism has extended into the world of manga and animè, with Hayao Miyazaki recently drawing fir...

It seems that in recent years there has been a trend toward "rehabilitating" the crimes of the twentieth century-- Stalinism in Ru...

Over at Charlie's Diary , Charles Stross has commented on the prospects of a Western intervention in Syria in a piece written prior to ...

It was in December 2003, that the new Battlestar Galactica miniseries first aired on Syfy--almost a decade ago, which makes this an obvious...

The RiffTrax company recently conducted a poll regarding the Worst Movie of All Time, the results of which have now appeared at Blastr . Not...

Certainly one of the more challenging aspects of writing a thriller is developing the investigative plot thread typically part of them--figu...