Raritania

New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 256. Given how long ago I became acquainted with Mills' classics, The Power Elite and Wh...

I recently noticed on Amazon that the negative reviews of Alfred Marshall's classic Principles of Economics tended to focus on the writ...

Earlier this month I mentioned David Walsh's review of Django Unchained , and his remarks on Zero Dark Thirty . Interestingly, just two ...

Raymond Kurzweil's 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines remains a touchstone of futurologists and their critics not only because of ...

New York, Penguin, 2006, pp. 799. I remember that reading Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of Great Powers back in college I pored o...

It seems to me that I have been running across a great deal of revisionist World War II-era economic history as of late, focused primarily o...

Considering the stats on the action film (such films now typically six of the ten top-grossing films in a given year), I naturally found my...

It seems generally understood that the action movie took off in the '80s, and, while going through some changes (becoming less often R-r...

As regular readers of this blog (all two of you, unless I'm miscounting by two) know, I have been watching the superhero movie bubble fo...

As is well known by now to anyone who pays much attention to films of the type, DC got the Wonder Woman film made, and got it out this summe...

When it comes to "info-dumping" and "incluing," a considerable current of thought about science fiction hews to the stan...

In his book How Fiction Works James Wood early on sings the praises of Gustave Flaubert as the founder of "modern realist narration,...

Having been both impressed and disappointed by James Wood's How Fiction Works --impressed by his lucid exposition of some literary funda...

Writing my book Cyberpunk, Steampunk and Wizardry I produced a history of science fiction that was most concerned with the genre's most...

Picking up the first volume in Anthony Horowitz's Alex Rider series, I was unsurprised to see that he took many of his cues from classic...