Raritania

The environmental movement has taken numerous forms, and indeed, just about every conceivable form with regard to ideology, so much so that ...

It seems that today meat-eaters can hardly go a day without being subjected to a moral harangue about how their dietary preferences and noth...

London: Verso, 2011, pp. 352. As the rather charged and frankly offensive title of Owen Jones' book,  Chavs , implies, his concern is ...

Back in 1931 Astounding Science Fiction paid its writers two cents a word. This does not sound like very much. But one has to take inflat...

New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018, pp. 368. Back in 2013 David Graeber penned an article for Strike! Magazine regarding what seemed to...

Watching Patrick Stewart in William Shatner's documentary The Captains' Close-Up talk about his childhood, I was surprised by his w...

What one might call the "myth" of the "New Hollywood" of the 1960s and 1970s is that the artists' hubris led to the...

I have already written a blog post about spotting trolls , but thought I'd present some of those thoughts again in a somewhat more syste...

We all know that the Internet, and especially social media, are inundated with trolls --pathetic, repugnant, dark triad -afflicted losers (n...

Many have encountered the claim, typically made by right-wing and especially libertarian commentators, that tax breaks are somehow not subsi...

Some time ago a poll in Britain identified George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four as the book that people most often lie about having rea...

New York: New Press, 1997, pp. 305. As the title of his book implies, here historian Eric Hobsbawm is writing less of history here than of...

When we recount the history of science fiction, it is common to point to some early figure as its founder--for instance, Mary Shelley, Jules...

Are books too long these days? I will say up front that many of the novels that have most impressed, most affected, most influenced me wer...

I haven't done an overview of the summer box office in quite a while, in part because it has become so damned repetitive, in its commerc...