Raritania

I have been reading and thinking and writing a great deal about spy fiction and military techno-thrillers. It is not really possible to do...

Most of this who dig into the history of science fiction in any systematic way quickly encounter a particular outline of that history, or at...

The chivalric tale of the Middle Ages and after glorified and flattered the feudal warrior-aristocracy. Likewise science fiction has glorifi...

In considering the historical counterfactual E.H. Carr argued in his classic What is History? that when facing a major turning point in the...

Last year I published a pair of papers over at SSRN about the declining presence on the New York Times and Publisher's Weekly bestsel...

As Hit Makers author Derek Thompson explained in an interview with Forbes , for something to go viral means the product or idea in question...

I recently revisited Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front . The book is not a sprawling epic in the manner of War and P...

I recently had occasion to think about how we never left the '80s in the really important things--in our economics and politics, the rig...

Recently running into a commercial for the Will Ferrell-John C. Reilly vehicle Holmes & Watson on On Demand I was surprised that I didn...

Once upon a time cops and, especially in the '80s, the commando, were the characteristic figures of the action movie, a relatively groun...

Writing about the military techno-thriller I generally focused on print works. This was for several reasons--because this is where the ove...

The screen adaptation of Shintaro Ishihara's second novel, Crazed Fruit , ran on TCM some time ago. I understand the movie has been re...

Considering the unending debate on obesity my thoughts go back to what George Orwell had to say of the dietary habits of the poor in his jou...

Recently I chanced upon John Rhys-Davies' nasty behavior toward Green Party MP Caroline Lucas on the BBC's Question Time . In partic...

I have been struck time and again by the number of trolls who claim to be intellectually superior to anyone they are likely to meet in their...