Raritania

It is widely recognized that, from the standpoint of how people treat each other, the Internet is a good deal worse than real life, which is...

Can there be such a thing as respectful disagreement? Well, let's consider what that word "respect" means. We can boil it do...

The pop culture of our time appears to be dominated by relentless, shameless exploitation of a small set of rather tired IPs--mainly because...

As word trickles through the entertainment press about what the world can expect of "Bond 25," a glance back at Bond 24 seems appr...

What seems like a thousand years ago, I was gulled by the hype into reading Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club . I ultimately found it incoh...

This essay is a development of two prior posts, "The Secrets of Tom Clancy's Success: The Boom Years" (August 22, 2019), and ...

A surprising number of Americans seem to romanticize Britain's upper classes, and its associated trappings--the ultimate symbol, idol, f...

Over the years I have found that anyone who expresses a dissenting opinion on the matter of Quentin Tarantino's films almost immediately...

Studying the Bond series for my books I found myself increasingly researching post-war Britain--to the point that I wound up writing two boo...

In one of the comparatively few scholarly articles written about the military techno-thriller, "Redeeming Vietnam: Techno-Thriller Nove...

Looking back at the military techno-thriller, it seems worth remarking that not all combat arms or weapons systems were equally popular wit...

Cultural commentators have always inflicted on the world a great deal of inanity about the younger generation not measuring up to their sati...

Running into the odd Home Improvement rerun on cable, I am time and again struck by how backward-looking that superficially contemporary sh...

The latest word about "Bond 25" is that it will start hitting theaters in April 2020. Assuming the franchise keeps to the schedu...

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...