Raritania

The eternal whine of editors, agents and others whose business has them dealing with aspiring writers (usually, dealing with them as little ...

I have had occasion in the past to remark that Jack London, while not forgotten (Harrison Ford starred in a major feature film version of Th...

Back in the interwar era figures like J.F.C. Fuller, Basil Liddell Hart and Giuilio Douhet envisioned small, high-tech forces (small mechani...

I don't watch much TV these days, and much of that is a matter of reruns on "classic" TV channels. This is mainly a matter of ...

One finds that those general knowledge-type things everyone is supposed to know, like those historical facts we all had in school--it was th...

A certain sort of stupid person gets mad when anyone refers to a thing as "overrated" or "underrated." They instantly ju...

The latest put out by the Bureau of Labor Statistics offered some interesting statistics regarding time use American Time Use Survey . It co...

Recent writing about Disney's recent travails in China the principal topic has, of course, been Mulan , but I did run across a piece in...

Recently looking at the coverage of the box office again I have found myself considering the case of China again. While in the U.S. Mulan ha...

Ever since the advent of TV the Hollywood movie studios have struggled to keep people buying movie tickets. Measured in per capita terms, Am...

I recently suggested that an optimistic calculation of the earnings of the country's novelists producing for adult readers from actual r...

Not long ago I wrote about the possibility that we are entering a post-scarcity age when it comes to fiction . My analysis there focused on ...

I recall being, if not pleasantly surprised, then at least intrigued by Josh Trank's Fantastic Four when I first saw it. There were asp...

In writing my history of the military techno-thriller I was concerned principally with the main line of the genre--its early flickerings dat...

Watching The Pretender it seemed that pretty much nothing about the show made sense--not that I expected much from a network TV show at tha...