Raritania

It seems to have become something of a commonplace over the years to draw an analogy between life and a poorly designed video game. The list...

One of my (many) causes for annoyance with the results Google's search engine spews out these days is that whenever I type in a name-- a...

Looking back at the 1990s from a generation on I find myself thinking that it may have been the last time when Americans had a sense of how ...

I remember how back when writing for The Fix I penned a piece titled "Science Fiction and the Two Cultures." As the title implies...

Some time ago I revisited the kind of writing I used to do for IROSF , in particular the big summary-type pieces toward which I tended--lik...

Looking back on the history of paramilitary action-adventure it seemed to me that one of the reasons why the genre declined in the 1990s as ...

Those who discuss the idea of the middlebrow commonly trace it back to a letter Virginia Woolf wrote to the New Statesman deriding it, post...

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...