Raritania

The names of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Theodore Dreiser do not seem to be spoken together very often and it is easy to understand why given the...

Recently revisiting the moral panic over the release of Joker it struck me that such panics seem less common than they used to be--for exam...

In a prior post I discussed some of the parallels and the differences between Isaac Asimov's Foundation novels and H.G. Wells' The S...

Looking back at the Golden Age of science fiction it has seemed to me that H.G. Wells was a hugely important influence. Certainly John Campb...

I recall some years ago encountering a page on some web site that purported to offer advice to writers of post-apocalyptic fiction. The purv...

It is an old pop cultural cliché that CBS is an older person's channel , apparently rooted in how that channel was king in the '70s ...

Not long ago a TV critic who, like most of his ilk, worships at the altar of "prestige TV," recently reported eschewing it for a m...

Those who were attentive to children’s television in the late ‘00s and early ‘10s are likely to remember Dan Schneider’s Nickelodeon sitcoms...

Where the history of the "New Hollywood" is concerned some figures, of course, get far more attention than others--and others less...

In the waning days of the New Hollywood, when the Suits were getting their own back and breaking the artists to their Neuordnung of executiv...

I have previously remarked the reality that, especially if one takes the word respect to mean what it has long meant, deference, then "...

In thinking about Robert Ludlum’s career I have tended to compare the Ludlum of the '70s, and especially the early and mid-'70s with...

As I have remarked in the past the country was clearly going off the rails mentally back in the ‘90s--but it knew it was going off the rails...

Once again it occurred to me to go to Goodreads to check out the evidences it offered of interest in one of those authors I so often find my...

I remember being struck by the intensity of the moral panic that surrounded the release of Todd Phillips' The Joker back in October 201...