A collection of 223 posts
As an avid reader of pop fiction, I’m more partial to the Nixon administration than any other White House. The Reagan years may have produced more crooks, and the Trump years may have produced more chaos, but there is one measure by which the criminal and criminal-adjacent members of
Under the Frog was based on his Magyar parents, both of them basketball players who, in the wake of the doomed 1956 uprising against the Soviets, fled Hungary for Britain.
Artists and scientists have a reductionist’s idea of one another and perceive the other as a threat.
WEIRD individuals are psychologically peculiar in a number of ways.
Science Fictions is engaging, story-led, and well-organised. It will equip my sad young friend to articulate what went wrong with his charity’s study on literacy and, as importantly, to do the next one well.
What cancel culture has just mown down isn’t simply Flannery O’Connor or her works, but our ability to view them through any other lens except that of doctrine.
Rather than the emergence of a China-dominated world order, as some in the West and many in Beijing propose, science fiction writers illuminate realities that could end up reprising the failures of the former Soviet Union.
Voinovich’s legacy has a personal aspect for me.
The poverty of Macedon made incense rarer than in Greece or the Near East, and it also made offerings rarer.
The book explains a half-century arc of intellectual history culminating in our current state of histrionic overreach in the name of social justice.
The New Yorker story remains an albatross around my neck.
Money is a consistently recurring theme. Trump told Bolton at one point that other presidents had not talked about money, but that he liked to do so.
Marx’s ideas have been debunked by economists; Freud’s ideas have been debunked by psychologists.
The connection between SF and liberty is not simply an accidental byproduct of the colorful history of SF publishing, but a necessary one tied to certain fundamentals of the genre.
Feudal societies were hierarchical, with clearly-defined roles and responsibilities for everyone. The knights fought for all, the priests prayed for all, and the peasants worked for all.