Travel
In July I went to Iceland. I hate planes, and I touched down at Keflavík Airport roasted by lack of sleep and darn thirsty. I’d had a hallucinatory encounter with Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan while onboard the Delta torture-tube and like Captain James Tiberius Kirk
Fantasy
Unfortunately It Is Her Temple of Doom As longtime followers know, I harbored some genuine excitement for the final installment of Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel’s Dart trilogy. The previous two books compelled and amused via their lush, sensual depiction of courtesan Phèdre’s horny alt-Renaissance adventures. But Kushiel’
Book Review
A Strange House in the Republic of Heaven How much love can one bear to have for a book which will only ever be half-finished? No matter how long I wait or how wrenchingly I romance the text, this first half is all there is of Aspects, and all
Review
But I Had to Use MGM+ to Watch It Desperation to entertain my family hemming me in, I activated yet another streaming service the other day in order to show my constituents American Classic. Don’t worry, I shan’t be out on the streets any time soon: it’s
Review
User Experience As Rhetoric If you’re reading this, I’ve deleted my dating apps. They were too damn depressing, and the more time I spent engaging with them, the more I came to believe that rather than being a machine for producing dates, dating apps are a machine for
Book Review
Touring the Mediterranean, Sexual-Style In 2024 I read Kushiel’s Dart by Jacqueline Carey because I’d found it in a tiny free library. But really I read it because ads for the book had haunted me from tweenhood, twining alluringly through the pages of my mid-aughties Dragon
Book Review
Last week: the plot of A Mirror for Observers. This week: the point of A Mirror for Observers. Every week: some weird thing you've never heard of. Relevance? How do the musings of a 1950s-produced alien bear upon the world of 2026? AMfO has its highs and
Book Review
Last week we pondered why I'd rate a book which took me an entire year to finish over a new awards-darling I finished easily in two weeks. As it turns out, sometimes what makes reading easy is when the content is simply not that deep despite the
Book Review
Reading A Drop of Corruption and Memory together Last year, during my ill-fated and soul-crushing encounter with the 2025 Hugo nominees, I accused Robert Jackson Bennett of writing a book redolent with fasco-libertarian dogwhistles: The Tainted Cup. Not an unentertaining book full of fasco-libertarian dogwhistles, so
Book Review
Reviewing How to Create the Perfect Wife by Wendy Moore It often seems most history books intended for the general audience are written with moms in mind, unless they’re about World War II or Abraham Lincoln. Nothing else could tempt a sixty-something dad out of his beer garage.
Book Review
Post-America, Written Too Soon I accidentally read two books about the collapse or rising irrelevance of America while I was on vacation last month. This is why I can’t do leisure time: I box myself into the grindset by accident. The funnier coincidence about these two books is
Review
Based on How Many Times I Said “Oh Fuck Off” While Watching We return to our article in progress. We already talked about the movie-within-a-movie episode, the baseball alien episode, the Bermuda Triangle episode, the giving-the-aliens-the-flag episode, even the Brady Bunch episode. How