A dear friend used to say I was a contrarian. I prefer to think of myself as an iconoclast, but after reading my last few blog posts, I...

When I was a kid, I stayed up all night on Christmas Eve. I’m sure I probably dozed intermittently, but that’s not how I remember it. I...

I am a third-generation citizen of Red Sox Nation. My grandfather went to one of the World Series Games at Fenway Park in 1946. My father...

I am still in the afterglow of Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility. Like her 2015 bestseller Station Eleven, it is a tour de force...

We’re still in the Halloween hangover, and my media stream and TV selections are filled with books and movies in that genre, some of...

How do you solve this moral dilemma? · Religion A says that women must have their clitorises removed shortly after birth. This was...

I write science fiction, so I enjoy UFO stories as much as—maybe more than—the next person. Disclaimer: Although I believe that aliens...

The interplay between supply and demand is the defining characteristic of the free market. When something is desperately needed and in...

A.C. Wise is best known for her short stories, but she made quite a splash with her first novel, Wendy Darling. With her next book,...

I ruptured my left quadriceps tendon in July and spent most of this summer in a knee immobilizer. The injury made walking and even...

Exhaustion is a theme that runs through much of my writing. If all politics is local, then all social upheaval is personal, and it’s...

The day before the presidential election in 2016, I was feeling optimistic about our country. We had elected a Black president, and now...

My father died in 2003, and we had a complicated relationship. He had the kind of troubles that made reading Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go...

I love audiobooks. I have at least two going at all times. I listen while I’m doing dishes or cooking or driving or exercising. In my...

In the last year I have stood in line behind a guy at Walmart with a Smith & Wesson M&P on his hip and a guy open carrying a Glock at the...

I read Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s masterpiece, A Hundred Years of Solitude on the couch of the maison de passage in Bakel, Senegal a very...

“You can’t fix stupid.” I’ve heard that a lot in my media bubble. People who believe that JFK, Jr. is going to rise from the grave to...

There’s an old joke about a dairy farmer who wins the lottery. When asked what he’s going to do with all the money, he says “probably...

In June of 2020, as he stood in front of St. John’s Church in Washington holding a Bible, Donald Trump was the very avatar of religion....

At few other times in history has the burden of writing speculative fiction been so heavy. Our work’s popularity is rising right now...