Mysterious Island, colonialism, and translators’ agendas
The other day, I pulled Mysterious Island, by Jules Verne, off my unread-books shelf. I decided that I didn't really...
Archive for Improving Society
The lifeboat scenario
My 9th-grade English teacher, Mr. Eymil, gave us a surprise in-class writing assignment one day in 1983. He told us...
In defense of Marvel and diversity
This is a long impassioned post in which I try to come to the defense of Marvel comics. The TL;DR...
Hold the line: How best to contact Congress
Long but fascinating article about the effectiveness of various means of contacting US members of Congress. It contradicts some things...
Day of Remembrance for the incarceration of Japanese Americans
Today is a Day of Remembrance: the 75th anniversary of FDR's executive order to incarcerate Japanese Americans. A bunch of...
Easy quick intro to contacting your members of Congress
Yesterday, I attended a really useful-to-me presentation titled "Activism 101: Finding your voice in government," about how to engage with...
Pete Seeger on helping
Pete Seeger died three years ago yesterday, so my post about him came up in my Facebook history today. It...
Turning pattern into preparation
Every now and then, I stop at a stoplight behind a long line of cars, and I see a homeless...
England Swings SF, Judith Merril, and the New Wave
I'm finally reading Judith Merril's groundbreaking 1968 anthology England Swings SF. Here are some thoughts. i probably ought to...
As a famous ancient human once wrote
Back in 2003, I noted that when future-setting sf characters refer to “an ancient Terran word,” they nearly always mean...
Misleading graphs
I've seen several potentially misleading graphs in articles lately, so here's a reminder of a couple of common y-axis issues:...
“How Can We Sink When We Can Fly?”
I'm reading Terry Carr's Best Science Fiction of the Year from 1972, and most of the stories in it, although...