Writing

Reading Michael Tomasky’s new piece on Obama in the February 7 New York Review of Books, I noticed what I assumed to be a particularly good David Levine caricature of John Boehner—and then I suddenly remembered that Levine died (as far as I could remember) some time in the past five years. The Boehner drawing […]

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The Message of All Eugene O’Neill

Tuesday, December 4th, 2012 Writing

“There is one man—and only one!—who is so old, drunk, ruined, hopeless, self-destructive, sick, failed, and bitter (and yet who yet once had promise and potential to rival anyone whom you wish to compare him to); who is so estranged from all loved ones, family and former friends, who has sunk to depths of destructive […]

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The Rules of Fiction: Fantasy Technology

Monday, November 5th, 2012 Writing

In 1965, during the planning stages of Star Trek, creator Gene Roddenberry was concerned about how to portray planetary exploration on his new show—not because of the (projected) limited resources of space travel, but because of the (very real) limited resources of television. Would Roddenberry’s spacefarers actually need to land their “Starship Enterprise” every week? The […]

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