The Writing Retreat could have been a decent little thriller, and there’s definitely glimmers in here of a better book under the overwhelming amount of baggage that comes packed in the 400 or so pages this one operates with. Between the angst-filled characters, the laborious pace, and the generous helping of the ludicrously incredulous, this […]
“THE WASTELAND GROWS,” wrote Nietzsche over a century ago. “Woe to him who hides wastelands within.” Since then, the wastelands have grown more indiscriminately within and without. Our social and spiritual lives wither on our cell phone screens. Our cities, habitats, and public arenas suffer from a blight whose causes remain obscure while the effects […]
I began listening to Wicca Phase Springs Eternal’s Full Moon Mystery Garden after I took two road trips through Death Valley, the first literal (in California) and the second figurative (in a hospital). So when I heard him say, “On a mountain under full moon / I could say goodnight and mean it” and then, […]
The counterintuitive truth about “the love that dare not speak its name” — a late-19th-century term of art for love between men — is that precluding the name “homosexuality,” it was allowed to be quite loud: It was sung, written, verified and moaned about everywhere, from retellings of classical myths to the dormitories of the […]
I am an appreciative recipient of this holiday season’s most exciting book: a volume bearing the title “Reflections in Light and Shadow, an Anthology of Short Memoirs” (Sunshine Place, Manila, 2022). The book is the harvest from a memoir-writing workshop in 2021-2022 during the pandemic and was conducted at the Sunshine Place, Senior Recreation Center […]
Illustration: Andreion de Castro Earlier this year, I wrote about genre-fiction authors using AI in their novels. Most wrote for Amazon’s Kindle platform, where an extremely rapid pace of publishing, as fast as a book a month, is the norm. AI helped them write quickly, but it also raised complex aesthetic and ethical questions. Would […]
LG’s new DualUp monitor is unconventional, to say the least. It doesn’t look like any monitor I’ve ever used, let alone seen. The display stands 28 inches tall with a 16:18 aspect ratio. It’s a sight you’d be forgiven for stopping and staring at, but the decision to stand out with a unique design ultimately […]
Andor is a masterclass in screenwriting. Here is how and why. Andor is the Disney+ Star Wars entry that has delighted fans, non-fans, and critics alike. And this alone is a seemingly impossible task—the monster IP has left countless creatives in its destructive wake. The bottom line is if you want to watch amazing scenes […]
Around forty-three hundred years ago, in a region that we now call Iraq, a sculptor chiselled into a white limestone disk the image of a woman presiding over a temple ritual. She wears a long ceremonial robe and a headdress. There are two male attendants behind her, and one in front, pouring a libation on […]
The decision to write a memoir is not to be taken lightly. Having done it, a retired USAID FSO shares his experience. BY FRANK J. YOUNG A ghat on the Ganges River in Varanasi, December 1969. The holy city along the sacred river has nearly 100 such flights of riverfront steps, where religious rituals are […]
