The Hole
Two soldiers, one American and one German, fall into the same shell crater in the Ardennes when the temperature hits minus thirty-two. The cold doesn't care which side they're on, and neither can survive the night alone.
Category: Writing (Page 21)
FictionThe Wall
A corporal who hangs his lantern on a dead man's hand protruding from the trench wall has stopped flinching at any of it: the rats, the men packed into the mud, the comrade who took three days to die where…
FictionOpen the Line
A late-night Pittsburgh radio host has built an eleven-year career interviewing the dead on air, while everyone argues over whether he's a fraud. It's real, and one night the line opens for the one voice he's spent his whole career…
FictionWhere We Live
The first six humans who will never return from the Moon land on a gray plain with no return vehicle on the manifest. The geologist is sent down the ladder first, and what she says when her boot touches the…
FictionIslands on the Water
On the most beautiful morning he can remember, a young fisherman sees three great vessels with white wings that were not there the night before, and little boats putting out from them toward his shore. He watches the strangers come…
FictionWhat Was the Big Bang, the First Nanosecond, and What Came Before
The Big Bang was not an explosion in space, it was the beginning of space, and the wildest events in cosmic history happened in the first sliver of a second. A plain-language tour of the first nanosecond, what the leftover…
FictionThings We Lost After the Year 2000 and Why They Mattered
Nostalgia is mostly a lie, but some of what we traded away after 2000 cost us something real. DVDs you actually owned, phone numbers in your head, the map of your own city, boredom that fed your imagination. A clear-eyed…
FictionHow to Write a Story From an Alien Point of View
Most writers who try to write a nonhuman character just put a human in a costume. Writing a real alien, animal, or AI point of view means subtracting yourself, one assumption at a time, until what is left is a…
FictionWhat a Mars Colony Will Actually Look Like
The Mars colony in the movies, a gleaming glass dome with green gardens and sunset views, would kill everyone inside a week. The real thing will be buried under meters of red dirt, built by robots before anyone arrives, and…
Artificial IntelligenceYou’re Renting, Not Owning: What the Anthropic Shutdown Teaches Writers
The U.S. government switched off Anthropic's most powerful AI models overnight, proving in a single stroke that nobody who uses AI actually owns it. If your business runs on a rented tool, whoever controls it can change the deal or…
GhostwritingSix of My Own Stories That Looked Like Nothing and Carried a Book
None of these felt like stories when they happened. A brick in a doorway. A microwave on the wrong network. Each one ended up carrying a chapter.
ObservancesTowel Day: Don’t Panic and Always Know Where Your Towel Is
Every May 25, fans of Douglas Adams carry a towel to honor the author of The Hitchhiker's Guide. The first Towel Day came in 2001, two weeks after his death at 49. Don't panic, and always know where your towel…