Getting the facts right without drowning in them. Historical and biographical novelists on how much research a book needs and when to stop.
Critical ThinkingSeptember 7, 2026
In the early 1990s a Bugs Bunny cartoon drew 37.7 million viewers a week and the franchise was valued near $17 billion. Sixty years of owners treated it as a revenue stream instead of an asset. Here is the full…
Critical ThinkingSeptember 6, 2026
The disasters that happen to ordinary people are boring: a power cut in a heatwave, a burst pipe, a job ending. Almost nothing in the preparedness market addresses any of it, because fear sells better than usefulness.
Critical ThinkingSeptember 6, 2026
Seventy-four thousand years ago a mountain in Sumatra came apart and took the sky with it. Sunlight fell, the cold held for years, and the human population may have dropped to fewer than ten thousand. This is what that winter…
fictionSeptember 3, 2026
Bucharest is the centre of the global adult webcam industry and almost none of the work happens in bedrooms. It happens in studios in ordinary office blocks, in an industry the state declines to classify.
fictionAugust 31, 2026
Settling the solar system is not a distance problem. It is an energy problem, a radiation problem, a gravity problem, and above all a supply chain problem, and the one that decides everything gets the least attention.
fictionAugust 28, 2026
Jules Verne wrote three novels across eight years that turn out to be one story, with returning characters, honoured consequences, and a timeline that does not add up.
fictionAugust 25, 2026
Deliberate human burial goes back at least a hundred thousand years. At Sungir, two children were buried with ten thousand ivory beads, each about an hour of work, by people living at the edge of their food supply.
fictionAugust 22, 2026
H. G. Wells sent a traveller thirty million years forward to a beach under a swollen red sun where the last living thing flopped in the surf. That ending was not invention. It was the settled physics of 1895.
HistoryAugust 21, 2026
Tampa has better rooms to work in than Pinellas does, distributed differently: a bookstore in an 1891 stable, a university library, a 1926 movie palace, and the historic district. The trade is that Tampa costs you a drive.
PhotographyAugust 21, 2026
Writing at the beach mostly does not work, and the failures are predictable. What the coast is good for is the other half of the job: the thinking and the deciding.
HistoryAugust 21, 2026
Ybor City was a company town built by a cigar manufacturer in 1885, run through mutual aid societies that owned their own hospitals, and used by Jose Marti to fund a revolution. For a writer it is the densest square…
Authority Through AuthorshipAugust 21, 2026
The Poynter Institute owns the Tampa Bay Times, because Nelson Poynter willed it to them so no chain could buy the paper. It is also where much of the modern craft of nonfiction writing was taught and written down.
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