Getting the facts right without drowning in them. Historical and biographical novelists on how much research a book needs and when to stop.
FebruaryNational Library Lovers Month runs through February. The free public library is younger than most people assume, it was built on a deal Andrew Carnegie made towns sign, and the branches near you now lend tools, seeds and metal detectors.
AmericaA study using dam resettlement records found rural populations undercounted by 53 to 84 percent. It doesn't mean billions of missing people, and it doesn't rescue anyone from falling birth rates. It does mean the numbers behind policy deserve a…
Critical ThinkingPenrose and Hameroff's quantum theory of consciousness, dismissed for forty years, is getting a second look. I agree that consciousness isn't computation. I don't agree that the brain produces it. Here's the radio model, and what it means for AI.
ResearchAbout 47,000 objects are tracked in Earth orbit, and models put the untracked debris in the hundreds of millions. Kessler syndrome is the chain reaction that could make some orbits unusable, and a war would set it off. It's the…
Personal StoryI write books for a living, and I haven't finished reading one in about five years. The shelf behind me on video calls is set dressing, and the reading I do now comes in pieces, a chapter at a time,…
Ancient RomeThe Jewish War by Josephus is one of my favorite books, and the translation you pick decides whether you finish it. Josephus wrote for the Romans who spared him, so trust his map and doubt his numbers.
Amazon & KDPBefore a book meant to sell gets written, check the Amazon categories it would live in. KDSPY and Publisher Rocket show what the top titles sell, how crowded the shelf is and how long the books run, and that decides…
FamilyGenealogy research, unlabeled photos, recipe cards and immigrant stories are the ingredients of a family history book. A ghostwriter interviews the relatives who remember and turns all of it into a book your family will read.
Fiction WritingEvery documentary reviewed on this site, ranked by the rating its review carries. Natural history, true crime, sport, surveillance, and the two films that got convictions overturned and a genocide described on camera.
AnimationThe studio animation canon ranked end to end, from the 1941 Disney features to the DreamWorks era. A complete ranking rather than a greatest list, because the bottom of it matters as much as the top.
Fiction WritingEvery vampire film reviewed on this site, ranked. Dreyer's dream logic, Herzog remaking Murnau, Bava's gothic, Hammer's decline into sex, and the one film that asks whether there is any such thing as a vampire at all.
Black and WhiteEvery samurai film reviewed on this site, ranked. Kurosawa, Kobayashi, Gosha and Okamoto, and a genre whose masterpieces are nearly all arguments against the thing they depict.
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