Essays

Essays on fiction, technology, institutions, science, history, games, and the systems that shape imaginary and real worlds.

This page is organized by topic rather than publication date. Some posts are pure essays; others are review-adjacent pieces where a book, film, show, or game becomes a way to think about a larger question. A small number of cross-cutting posts appear in more than one section where that makes browsing more useful.

On this page

• Start Here
• AI, Technology, and Knowledge
• Energy, Climate, and Infrastructure
• Space and Engineering
• Economics, Markets, and Innovation
• Institutions, Democracy, and Development
• Science, Mind, and Identity
• Fantasy, Power, and Institutions
• Fantasy, Myth, and Story Logic
• Urban Fantasy and Genre Evolution
• Adaptation, Screens, and Games as Systems
• Reading, Books, and Culture

Start Here

The archive is now broad enough that a curated starting point is useful. These posts introduce several recurring concerns of the blog: technological dependence, institutional capacity, energy systems, speculative politics, identity, and genre.

• Europe’s Slow Emergency: Can the EU Still Build the Future? — Europe’s competitiveness problem as a slow erosion of industrial capacity, energy strength, technological autonomy, and the ability to build.
• When AI Passes the Test, the Test Fails: Why AI Benchmarks Become Obsolete — What happens when benchmark success stops measuring useful progress, and evaluation has to move faster than the systems being tested.
• Solar, Wind, and Nuclear: The Energy Transition Is a System Problem — Why electricity transitions cannot be reduced to choosing a winning technology: grids, storage, firm power, costs, and timing all interact.
• Renting the Sky: Europe’s Space Industry and the Risk of Orbital Dependence — European strategic autonomy viewed from orbit: launch, satellites, infrastructure, and the cost of depending on systems controlled elsewhere.
• The Politics of Impossible Worlds: Political Systems in Fantasy and Science Fiction — Imagined governments as worldbuilding machines: political systems that solve one problem by creating another, and only make sense because their worlds are built around them.
• Copies of Ourselves: Cloning, Identity, and the Problem of Being You — Cloning and copying as a way to test what we think a self actually is.
• Urban Fantasy Reread: Anita Blake, Dresden Files, Mercy Thompson, and October Daye — A gateway post for the wider urban fantasy reread project.

AI, Technology, and Knowledge

Essays about artificial intelligence, automation, authorship, cybersecurity, data, scientific discovery, digital infrastructure, and the changing value of human expertise.

• When AI Passes the Test, the Test Fails: Why AI Benchmarks Become Obsolete — What happens when benchmark success stops measuring useful progress, and evaluation has to move faster than the systems being tested.
• You Can Watermark the Words. But Can You Watermark the Meaning? — Claude and the AI Watermark Arms Race — Text watermarking, provenance, paraphrase, and the deeper difficulty of marking machine-generated meaning rather than merely machine-generated wording.
• AI Rulers and the End of Politics — The attraction of algorithmic government—and the danger that replacing judgment with optimization also removes the substance of politics.
• The Manuscript Was “Genius.” Then Suspected AI Use Made It Unpublishable — A publishing controversy as a test of authorship, artistic value, provenance, and how much the human process matters to the finished work.
• Ghost in the Wires Review: Kevin Mitnick and the Human Side of Hacking — Kevin Mitnick’s memoir as a study of cybersecurity’s weakest and most persistent component: human trust.
• Can Europe Afford to Rent Its Intelligence? — AI sovereignty becomes practical when access to frontier models depends on foreign companies, infrastructure, and policy choices.
• AI and Forbidden Knowledge: When the Book Is Already Open — AI safety and information control once dangerous knowledge is already widely distributed, searchable, and difficult to contain.
• The Cost of Unused Data: GDPR, AI, and Europe’s Privacy Bargain — The benefits of strong privacy rules weighed against the economic and technological cost of making valuable data harder to use.
• Bitcoin Before Satoshi: Reviewing Aaron van Wirdum’s The Genesis Book — The cryptographic, monetary, and ideological projects that made Bitcoin thinkable before Satoshi Nakamoto assembled them into a working system.
• AI and Scientific Discovery: More Paths, or a New Map? — Whether AI simply accelerates existing research paths or changes the map of possible discovery.
• If AI Can Create New Knowledge, Why Do We Still Need Humans? — A direct look at what remains humanly valuable if machines can participate in discovery.
• Artificial Intelligence as a Discovery Engine — AI considered less as a chatbot and more as a machine for finding patterns, hypotheses, and new routes through knowledge.
• When the Machines Learn to Paint: AI, Copyright, and the Future of Culture — AI image generation, creative ownership, and the unsettled future of cultural production.
• The Future Might Not Be AI — It Might Be Copies of Us — A speculative essay on copied minds, emulated labour, and a stranger alternative to conventional AI futures.
• The Singularity Is Nearer — Acceleration, Optimism, and Uneasy Futures — Technological acceleration, optimistic forecasting, and the unease underneath grand predictions of the future.
• Chasing a Ghost: Reflections on The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto — Bitcoin, anonymity, invention, and the strange cultural afterlife of Satoshi Nakamoto.

Energy, Climate, and Infrastructure

Essays about the physical systems beneath modern life: electricity, decarbonization, climate risk, nuclear power, logistics, industrial capacity, and the politics of infrastructure.

• Climate Finance and Development: The Bargain That Might Actually Work — A climate bargain built around making clean growth more attractive than fossil growth for developing economies.
• Europe’s Slow Emergency: Can the EU Still Build the Future? — Europe’s competitiveness problem as a slow erosion of industrial capacity, energy strength, technological autonomy, and the ability to build.
• Breeder Reactors and the Energy Transition: Option or Distraction? — Whether breeder reactors deserve a serious place in long-term decarbonization or remain an elegant technology searching for a practical role.
• Solar, Wind, and Nuclear: The Energy Transition Is a System Problem — Why electricity transitions cannot be reduced to choosing a winning technology: grids, storage, firm power, costs, and timing all interact.
• AC vs DC Again: Is Direct Current Winning the Second Electrical Age? — Direct current, electrification, batteries, data centres, and the changing architecture of the grid.
• AI Energy Use Is a Real Problem. But It Is Not the Whole Question — AI energy use placed inside the wider problem of power grids, incentives, and competing claims on infrastructure.
• Re-Greening the Edge: What China’s Green Belt Gets Right—and Where It Stops — China’s green belt efforts as practical environmental engineering with real achievements and clear limits.
• The AMOC Question: From Distant Risk to Plausible Concern — The Atlantic circulation risk as a case study in how distant climate threats become politically and practically harder to ignore.
• Was Europe’s Retreat From Nuclear Power a Strategic Mistake? — Europe’s nuclear retreat viewed through energy security, decarbonization, and long-term strategic capacity.
• The Box — Marc Levinson: The Invisible Machine That Remade the World — A nonfiction review that also works as an essay about markets, labour, infrastructure, and hidden institutional change.
• What We Learned from Ukraine—and Why It May Not Matter — The war in Ukraine as a lesson in energy, industry, resilience, and the limits of learning from crisis.

Space and Engineering

Spaceflight, orbital infrastructure, launch systems, cybersecurity, engineering organizations, and the strategic consequences of turning space into ordinary infrastructure.

• No Hands on the Hardware: Why Satellite Cybersecurity Is Different — Cybersecurity for systems that cannot be physically reached, where trust, command architecture, resilience, and recovery become unusually unforgiving.
• Orbital Debt: Space Debris and the New Space Economy’s Cleanup Bill — Low Earth orbit as infrastructure—and space debris as the maintenance liability created by a rapidly expanding orbital economy.
• Renting the Sky: Europe’s Space Industry and the Risk of Orbital Dependence — European strategic autonomy viewed from orbit: launch, satellites, infrastructure, and the cost of depending on systems controlled elsewhere.
• Reentry by Eric Berger: When SpaceX Turned Rockets into Infrastructure — SpaceX after survival: reusable rockets, organizational pressure, and the transition from spectacular launches to dependable infrastructure.
• Liftoff by Eric Berger: How SpaceX Survived the Falcon 1 Years — The fragile engineering and organizational path through SpaceX’s early Falcon 1 failures and near-collapse.
• The Wrong Stuff Review: Brilliance, Secrecy, and the Soviet Space Race — The Soviet space programme viewed through technical ambition, secrecy, institutional pressure, and costly failure.

Economics, Markets, and Innovation

Essays about risk, capital, taxation, innovation, finance, and the legal or institutional machinery that makes experimentation possible—or pushes its costs elsewhere.

• Limited Liability and the Invention of Survivable Failure — Limited liability as one of capitalism’s quiet enabling technologies: a legal boundary that makes ambitious failure survivable while deciding who absorbs the loss.
• Who Really Pays Taxes? The Myth of Someone Else Paying — Tax incidence, public goods, and the political habit of pretending that costs can be imposed without eventually landing somewhere in the system.
• Climate Finance and Development: The Bargain That Might Actually Work — A climate bargain built around making clean growth more attractive than fossil growth for developing economies.
• Why Developing Economies Are Not Short of Risk-Takers — A challenge to cultural explanations of underdevelopment: entrepreneurship exists, but institutions determine which risks are rewarded and which become traps.
• Who Pays for Failure? The Hidden Role of Venture Capital — Risk capital as a mechanism for funding experiments most institutions could not survive.
• The Low-Hanging Fruit Theory of Innovation Is Only Half Right — A critique of simple stagnation stories and the idea that progress merely slows once the easy gains are gone.
• From Liar’s Poker to the Financial Crisis: How Wall Street’s Culture Created Modern Risk — Wall Street culture, incentives, and the institutional prehistory of modern financial risk.
• The Box — Marc Levinson: The Invisible Machine That Remade the World — A nonfiction review that also works as an essay about markets, labour, infrastructure, and hidden institutional change.

Institutions, Democracy, and Development

Essays about democratic machinery, incentives, regulation, state capacity, development, institutional drift, coordination failure, and the ways systems can remain stable while producing poor outcomes.

• The Machinery of Democracy: How Election Systems Decide Before Voters Do — Electoral systems as political machinery that shapes what votes can become before any individual ballot is counted.
• Democracy’s Signal Problem: Lobbying, Outrage, and False Responsiveness — How lobbying, social media, organized intensity, and public outrage can distort the signals democratic institutions think they are responding to.
• Who Really Pays Taxes? The Myth of Someone Else Paying — Tax incidence, public goods, and the political habit of pretending that costs can be imposed without eventually landing somewhere in the system.
• Climate Finance and Development: The Bargain That Might Actually Work — A climate bargain built around making clean growth more attractive than fossil growth for developing economies.
• Why Developing Economies Are Not Short of Risk-Takers — A challenge to cultural explanations of underdevelopment: entrepreneurship exists, but institutions determine which risks are rewarded and which become traps.
• Corruption Is Not the Disease: Development, Incentives, and Weak Institutions — Why corruption is often a symptom of weak institutions and incentives rather than a sufficient explanation for failed development.
• After The Myth of the Rational Voter: Can Democracy Be Made Less Blind? — What institutional design, information systems, and AI might do if voter incentives themselves are part of democracy’s problem.
• The Myth of the Rational Voter Review: When Democracy Gets What It Wants — Bryan Caplan’s argument that democratic failure may come not from ignoring voters, but from responding to systematically biased preferences.
• The Cost of Unused Data: GDPR, AI, and Europe’s Privacy Bargain — The benefits of strong privacy rules weighed against the economic and technological cost of making valuable data harder to use.
• The Bloody White Baron Review: Roman von Ungern-Sternberg and the Violence of Collapse — Imperial collapse, civil war, and the strange career of Roman von Ungern-Sternberg as a window into what happens when institutions disintegrate.
• Europe’s Slow Emergency: Can the EU Still Build the Future? — Europe’s competitiveness problem as a slow erosion of industrial capacity, energy strength, technological autonomy, and the ability to build.
• Stable, but Stuck: When Nash Equilibria Fail Us — Why stable systems can still be bad systems, and why rational actors may not be able to escape them.
• Inadequate Equilibria — When Smart Systems Stay Stupid — A systems essay on competence, coordination failure, and broken institutions that keep reproducing themselves.
• On Bullshit — What It Is (and What It Isn’t) — Truth, indifference, and why bullshit is not simply another word for lying.

Science, Mind, and Identity

Essays and nonfiction reviews about consciousness, personal identity, evolution, medicine, cosmology, quantum mechanics, rationality, and the limits of what scientific explanation can make intuitive.

• Why Do Deserts Have Sand? What Dunes Actually Require — A physical-systems explanation of deserts and dunes that separates dryness from the geological processes needed to create and move sand.
• The Future Does Not Move at One Speed: A Review of Martin Rees’s On the Future — A future-facing review about uneven technological change, demography, risk, and why progress does not arrive everywhere at the same pace.
• The Tangled Tree Review: Evolution Was Never Just a Tree — Horizontal gene transfer and modern evolutionary biology complicate the familiar branching-tree picture of life.
• The Song of the Cell Review: Medicine at the Edge of Understanding — Cell biology as both explanatory framework and frontier: modern medicine can manipulate cells with extraordinary precision while still understanding them incompletely.
• How to Invent Everything by Ryan North: Civilisation as Shared Knowledge — Civilisation reconstructed as accumulated, transferable knowledge rather than a catalogue of isolated inventions.
• Copies of Ourselves: Cloning, Identity, and the Problem of Being You — Cloning and copying as a way to test what we think a self actually is.
• Teleportation, Death, and the Illusion of Continuity — Teleportation as a philosophical trap: survival, death, continuity, and the comfort of narrative identity.
• What Is It Like to Be a Bat? – Thomas Nagel — Subjective experience, consciousness, and the problem of explaining a mind from the outside.
• Something Deeply Hidden — Quantum Mechanics, Many Worlds, and the Limits of Understanding — Many-worlds quantum mechanics and the tension between mathematical explanation and human intuition.
• From Wonder to Uncertainty – A Reading Journey Through Cosmology — Cosmology as a movement from awe to uncertainty, and from simple wonder to stranger questions.
• River Out of Eden — A Compact Map of a Much Larger Territory — Evolution, genes, explanation, and the compressed power of Dawkins’s short nonfiction book.
• The Icepick Surgeon – Sam Kean — Science, ambition, ethics, and the darker history of discovery.
• The Age-Proof Brain – What We’ve Learned About the Brain (and What I’m Taking From It) — Brain health, ageing, and which practical lessons seem worth keeping.
• Rationality – Steven Pinker and the Trouble with Being Human — Reason, bias, institutions, and the difficulty of being rational in everyday life.
• A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy — A Usable Philosophy, Not a Perfect One — Stoicism treated as a practical toolkit rather than a complete answer to modern life.

Fantasy, Power, and Institutions

Fantasy and science fiction as laboratories for politics, hierarchy, legitimacy, empire, military power, social codes, bureaucracy, and the institutions that make imagined worlds function.

• Why Fantasy Understands Armies Better Than Navies — Why land warfare maps naturally onto fantasy’s geography and heroic conventions while naval power demands a different kind of strategic imagination.
• Why Fantasy Has Pirates but So Few Navies — Pirates make the sea personal and romantic; navies make it institutional, logistical, and political—and fantasy strongly prefers the former.
• The Bureaucracy Is the Monster: Kafka, Fantasy, and Science Fiction — Bureaucracy as an antagonist without a face: systems that frustrate, constrain, and reproduce harm without needing a single villain.
• The Politics of Impossible Worlds: Political Systems in Fantasy and Science Fiction — Imagined governments as worldbuilding machines: political systems that solve one problem by creating another, and only make sense because their worlds are built around them.
• Insectoid Armour in Fantasy: Why Empires Wear Shells — The visual language of insect-like armour, dehumanization, hierarchy, and the way fantasy makes empire look alien before it explains why.
• Gods and Empires in Fantasy: When the Enemy Defines Reality — Why an enemy embedded in institutions, cosmology, or social order can be more formidable than a villain who merely occupies a throne.
• Honor Systems in Fantasy: Why Codes Matter More Than Virtue — Honor codes as institutions: mechanisms that coordinate behaviour, status, obligation, and violence rather than simple markers of personal goodness.
• From Scarcity to Prophecy: Fremen, Aiel, and the Desert Warrior Myth — How Dune and The Wheel of Time turn scarcity, ecology, discipline, and prophecy into versions of the recurring desert-warrior archetype.
• Minds That See Too Much: Intelligence, Power, and Its Limits in Speculative Fiction — Superintelligence, prophecy, analysis, and the narrative burden of characters who see more than everyone else.
• From Chosen Ones to Self-Made Heroes: What Fantasy Stopped Believing In — A genre essay on destiny, agency, merit, and the changing shape of heroic legitimacy.
• The Power of Manners in Fantasy and Science Fiction — Manners as social technology: etiquette, hierarchy, danger, and power made visible through behaviour.
• Rome and the Illusion of Empire — Rome as historical memory, fantasy template, and recurring dream of order and decline.
• Sisterhoods of Power: How Female Orders Shape History in Fantasy and Sci-Fi — Aes Sedai, Bene Gesserit, and other female orders as institutional power rather than decorative worldbuilding.

Fantasy, Myth, and Story Logic

Essays about prophecy, death, monsters, immortality, symbols, narrative rules, collective minds, dangerous knowledge, and the devices speculative fiction uses to turn abstractions into stories.

• Why Doesn’t the Villain Just Kill the Hero? — Plot armour, villain logic, and the narrative devices stories use when the antagonist has already won but the protagonist still has to survive.
• Why Hive Minds Have Queens: The Face Stories Give the Swarm — Why fiction repeatedly gives collective intelligences a queen or central face, turning an alien system into something a conventional story can confront.
• Hive Minds in Science Fiction and Fantasy: When “We” Becomes Too Strong — Collective intelligence as a challenge to the bounded individual—and to stories built around singular agency, identity, and responsibility.
• Ravens in Fantasy: Thought, Memory, Death, and Old Power — Why ravens so often become messengers, omens, spies, familiars, and symbols of memory or ancient authority.
• Immortality in Fantasy and Science Fiction: Grief, Power, and the Fear of Ending — Immortality as a change in scale rather than simply a longer lifespan: grief, memory, power, boredom, and the fear of finality.
• Gods in Disguise in Fantasy: The God Must Be Smaller Than the Story — Why fantasy repeatedly hides divine power inside beggars, wanderers, fools, prisoners, and other apparently minor figures.
• Replicators in Science Fiction and Fantasy: The Monster Is the Multiplication Rule — Why self-replicating threats become frightening not because one creature is powerful, but because the arithmetic of reproduction defeats ordinary containment.
• Doors in Fantasy: The Door Is Never Just a Way Through — Doors as compact fantasy machinery: thresholds that encode secrecy, transformation, exclusion, danger, and the promise of another world.
• Forbidden Knowledge in Fantasy: When Truth Becomes Dangerous — Stories in which information itself becomes hazardous: knowledge as temptation, weapon, contamination, or power that cannot safely be forgotten.
• Talking Skulls in Fantasy: Why Death Gets the Best Lines — Talking skulls, ghosts, and articulate dead as a recurring way for fantasy to make mortality comic, unsettling, useful, and impossible to ignore.
• The Rules of Time Travel: Fixed Loops, Branching Worlds, and the Cost of Change — A taxonomy of time-travel logic: fixed histories, mutable timelines, branching worlds, causality, and the narrative costs attached to each model.
• From Merlin to Hari Seldon: Prophecy Across Fantasy and Science Fiction — Prophecy as magic, mathematics, narrative control, and a way of turning the future into structure.
• At the Edge of Death — Fantasy’s Most Dangerous Boundary — Death as the boundary fantasy keeps testing, crossing, bargaining with, and mythologizing.
• Why Humans Are Drawn to Revenge Stories — Revenge as narrative engine, moral fantasy, and emotional structure.
• When the Mask Becomes the Self: Identity and Impersonation in Fiction — Masks, roles, disguises, and the point at which performance becomes identity.
• Beyond “Lesbian Necromancers in Space”: How Necromancy Evolved in Modern Fantasy — Necromancy as more than shock value: death magic, power, theology, and modern fantasy’s changing imagination.

Urban Fantasy and Genre Evolution

Essays and reread posts about hidden worlds, monsters, religion, crime structure, technology, and the ways urban fantasy changed as the genre matured.

• Urban Fantasy and Theodicy: When Holy Power Actually Works — What urban fantasy does with the problem of evil when God, faith, or holy power can leave observable effects in the world.
• Urban Fantasy Reread: Anita Blake, Dresden Files, Mercy Thompson, and October Daye — A gateway post for the wider urban fantasy reread project.
• Urban Fantasy in the Age of Smartphones - How the Genre Hides Its Monsters (or Stops Trying) — What phones, cameras, search, and surveillance do to the premise of a hidden supernatural world.
• When Urban Fantasy Was About Monsters — and When It Became About Something Else — A genre-history essay on monsters, danger, intimacy, and the changing centre of urban fantasy.
• Revisiting Anita Blake – Urban Fantasy’s Early Pulse and Why the Magic Faded — Anita Blake as an early urban fantasy signal, and why its original charge changed over time.
• Urban Fantasy, Wicca, and Crime Fiction: A First Look at Harm None — Witchcraft, investigation, and the overlap between crime fiction and early urban fantasy.
• Blood Bound by Patricia Briggs: Vampires, Violence, and the Problem of Evil in Urban Fantasy — Mercy Thompson, vampires, holy power, and the theological pressure inside urban fantasy.

Adaptation, Screens, and Games as Systems

Essays and analytical reviews about adaptation, film, television, games, and what changes when stories move between books, screens, rules, and interactive systems.

• Vidocq, Brotherhood of the Wolf, and the Lost Future of French Genre Cinema — A look back at an early-2000s strand of ambitious French genre filmmaking—and the cinematic future it briefly seemed to promise.
• Lockwood & Co. Netflix Review: The Ghost Story That Grew Up on Screen — An adaptation that keeps the adventure structure of Jonathan Stroud’s books while making its haunted London feel older, darker, and more adult on screen.
• Brotato Review: How Much Game Can You Fit Inside a Potato? — A compact roguelite that turns a deliberately silly premise into an argument for build variety, readable systems, and dense mechanical design.
• Cultist Simulator Review: The Frustrating Genius of Weather Factory’s Occult Card Game — An occult card game whose opacity, repetition, and discovery mechanics are inseparable from both its frustration and its strange appeal.
• Spider-Noir Review: When Superpowers Still Looked Impossible — A superhero review shaped by period setting: what changes when extraordinary powers appear before the modern technological world has learned to look equally impossible.
• Baldur’s Gate at HBO: Adapting a Story Built on Choice — The problem of turning a role-playing story built around player agency, divergent companions, and choice into a fixed television narrative.
• Why Red Rising Is Almost Impossible to Adapt (And How It Could Work) — The structural difficulty of adapting Red Rising: violence, scale, interiority, and spectacle.
• The Wheel of Time and the Architecture of “Awesome” — A screen-focused essay on fantasy spectacle, adaptation, and the problem of making wonder feel earned.
• Rereading The Wheel of Time Alongside the TV Adaptation — A reread shaped by adaptation: what changes, what survives, and what television cannot easily carry over.
• Brandon Sanderson, the Cosmere, and the Perils of Screen Adaptation — Why the Cosmere is attractive to adapt, and why its strengths may also become obstacles on screen.
• Dark – Time Travel Done the Hard Way — A television essay on recursion, consequence, and time travel that refuses to make itself easy.
• Actual Play Podcasts — Actual play as a hybrid of game, performance, improvisation, and serialized storytelling.
• Darkest Dungeon – Stress, Madness, and the Cost of Survival — Game systems as moral pressure: attrition, fear, and survival as design rather than decoration.
• Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri – Still the High Point of 4X — A strategy game remembered for ideology, atmosphere, faction identity, and worldbuilding through systems.

Reading, Books, and Culture

Personal and meta essays about reading, publishing, literary memory, children’s books, fandom, authorship, and the habits through which books become part of a culture.

• The Manuscript Was “Genius.” Then Suspected AI Use Made It Unpublishable — A publishing controversy as a test of authorship, artistic value, provenance, and how much the human process matters to the finished work.
• Dan Simmons (1948–2026): Remembering the Author of Hyperion — A remembrance of Dan Simmons and the place Hyperion occupies in modern science-fiction reading culture.
• Reading in 2025: A Year of Cyberwar, Consciousness, and Familiar Comforts — A year-in-reading essay about cyberwar, consciousness, familiar worlds, and the patterns that emerged across the year.
• Rediscovering Hard Science Fiction – and Why “Fantasy in Space” Doesn’t Quite Scratch the Same Itch — A reading-life essay on why hard science fiction offers a different pleasure from fantasy dressed in space imagery.
• Returning to Old Universes: On Reading Eisenhorn — Returning to a familiar fictional universe and discovering what has changed in the reader as much as the work.
• Five Nights at Freddy’s 2, Screens, and the Fear That Kids Don’t Read — A reading-life essay about children, screen culture, franchise storytelling, and the recurring adult fear that new media are displacing books.
• Books That Define Us — A short reflection on formative books, taste, memory, and the works that become part of a reader’s self-image.
• Reading for the Kids — Children’s reading as shared culture, family practice, and a reminder that books also live through recommendation.
• A Very Late Worldcon Report — Convention memory, fandom, genre culture, and the belated record of a literary gathering.