by Omar El Akkad The wreckage of a boat filled with Middle Eastern and African migrants washes up on a (presumably) Greek island, and Amir, a Syrian child, is the sole survivor. What Strange Paradise is told in chapters alternating between the events leading up to the incident––explaining what brought Amir and the others there––and…
Read more
by Michael LaPointe Whitney Chase is the culture writer for the New York publication The Bystander. She gets a taste for hard reporting in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and by a stroke of luck hits upon a story about a medical breakthrough with the potential to save millions of lives. But everything isn’t as…
Read more
by Kazuo Ishiguro Klara is an Artificial Friend, a robotic humanoid that thinks and feels, intended as a companion to a lucky child. Klara and the Sun follows her journey from the AF store into the home of Josie, the child who chose her. Though Josie has an illness that often tires her out, she…
Read more
The reviews I’m posting today were originally written in 2021 and published in The Walleye. I recently tried to search them in the back issues available online on their website, and I can’t find anything older than December 2025. As such, I decided I’d publish them on my website now, just so people can still…
Read more
I believe in democracy, but real democracy, not democracy as we see it even in its highest forms in the real world. The democracy that I believe in entails that the people themselves should be the actual deciders of how they’re governed, and that they have authority over their representatives to actually enforce their decisions….
Read more
There’s an age-old problem that people continually run into when trying to influence people and the world for the better: the dynamic between systems and character.i Poorly-designed political, social, educational, and economic systems will yield people of poor character, possessing questionable values, which will make it hard to accomplish good and needful things. As such,…
Read more
I periodically encounter the idea of the Social Contract being employed to justify something or other, some government policy or some informal opinion. However, when it’s employed in this way, such ideas strike me as commonly failing to do what the speaker intends largely due to the errors to the way they understand and attempt…
Read more
There appears to me to be a lot of confusion surrounding our concept of Rights, and much of this seems to me to have to do with a failure of understanding and communication, both individually and collectively. Because there seems to me to be a great deal of imprecision when people refer to Rights, with…
Read more
I wish I could remember where I first heard of Matthew Arnold. I recall encountering a long quotation from what is likely his most famous work, Culture and Anarchy,1 when reading another book and being drawn to it. (I thought it was quoted in Albert Camus’ The Rebel.2 However, I found from its re-read that…
Read more
I’m certainly no fan of AI art.i To most concisely capture my opinion on the matter, you can borrow the sentiment I’ve repeatedly seen circulating on social media, attributed to one Joanna Maciejewska: “I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do…
Read more