Lessons from the aspiring writer’s degree of choice — In recent decades, a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree in Creative Writing has become a common prerequisite for pursuing a career as a novelist or poet. Responding in part to the lack of apprenticeships in the writing field, the MFA-style “writer’s workshop” concept originated at the University of Iowa…

The disenchantment of the movie-watching experience — Recall, for a minute, a night out at the movies in the late 20th century, maybe the early 21st. After you’d arrive at a cinema, you’d stand in a maze-like queue, where you’d be able to analyze the available films and times. When you finally reached the box office, you’d…

Dispatches from a Fulbright fellow in Nicosia — In September 2021, I started The Cyprus Files, a newsletter series chronicling my dispatches from the divided Mediterranean island of Cyprus, part of my program as a U.S. Fulbright fellow in the Republic of Cyprus. The Cyprus Files are meant to be part-diary and part-snippets, a way for me to…

Let’s be real: ‘Dune’ (2021) is as good as it gets for sci-fi blockbuster storytelling — Dune currently holds an 83% on Rotten Tomatoes. Standard critiques of the review aggregator aside, Denis Villeneuve’s 2021 adaptation of the classic 1965 sci-fi novel seems criminally underrated by barely clearing the “B minus” hurdle. That’s because I don’t think anyone can do better with the source material than what…

A conversation with literary scholar David Ting — I wanted to write about the Snyder Cut, but I realized I didn’t have the necessary level of DC Comics expertise. So I reached out to David Ting, a literary scholar and avid reader of DC Comics. We talked about how Zack Snyder’s Justice League (ZSJL) points to the wider…

In 1903, an American writer by the name of James Duff Law introduced a new word into the English lexicon: Usonia. His rationale for creating the term “Usonia” and its related demonym, “Usonian,” was to create an alternative to calling the US and its citizens “Americans.” …

‘The Best American Travel Writing 2019' and the schisms currently upending travel journalism — On Amazon, The Best American Travel Writing 2019 holds a 4.3-out-of-5-star-rating, its acclaim ever-so-slightly dragged down by a vocal minority of negative reviews. As this book ostensibly showcased the best travel writing on offer, I wondered about the root of such gripes. One particularly polemical two-star review stated:

The divergent trajectories of San Antonio and Austin — Everything is bigger in Texas. Except for the Alamo, that is. Perhaps it is telling the state’s most iconic landmark is smaller than you’d think. …

The cavalier storytelling attitude of Star Wars Episode IX — (Spoilers throughout, so be warned). Toward the beginning of Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker, a bunch of Resistance fighters learn that Emperor Palpatine survived falling into a bottomless pit three movies earlier. The camera pans around the group, and a rebel played by three-time hobbit Dominic Monaghan…