Thought experiments are tools. Some thought experiments are like power saws with no blade guards: you can see what someone wanted to do with them, but they’re still a terrible idea and likely to get blood everywhere. Science fiction has a history of loving thought experiments not wisely but too well. A “hard choices” narrative […]
Do you ever have that moment where you look in the mirror, and you really see yourself? Not just the outfit that you wear, or the makeup you just did, or the new haircut that you got—but the person who you’ve become while you weren’t paying attention? While you were too busy working on your […]
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Catching a 25-year-old white whale Like a lot of gamers in the 90s, I could often be found in my dimly lit bedroom huddled in front of an SNES playing the latest Japanese Roleplaying Game (JRPG). Chrono Trigger. Final Fantasy VI. Secret of Mana. I played them all. Back then, games took months or years […]
The Good Place pilot aired in September 2016; two months later, any optimism about our nation’s advancement had to contend with the acknowledgement that our country, like so many of its predecessors and contemporaries, could experience a fall. Though I’d hoped that we had done enough to prevent Trump’s potential presidency, it was never an […]
The producers of The Good Place recently announced that the show will end after Season 4. While it’s excellent to know they will get a whole season to bring their story of death, the afterlife and moral philosophy to a proper conclusion, it’s also bittersweet to lose one of the all time great comedy ensembles. […]
I cannot remember a time before I loved Star Trek. I was two years old when The Next Generation premiered in 1987, young enough that the characters, world, and ideals of that show seem like innate knowledge. Eight years old when Deep Space Nine began, and those two shows raised me like a third parent, […]
I remember walking into the rainbow-colored coffeeshop down the street during the late summer of 2016 and finding my friend Sarah already there, hard at work on her new novel. I asked her how it was going, but somehow we ended up spending nearly an hour talking about how much we loved season one of […]
How to deal with the end of the world: first, recognize that everyone’s world is ending all the time. Then, take note: in fact, lambkins, we will live. All despite ourselves, we will live—and be irrevocably changed, as we have irrevocably changed the world. 1. All That Is Solid Melts Into Air Approximately two and […]
This is an extremely difficult thing to write and compile. Our dear friend Jennifer Adams Kelley passed away on February 26, 2019, after a brief battle with cancer. The Thomas family first met Jennifer nearly 20 years ago at a Doctor Who convention—the very first Chicago TARDIS, in fact. She was the very heart of […]