The holidays happen at the wrong time of the year. From Thanksgiving, the busiest travel holiday in the U.S, to New Year’s week, there is an excess of travelers. We all try to make it through the airports in a lump, like a big mouse in a small snake, and the airports have trouble digesting [...]
I remember feeling trapped at grandma’s house, 13-year-old Casey, trying to figure out how to play Uno by myself. Columbus Nebraska has never been a playground for the rich and famous, but when I was 6 it was great fun. I remember my pre-puberty self digging through dusty crates of old toys, finding my fathers [...]
Experience cuts both ways. People often say they travel to “try something new” or “break out of a routine.” Novel and different things excite us. Dr. David Eagleman said in an article in Current Opinion in NeuroBiology “perceived durations can be distorted by… an oddball in a sequence,” put simply, doing something different can change [...]
Born in Alabama but currently living in Kansas City, Jason Aaron is the comic book writer, co-creator behind the gritty crime thriller Scalped. Earlier this year, he announced that Scalped (which has already run four years) would end its story and its run at issue #60. During its run of over four years, this story [...]
The chapter titles and dialogue in “Soon I Will be Invincible” hit all the oldest and most beloved superhero clichés: “I will get you next time” or “We meet again.” Austin Grossman knows and loves the comic book world. He runs through its tropes, plot contrivances and double-crosses with all the majesty of a caped [...]
Marjane Satrapi is best known for her autobiographical graphic novel work, “Persepolis,” which was later made into a film. Her latest project, “The Sigh,” goes in a new direction: Rather than stories from Satrapi’s life, “The Sigh” is a fairy tale about a woman in a fantastical world who’s trying to save her lost love. It’s told [...]
Steven Levitt, coauthor of “Freakonomics” has a theory on how to be happy. He suggests a person should try to do things other people don’t want to do. He asserts that success is harder to attain in a crowded field than in an open one. You might not get a chance to be the best [...]
Generally, Murakami is easy to read. That doesn’t mean the works careen through a jumble of cliffhangers rushing toward an unearned payoff. His characters are soulful thinking people* who consider the world around them. But they don’t spend an entire book sitting around considering. That’s what makes the books easy to read, they move. They [...]
Technology advances faster and faster. Devices, gadgets and lifestyles keep getting shorter and shorter lifespans as progress speeds up. Phones make way for smart phones, CDs are pushed aside for mp3s, pagers which reached there peak usage in 1990 are a total anachronism. But, some times the right tool for the job is not the [...]
Australian author Max Barry recently published the science fiction thriller/dark comedy “Machine Man.” The novel is the second incarnation of a story he originally published online as a serial, one page at a time. Rather than a reprint of the online content, the novel “Machine Man,” is a distillation of Barry’s original idea: a future in which [...]
