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The hold requests at a library can be a hell of a thing, sometimes, the books requested by patrons at other libraries in our system. Often it isn’t the actual requests that are weird, rather the...

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I’ve spent my entire life obsessed with trying to figure out where stories come from, how they work, how we can make new ones and better ones. When I was little, I wanted folks to think I was sm...

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To say all war is about power is nakedly self-evident, of course. It’s all about power. Every flesh rendered into a chunky salsa, every hospital set on fire, every city incinerated with its popu...

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Wading through a media landscape rigged to convince us caring about others is for chumps, that empathy is just an obstacle to buying more rape yachts, that each person who doesn’t agree with you...

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Maybe we need to re-evaluate what stories are worth telling, need telling? Deserve telling. The classics make six million not having enough to eat a background statistic, but one wealthy man los...

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“The Jungle” was to be Upton Sinclair’s masterwork. He spent six weeks working undercover in the deep muck and horrors of early twentieth-century Chicago meat-packing plants to research it. Aw...

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The princess was no idiot. She understood a woman in her position was not going to be marrying for love. Royals married for power, for political alliance, for expedience. Her parents were bound ...

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He did his best thinking while stitching up his employer’s wounds, which he did far more often than most house staff do, but that tends to happen when the employer tends to run about beating dow...

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I was born with an odd number of wisdom teeth, literally-and-figuratively odd. Three. I’ve been told that’s rather rare, that most people are born with two or four wisdom teeth, sometimes none a...

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Magic didn’t just simply come into the world, it ran rampant. The discovery or rediscovery of it, not as a subtle occult force that could be mistaken for coincidence or confidence tricks, not as...

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They called him Powerless Steve. They all did. It didn’t matter if his full legal name was Stephen Baker, someone at that college once called him that once and that nickname just kinda stuck. Th...

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Mental illness isn’t funny. It’d be cruel to say it is. But it’d also be a lie to say its manifestations, if taken out-of-context, aren’t sometimes as hilarious as they are in-context tragic and...

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The ships were gone, finally gone, having escaped the surly bonds of Earth’s atmosphere and off toward the one theoretically-livable planet within the Proxima Centauri system. Once their stellar...

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All their drug ultimately did was cut people off from experiencing their dreams. Living them out or remembering them. It couldn’t prevent dreams entirely, of course. Dreams are the mind trying t...

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“The problem with getting old,” she told the boy, “is it’s the only way to really know anything.” Which sounds deep and timeless in a cliched fashion, until you have the context that the woman ...

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There’ve been thousands of plagues in recorded human history. Tens of thousands we can never know about because there wasn’t writing yet, or their texts couldn’t survive the ravages of ages, or ...

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When the writing’s on the wall, the writing’s on the wall. The first time I saw a website with an advertisement in a paper magazine, I knew that industry was on its slow crawl out. That’s when y...

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As the dutiful oldest daughter of an impoverished family, Maria took up the burden of helping with finances, by sneaking across the border to work on the farms of California, sending back everyt...

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There, on his death-bed, surrounded by his closest followers and assistants, the bishop looked out his window into the starry night-sky and wondered how much longer he’d have there, wondered if ...

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The Hedonic Treadmill is real. The more empty-pleasures you chase, the more empty-pleasures you’re gonna need and the more it’s going to hurt when you can’t get another even larger empty pleasur...

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You could’ve cut the tension in their council chambers with a knife. Not some ordinary knife. A cold iron blade, a sword with a silvered edge, a weapon otherwise blessed or cursed to exploit a n...

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The good news was they had finally, in earnest, begun to wrestle with the scientific challenges of breaking our reliance on fossil fuel, for once and for all. Better news yet was that they did i...

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Objectivity’s a comforting and convenient lie. There’s no such thing, of course? Everything we do or see is shaped by the context of the moment and the perspectives of the participants, but it f...

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You were born with a little lump of coal inside your chest, so was I. So was everyone. You know, metaphorically? But it doesn’t stay that way. What life does to you and what you’ve chosen to do ...

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There are almost always two of me inside my head. I don’t mean that in a Jekyll-and-Hyde way or a split-personality way or even in a multiverse kind of a way, it’s far more mundane than any of t...

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