Thoughts, articles, and published work.
May 29, 2021
People underestimate the importance of stories, but I think that stories are the fabric of our minds. Stories are how stars become constellations, and how flesh becomes character. They’re the…
May 26, 2021
I want to tell you about The OA. You might not understand why I’d take the time to tell you about a TV show while reality itself seems to be falling apart, children are getting murdered in their…
February 19, 2021
Watching the finale episode of Season One of For All Mankind, and it really is a well-written show. Two particular moments stand out so far, and for almost opposite reasons - [SPOILERS] In the first,…
January 22, 2020
1917 is a damn good movie. By focusing on a microcosm, a tiny slice of story within what was otherwise a ‘world’ war, it creates incredible cinema. The cinematography by Roger Deakins is fantastic.…
February 25, 2019
In 2002, when a fire erupted at a girl's school in Mecca, members of the 'Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice,' otherwise known in Saudi Arabia as the ' mutawiyin'…
February 13, 2019
I Saw Vice yesterday. It's an absolutely great movie. Well written, very well directed, great performances all around. It's rare to see a movie tackle such a serious subject with such so much humor…
December 26, 2018
Aquaman is terrible. The jokes don’t land. The close-ups and metal riffing on the little quips are so pathetic they’re laughable. The heroic arc is completely lacking, with everybody telling us how…
November 28, 2018
I like some of Tom King’s work, and some of his earlier Batman stories were really good (I’m ignoring the Batman Wedding debacle), but Heroes in Crisis should have been nipped in the bud by the…
November 26, 2018
Excited about the new Lion King? In case you forgot, this was the story: A brain-dead cub listens to his lying uncle and gets his father killed. He cowardly abandons his now-widowed mother, is…
October 24, 2018
I'm really tired of all the various editions that get published to fleece comic book readers, and that try to make a buck off prospective 'collectors.' Look at this one, for example - the issue for…
January 10, 2018
Things I've learned from reading comics: Time Travel is messy, the good guys always win, sometimes the good guys lose, sometimes winning isn't quite winning, you can be good and poor, you can be good…
October 25, 2017
You’re impatient. All you have to do is wait. Everything takes time. Give the man a chance. This has been the chorus, and it arose within months after El Sisi came to office. It’s still there, spoken…
August 6, 2017
When compared to some great classic war movies, Dunkirk is both mediocre and unnecessary. Nolan, it seems, can’t forget that Memento is what initially made him, and uses a time-shifting device that…
July 14, 2017
Saw "War For The Planet of The Apes" yesterday and it was very, very good. I was worried that it would be an all-out 'war' movie with big action set-pieces, but despite that it has a bit of that, it…
November 30, 2016
People often think of current cultural time as divided between 'pre-internet' and 'post-internet', and they generally attribute all the modern online insanity to the latter. However, in doing so,…
November 18, 2016
It's the height of intellectual laziness to accuse any man who has anything to say about women or gender relations of 'mansplaining'. It's not clever. It betrays a complete inability to actually…
November 15, 2015
It seems like an obviously bad idea to bash anybody anywhere for sympathizing with victims of a crime. Having said that, it's also a bad idea to ignore why some people are taking offense, not to the…
July 2, 2015
Too often, we react to other people's posts on social media as though they represent the final conclusions, thoughts, and emotions of those posting. More often than not, they are nothing but their…
January 9, 2015
The notion that Charlie Hebdo is a purely satirical magazine that attacks everybody and cannot, therefore, be considered racist seems to generally be espoused by well-meaning but uninformed people.…
January 7, 2015
Americans, like citizens from other countries that have ‘absolute’ freedom of speech, do not quite understand that in France, things aren’t quite the same way. For example, in France, Roger Garaudy,…
November 4, 2014
There are certain things people need to realize first to sense the necessity of change and, in some cases, the urgency. Let’s start with a basic social truth – there is no ‘bottom.’ Your society,…
October 27, 2014
As an Egyptian in Egypt these days, you get used to absurdity. It starts when you wake up and look at the news and then frustrates you during the day as you see it resonate with some of the people…
October 26, 2014
This is the only Egypt your actions have allowed, one in which innocents are sentenced for standing up for their own rights or the rights of others. It is the same Egypt, in which you support a…
September 26, 2014
They are taken with the woman in her pilot costume, they see her wearing her helmet, in their heads, they consider her as part of an ‘oppressed’ group, which is to say, Arab women, and they imagine…
August 15, 2014
This is a letter Philip K. Dick wrote in response to Israel’s bombing of the Osirak reactor in Iraq in 1981. It’s worth reading these days because, as with his science fiction, PKD remains…
February 1, 2014
Obligatory recap It’s difficult to know how far back to go – but let’s just say this; it’s January 2014, the Post-Morsi constitution has passed, with a (ridiculously) high approval but a relatively…