Drive down a fairly benign, suburban road in southeast Houston, Texas, and you’ll pass the parking lot that once housed the BEST Products showroom known as Indeterminate Facade. Located at 10765 Kingspoint Road, the still-hanging-in-there Almeda Mall is nearby, along with a shuttered public library building…
By K.E. Roberts
As slasher franchises go, A Nightmare on Elm Street is certainly the most interesting conceptually: a former child murderer burned to death by the town’s vengeful parents returns years later to haunt and punish the community’s teenage children—by stalking their dreams…
In his series of “Peter Ward” novels, published by various paperback houses (Signet, Dell, and Fawcett) between 1965 and 1971, Hunt conjures an agent with a pedigree strikingly similar to his own: Ivy League-educated (at Brown), possessing both a mysterious past involving disastrous CIA ops gone wrong and a burning desire to see himself accepted by the clandestine Washington D.C. power structure…
By Tom G. Wolf
Serial killers exert a peculiar hold over many among the general public. Their crimes are appalling, yet fascinating; their motives are frequently incomprehensible, sometimes even to the killers themselves. Yet people still find themselves drawn back again and again to these seemingly complex characters and the gruesome nature of their crimes…
In the early 1980s, French philosopher, media theorist, and cultural scholar Jean Baudrillard visited the United States several times, taking in the vastness of the continent-spanning nation, from Manhattan to Manhattan Beach. In 1986, his account of these trips, America, was published in France. Two years later, the book came to the US in a translated edition. In the work, Baudrillard ruminates upon Mormons and breakdancers, fitness nuts and canned laughter on television, on all of the sources of beauty and horror of American culture and society in the 1980s…
By Ben Schwartz
Ultra-prolific board game designer Sid Sackson made his first game when he was six years old; he militarized Uncle Wiggily, a 1916 children’s game based on a series of children’s books. In it, players race from the titular rheumatic-yet-cheerful rabbit’s house to Dr. Possum’s office, for reasons not elaborated upon in any rulebook I can find. It’s cute, in a turn-of-the-century, butterscotchy kind of way—calming, quaint, woefully unbalanced, and entirely luck-based…
By Tom G. Wolf
Few Lego themes have infiltrated the wider public’s consciousness in the same way as Space. A mainstay of the company’s range since the 1970s, Space has captured the imagination of millions of children across multiple generations and made numerous appearances throughout pop culture. Most notable in recent years is the character Benny from The Lego Movie…
Dolphins, of course, were not the only cetaceans that were of concern to environmentalists in the ’70s and ’80s. Whales, the victims of a mass, human-engineered extinction since the Age of Sail, were also being studied, the intelligence in their massive brains quantified…
From the 1960s on, we saw a kaleidoscope of depictions of dolphins and whales in novels, films, and television as wise, immanent intelligences: co-existing on a planet with the rapacious homo sapiens, yet somehow more worldly and wise than the “superior” species…
By Daniel Cecil
Once people believe something, they want to keep believing it, even if they are presented with incontrovertible evidence that their belief is incorrect. In fact, being confronted with contradictory evidence can make them want to express their questionable belief with even more conviction. In our current perpetually appalling discourse…
