Read Todd VanDerWerff On What Makes Ray Bradbury’s Science Fiction So Distinct And Wonderful
As part of his Nerd Curious series, in which he goes back and explores artifacts of culture he missed in his youth, my friend and the AV Club’s television editor Todd VanDerWerff took a deep dive into Ray Bradbury’s short stories and emerges with what I think is one of the best summaries of what makes Bradbury’s work distinct, the element of nostalgia and emotional irrationality in decision-making, even in science fiction where we’re supposed to be enhanced–or at least, where rationality is supposed to rule:
In The Martian Chronicles, as happens so often in Bradbury’s work, people don’t look at the destruction of their world and run as far as they can from the mushroom clouds or the astronauts bearing chicken pox. Instead, they run toward them, trying in vain to preserve something that’s already gone. The Earthlings who have settled Mars decide to go back to Earth after nuclear war erupts there. That seems a very curious decision—wouldn’t those who had escaped such destruction by virtue of being so very far away count themselves lucky?—until it is situated in the context of Bradbury’s bibliography. The characters are haunted by memories of a past they can’t ever shake. In that context, their actions make perfect sense. They aren’t driven by practical sense; they’re driven by emotional sense, until both worlds are mostly dead and barren, a handful of survivors of two species straggling out a life on the margins.
You should really read the whole thing, which has too many big ideas to get into here. But I thought that was lovely and astute.





In his writing here about the dearth of openly gay players on the active rosters of professional sports teams, Travis Waldron’s discussed a range of issues that have factored into the perception that athletics are a largely heterosexual pursuit. There’s the theory that the locker room is an unfriendly environment that’s been partially dispelled by straight allies like Chris Kluwe and Brendon Ayanbadejo. The persistent use of homophobic insults by fans suggests that the problem might be more in the stands than in players-only areas. And there’s the question of how being publicly out of the closet might affect a player’s negotiating power or sponsorship deals.

In an impressive expansion of the term “pornographic,” a Northville, Michigan woman, Gail Horalek asked that Anne Frank: The Diary Of A Young Girl (The Definitive Edition) be removed from the school’s curriculum because: “It’s pretty graphic, and it’s pretty pornographic for seventh-grade boys and girls to be reading. It’s inappropriate for a teacher to be giving this material out to the kids when its really the parents’ job to give the students this information.” The passages that she’s dubbed “pornographic” are actually more anatomical, given that they discuss Frank attempting to learn more about her own body, than they are “designed to arouse lust,” the conventional meaning of pornographic.
In my favorite new illustration of the persistent belief that, when it comes to gender, male experience is considered general and unbiased while female experience is particular and annotated, novelist Amanda Filipacchi browsed through Wikipedia and found out that someone has been recategorizing entries on female American fiction writers so that they’re weeded out of the “American Novelists” category and ghettoized off in an “American Women Novelists” category—the “American Man Novelists” contains rather fewer entries.
I was sorry to
Reading the opening scene of Flight Behavior, one could easily believe they’d somehow become immersed in a bad country western song — something like “Third Rate Romance, Low Rent Rendezvous.”
Reading comedian and actor Russell Brand’s 



In a (not surprisingly)
When I woke up to the news this morning that Chinua Achebe 



