All who are born must face the Dragon — Young Helios traveled a straight line west. With his first step, he passed beyond the realm of the familiar, yet as he progressed, each town, each people, became more like the last. …

Happy Halloween and Season’s Readings! — One of my biggest pleasures on Medium has been publishing short fiction in the horror publication Keeping It Spooky. The publication has fiction, articles and poetry for fans who like anything that sends a shiver down the spine. My stories belong to a variety of subgenres, with reading times from…

One day, I was in a park reading when a Hispanic man in a state of joyous inebriation took an interest in me. After a few glances from where he lay on the grass, he staggered over and rambled amiably about how I was a “white monkey” and he was…

The apotheosis of Keanu Reeves began with The Matrix, but it may surprise some to learn that the actor didn’t suddenly pop into existence with that mega-blockbuster. He was one of those guys, like Johnny Depp, who seemed to show up in everything and whom you were always happy to…

In his book The Idea of History, philosopher and historian R.G. Collingwood sneers at scholars who assign “the most trivial causes for the vastest effects.” He makes an example of Cleopatra’s nose. Had it been differently proportioned, misguided historians would claim, Julius Caesar and Mark Antony wouldn’t have found the…

Iceland’s post-rock swooners release an album centuries in the making — Summer, 2000. Black Eyed Peas are known to only a few discerning hip-hop fans, Radiohead is months from bending minds with Kid A, Prankster is in trouble, and internet radio is a new thing. Much like traditional radio, it plays the same songs over and over, among them “Nookie” by…

Siegfried is a frustrating character. In some ways, he’s the hero we want: bursting with vitality, slaying a dragon, fearlessly crossing a ring of fire to awaken a sleeping maiden, and falling in love so tumescent it requires one of the lengthiest and most demanding of duets in all of…

Some songs are just cooler than others. “Come Together” by The Beatles, “Rhiannon” by Fleetwood Mac, “Bloodletting” by Concrete Blonde . . . These are concoctions that sit atop the seventh step of refinement ascending to the temple within which lies the essence of cool. Try as they might, philosophers…

In the view of science fiction author N.K. Jemisin and many others, the early 20th-Century horror writer H.P. Lovecraft was a terrible person. They say this because he was a racist, and indeed he was. We know this not because of a loose comment here or there or a woke…