An English professor recently explained to me a bit of the history of the short story. Apparently, the genre first surfaced in the United States, where publishers wanted to print cheap, disposable entertainment for the literate public, rather than binding everything into books. Novels reeked of Old England; short stories were suited to the quick, [...]

Here they are:

Visual communication is an extremely powerful tool, and always has been. “A picture is worth a thousand words.” How many times have you had a hard time describing something that could have easily been communicated with a good picture?
Our culture is one of the most visually-oriented ever. With photographs, TV, and computers, people [...]

Sitting at the computer, I listened to my five-year-old brother’s conversation with my mother. He had just told her that God uses magic, and she was correcting Him. “No,” she said, “God hates magic.”
“But he created the whole world,” Michael objected
“That’s not magic,” she replied. “That’s creation.”
He thought for a moment. “It’s magic and creation.”
The [...]

“Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
~The Party slogan in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four
Orwell is talking about knowledge of history. Knowing humanity’s past helps us to know humanity itself, and our perception of who we are shapes who we try to be in the future. People with complete [...]