The diverse, ragtag group of urban kids comprising a chess club at public school Q722 in New York are three decades too young to have any memories of the Cold War and the Collapse of the Soviet Union. However, for the narrator of PUSHING PAWNS — gifted 14-year-old Moses Middleton…
I remember seeing What’s Cooking in the cinema on its release in December, 2000. It is now nostalgic. Shot in the waning days of the Clinton Administration, the movie takes place in an America before September 11; before George W. Bush, the War in Afghanistan, Donald Trump or January 6.
…
This past Friday, the Jury in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial reached a reasonable verdict based on Wisconsin law.
Wisconsin — like many other states — has permissive laws governing the carry and use of firearms after years of gun lobby influence. …
If spoilers are important to you, read this after you’ve seen the film.
I’m not the most woke person on the planet. I’m intersectional only at my leisure, and not one to examine every jot and tittle through a prism of race, gender, or sexual orientation.
I am a few…
In 2018, I wrote two short YA pulp stories for a now-defunct publisher. I also wrote about some lessons I learned writing pulp.
Pulp is quick-written ephemera. It’s designed to sell well at the front-end, then never again. It’s entertaining, then forgotten. I succeeded by these metrics.
Three years later…
On January 6, a group of angry Donald Trump supporters who had rallied in Washington, D.C. stormed the United States Capitol to disrupt the certification of Joe Biden as President of the United States. This happened against a complex backdrop.
First, President Trump, who lost a free and fair election…
I once wrote a piece on Medium about how Chinua Achebe took offense to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (How Conrad and Achebe Battled over Africa). Achebe felt Conrad’s story frames colonialism as a white man’s struggle and reduces Africans to props. …
I discovered Natalie Wynn through WNYC’s On the Media podcast in an episode titled “Making Sense of Cancel Culture.” Wynn, who is a trans woman, hosts the website/YouTube vlog Contrapoints. …
Jill Criswell is a writer from Northern Florida. She took an MFA in creative writing from UCF, and, like me, she travels the globe. We haven’t met, but I think we’d be friends. Like her, I think world travel creates a perspective shift worthy of discussion. …
Jessica Krug isn’t black. That was the big news yesterday, because the George Washington University professor was pretending to be black — and Latino — as she wrote, taught, and profited on her minstrelsy.
My mother, a pastor and counselor, once said, “when people have affairs, they should never confess…
World traveler & foreign affairs enthusiast. GenX. Lawful neutral. I write gags and titles . Smoke if you got ’em. www.ctliotta.com
