When you grow up in Miami, you’re going to run into Cuban food in elementary, middle, and high school. Classmates would bring Cuban bread and pastelitos for special occasions, especially if your group of seniors in high school was in charge of selling parking spaces for prom. As a mostly vegetarian that isn’t a fan of beef or pork, I would favor cheese and spinach empanadas bought from a university stand rather than the meatier versions.

Sometimes you need to see a perspective from another person’s eyes, to determine what you may have missed as a teen. While I took…

Mark Oshiro is one of the modern wordsmiths. He’s also very modest about his achievements, having built a successful blog on analyzing works such as Harry Potter, Discworld, and Steven Universe. Then Tor debuted his first book Anger Is A Gift, about the trauma of police brutality on black children.

This story is about the burden of carrying words, and what happens when the world challenges the beliefs that raised us. Mark described Each of Us A Desert in an interview as a form of magical realism. …

Mental health games interest me. From a self-care perspective, seeing a game talk about the issues that a person may be facing — anxiety, stress, coping mechanisms — is interesting and helpful. Celeste by itself is worth a whole essay for another time, which I may do after playing the sequel. In the case of Syntherapy, there is a very meta game about therapy, where you serve as the therapist.

“The road to true love never runs smooth,” as Shakespeare put it once. Romantic comedies are no different. Some from sixteen years ago are practically from a different era, and they show it in how they handle romantic boundaries.

Will Smith is a great actor, and very versatile. He did a great job in the movie Hitch, about a “Date Doctor” that tries to help others find true love after they prove they deserve it. There are really funny moments, and Will works to create a memorable role. The film just gets more dated with time.

The Movie Basics

Will Smith plays “Hitch,”…

This article isn’t going to be about the one-year pandemic necessarily. I’ve talked about my thoughts on work going remote on my personal website. With that said, Broadway has opened. So has the West End. They may be showing off new shows, perhaps established ones. Even so, there is a sense that things will not be the same. You can reduce seating and order people six feet apart, and ensure that everyone wears masks and does not eat in the theater.

It’s hard to measure the loss for the people who had to hang up usher uniforms, cancel auditions, or…

2021 really had to hurt us this year. I know that death comes for everyone, but while we are still at home it feels unfair to lose more good people. When an author doesn’t break their pedestal and proves that they can be decent human beings, you want to hold onto them forever. You want them to live.

Beverly Cleary was 104. She wrote a wide array of books, mostly for kids. Many people have said that having her around for 104 years and not breaking her pedestal was a remarkable achievement. Even so, it hurts when the news broke…

Fandom novels are gradually growing as a subgenre within YA and NA. I like them because they reflect a world in which I grew and matured, finding my friends. Even so, it can be hard to find a book that resonates with your experience and doesn’t mock fans. (Yes, I still have a long memory of certain YA novels that make it feel like the authors hate fandom.)

Zoe Rosenthal Is Not Lawful Good acknowledges that it is hard to explain fandom to an outsider. It doesn’t help that fanfic is sometimes sold illegally en masse, and some fans can…

“Every time I look at you, I don’t understand. Why’d you let the things you did get so out of hand?”

I would hear these lyrics on the albums that we had collected, CDs which we would play in the car or on stereos. My naive self assumed that it was an opening number for a play about the Crucifixion and the consequences for trying to keep the peace. Actually, no, it’s a finale for a musical where it ends in a great death, and a question about why the Crucifixion had to happen, what purpose did it serve.

I’ve…