Allan Dyen-Shapiro

I like the New York Times. I like getting their free headlines in my inbox, and I like linking to my ten free articles per month. And my...

My wife is outstanding at winning radio contests. And all sorts of other contests. As such, much of our entertainment is free. With free...

And the award for pretension in blog post titles goes to ... yeah, bear with me on this one. I recently binge watched the first two...

Yeah, I certainly could have started with a cheesy quotation from Wizard of Oz, but the Rogers and Hammerstein lyrics were running...

A colleague in my non-writer, day job, a Moroccan immigrant, delights in discoveries of American pop culture that I had encountered so...

Okay, at this point, I've seen lots of other folks on panels putting their schedule for MidAmericon II, August 17 - 21 in Kansas City,...

A enthusiastic young woman phoned me recently, reciting from a canned script that I knew would culminate in a request for money. An...

I have one short story that has been an absolute bear to write for various reasons. It has undergone multiple revisions. However, I...

This week's 12 Monkeys delved very deeply into philosophy, with Cole as the week's prophet. He reminisces about a boyhood scuffle when he...

A few weeks ago, I linked on my author Facebook profile (do friend me via the link at the bottom of this page) to the latest paper from...

Ben Bova was one of the great authors from the Golden Age of Science Fiction, back when all was spaceships and scientists saving the...

I really wanted to like this stuff. It sounded like a great idea: extract protein and other components from pea and other vegetables,...

The combination of global climate change, an unusually strong El Niño event, and other factors affecting water temperature was recently...

It was the beginning of the new millennium, and an expatriate Russian passionately expounded on the tragedy his new company was set up to...

Noted clarinetist Kirby Miller passed away last night at his home in Provo, Utah. Miller was best known as the founder of the Catatonic...

The late Columbia professor Edward Said introduced a useful term with his publication of Orientalism in 1978. To quote this work,...

Back in my scientist days, I had a colleague at the U. of Georgia with a fascinating and important idea. He had been told of a genetic...

To the Buddha's proverb, "A spoon of salt in a glass of water makes the water undrinkable. A spoon of salt in a lake is almost...

Last week, I posted, comparing/contrasting the situation in science with that in fiction in terms of freedom of information. The position...

The tagline of New Yorker writer and comedian Andy Borowitz used to be that there's a fine line between social media marketing and...