I am dispassionate on matters of nationalism. I’m critical and demanding of the national story we tell ourselves, wanting desperately to understand any truths far above any emotionally delectable fable. And that yearning to understand tempers any blinding love of homeland I’ve ever had. I willingly recast our culture as…

In the waning days of the 20th century, and across the first two decades of the 21st century, the paperback publisher Pocket Books created an enormous, sprawling, self-contained, internally-consistent continuation of the Star Trek multiverse, picking up from the end of the television show Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and…

This is from a stint as a truck driver, dating to September 2008 I drove my truck down an interstate exit near the Missouri / Arkansas / Oklahoma tri-state border onto some forgotten back roads likely to have not seen maintenance since the Reagan Administration. It was the blackest night…

I was 18 when we went. As soon as I graduated from high school in May 1999, my Brazilian-brother-from-another-mother, Thiago Fragoso, and I bought Greyhound bus tickets from our small Alabama town straight to New York City. We intended to see the world and we were going to start from…

Did you know that over 1.5 million people in Mexico still speak Aztec? The language is called “Nahuatl” by its speakers, and it was the dominant language of the Aztec / Mexica empire in what is today Central Mexico. …

The character Felix in Garden of the Gods doesn’t have much understanding of the traditions of Día de los Muertos. Does he deserve to die for his insensitivity? The Day of the Dead (Día de Muertos) is a holiday with deep roots in Mexican culture, dating back before Spanish colonization…

Recently we posted a video on our YouTube channel letting viewers know we’re raising money for post-production of a short film we shot earlier this year. Most of the comments ranged in tone from lukewarm to positive. …

Episode 10 of Star Trek: Discovery’s Season 2 is plot-filled pandemonium. We got surprises, relapses, a funeral, some classified information, and an identity revelation we’ve been chasing the whole season. Where most episodes this season had more or less good balance between story, plot, and canon, Episode 10 was chocked…

The latest outing from Discovery, Episode 9 “Project Daedalus,” introduces us to Section 31’s headquarters, to Spock and Burnham’s fractured relationship, and to the backstory of Ariam, the augmented human that has been assisting on the bridge of Discovery since the first season. All around, this was another solid chapter…