欧宝娱乐

鈥� just after Christmas, Alice Webber started to get sick. She complained of pains in her sides like needles being pressed there. When they lifted h

鈥� just after Christmas, Alice Webber started to get sick. She complained of pains in her sides like needles being pressed there. When they lifted her shirt, there was a pinprick rash and blood welling up as if the skin had been broken. A few days later she started vomiting. By this point Alice was too weak to get out of bed so her mother put a bowl beside it. When she came to empty it, she found watery bile and clots of black hair, like you鈥檇 pull out of a plughole. Another time Alice coughed up a handful of sewing pins bent into strange shapes. She developed a fever which made her start seeing things. She got delusional.鈥�
鈥淚n what way?鈥�
鈥淎lice told her parents that a witch was spying on her through the chimney breast. She said the witch had a black tongue and her face was 鈥榓ll on upside down.鈥�

鈥淪he was saying such odd things. At school, then here at home. Sometimes it was like she was listening to music you couldn鈥檛 hear, you know? I鈥檇 catch her just staring at the fireplace and her lips were moving but no sound was coming out. When I asked her what she was doing, she said鈥濃€攈ere Lisa sighs, fretful and ill at ease. It鈥檚 clear she isn鈥檛 comfortable talking about this鈥斺€渟he said that the dead wanted her to open her throat.鈥�

For a moment I think she is speaking鈥擨 can see her shoulders twitch, her mouth slowly moving鈥攂ut the voice I hear is slurring and thick, heavy. Like a throat full of molasses. It is a language I don鈥檛 recognise, Germanic maybe. The words spread like a ripple, like oil on water, dark and tainted. It fills me with something icy and unknowing and I taste the bitterness of bile in the back of my throat.

If you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you. - Friedrich Nietzsche

Daisy Pearce was born in Cornwall and grew up on a smallholding surrounded by hippies. She read Cujo and The Hamlyn Book of Horror far too young and has been fascinated with the macabre ever since.
Daisy began writing short stories as a teenager and after spells living in London and Brighton she had her first short story 鈥楾he Black Prince鈥� published in One Eye Grey magazine. Another short story, 鈥楾he Brook Witch鈥�, was performed on stage at the Small Story Cabaret in Lewes in 2016. In 2015 The Silence鈥� won a bursary with The Literary Consultancy. Later that year Daisy also won the Chindi Authors Competition with her short story 鈥榃orm Food鈥�. A further novel was longlisted for the Mslexia Novel Award鈥aisy currently works in a library where she stacks books and listens to podcasts on true crime and folklore.

Interview
-----Bloody Good Reads - - audio 鈥� 38:38 鈥� on writing what she loves

Items of Interest from the author
-----Crime Reads -
-----Short story - - linked from her website
-----Short story - - linked from her website

What do I do? I liberate people who don鈥檛 know they鈥檙e stuck. I help them to press the eject switch That鈥檚 one definition.
Another? I sow chaos. I

What do I do? I liberate people who don鈥檛 know they鈥檙e stuck. I help them to press the eject switch That鈥檚 one definition.
Another? I sow chaos. I clean house.
I change people鈥檚 lives for the better, whether they see it that way or not. Only once did my actions end for the worst. But I don鈥檛 like to talk about the murder.

I鈥檝e found that the best way to hide a secret is to keep it from yourself.

Cry 'Havoc!', and let slip the dogs of war. - William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

Christopher Bollen is a writer based in New York City. He鈥檚 the author of five novels and his journalism has appeared in many publications. He is currently the editor at large at Interview Magazine and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair.

There鈥檚 no reason why I鈥檓 not screaming. I consider what it might look like, for a moment. I could run out of my apartment barefoot, find a kind-lo

There鈥檚 no reason why I鈥檓 not screaming. I consider what it might look like, for a moment. I could run out of my apartment barefoot, find a kind-looking (handsome?) stranger on the street and beg for their help. But the truth is, I'm not the naked girl. I鈥檓 Dr. Frankenstein鈥攖his is my creation.

鈥淵ou鈥檙e real,鈥� I whisper, but I don鈥檛 know if I鈥檓 trying to convince him or me.

I think we鈥檙e all kind of blobs in a way. - from the Debutiful interview

Maggie Su is a writer and editor. She received a PhD in fiction from University of Cincinnati and an MFA from Indiana University. Her work has appeared in New England Review, Four Way Review, TriQuarterly Review, Puerto del Sol, Juked, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. She currently lives in South Bend, Indiana, with her partner, cat, and turtle.

The ebb and flow of human history is defined by the Seven Deadly Sins: wrath, gluttony, lust, envy, sloth, greed, and pride. From the wrath that ha

The ebb and flow of human history is defined by the Seven Deadly Sins: wrath, gluttony, lust, envy, sloth, greed, and pride. From the wrath that has ignited revolutions, to the greed that has re-sculpted the world map. From the sloth that has led to the fall of empires, to the envy that has built them. From the lust that has led to the fall of politicians and the betrayal of national secrets, to the voracious gluttony that has left our environment in ruination, and the pride that has fueled countless conflicts.

Disorders of the brain, of our genes, or other physical conditions, may give rise to gluttony, lust, wrath or pride. The effects of our environment or our upbringing may produce envy, lust or sloth. Crucially, these disorders unmask what is already in us, what already exists in all of us.

Poor man wanna be rich, rich man wanna be king
And a king ain't satisfied till he rules everything - Springsteen 鈥� Badlands

if you believe that the brain is the origin of our personalities and our character traits, the basis of our decisions, be they good or bad, then it is arguable that much of what defines us is outside of our control.

extrinsic factors 鈥� medication, injury, or functional disturbance of the brain 鈥� rather than our values can cause us to act in ways that contravene our moral
code. However, that dividing line between what constitutes normality and pathology shifts in the sand. That line is blurred by the prevailing winds of our views on morality, legality, philosophy and medicine.

For these other sins, we delineate the pathologies that shape our thoughts and behaviours, and set them apart from those underlying character traits through their intensity and consequences. For greed, we do no such thing. Yet greed, like the other sins, is perilous in its most extreme forms, causing harm to individuals and wider society alike.

Every dog has the Growl in it, no matter how big or little, how scruffy or cute, how pampered, old, or toothless. Every dog has in the first wolf b

Every dog has the Growl in it, no matter how big or little, how scruffy or cute, how pampered, old, or toothless. Every dog has in the first wolf barely coaxed to a campfire. Maybe we never have a chance to use it in our kind lives, and our humans would never suspect. But if we do, it鈥檚 because none of us, not a single pup, has forgotten the first campfire. And though we have taken on many jobs for our humans since then, there is one that is summarized in the Growl.
This One Is Mine to Protect

Ninety percent of magic is public opinion.

The Wizard of Oz is arguably the first modern American fairy tale, and Dorothy one of the first prototypes for the army of empowered, female YA protagonists we have today. And growing up as a rural girl in Nebraska鈥攐ne hop north of Dorothy鈥檚 Kansas鈥攊t鈥檚 no surprise then that I was desperately obsessed with the story. I always wanted to find the rainbow, yellow brick road, or magic slippers that would take me somewhere else. I always wanted to pay homage to Oz, and as a lifelong dog lover, it felt natural that Toto鈥檚 perspective was the way into a whole new view of the classic story. - from the Writers Digest interview

Imagine the flattest, grayest, most cornfed place you can imagine. Now add depression and life wrecked by late-stage capitalism. That鈥檚 Kansas. It鈥檚 like the dull beginning of every ad for pharmaceuticals right before Xylohappitoxin or whatever fixes everything. Sure, I make the best of it. Stealing socks and digging in old lady Brumley鈥檚 garden. But me and Dorothy are meant for bigger things, like destiny and boss battles and whatever that 鈥淟ikeandsubscribe鈥� stuff is the glass-people are hype about. - from the Fresh Fiction piece

When Frank L. Baum sat down to write the The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, his country was in a state of turmoil which might seem very, very familiar to us these days. Economic and international pressures were ripping apart the perceived stability of the middle class. Hotly contested initiatives like the silver standard are referenced in Dorothy鈥檚 own silver shoes (changed to ruby for the technicolor movie). Populist leaders are lambasted in characters like the Cowardly Lion and the Emerald City itself can be read as a giant allegory to the capitalist power of Wall Street in Baum鈥檚 era. Oz was never a sterile product of pure imagination. The books reflected Baum鈥檚 opinions on the realities of the world. - from the Nerd Daily piece

You ever feel trapped in a family you don鈥檛 belong in? In a place that鈥檚 just so . . . so that it鈥檚 suffocating? That you know there鈥檚 more, so much more, out there, and it鈥檚 worth seeing, and every day you wake up in the same bed is like drowning a teaspoon at a time? I never wanted鈥擨 just . . .鈥� She took in a sharp breath, catching herself. Her gaze refocused away from the window and back on me. For a flicker beat she looked like a duotype print of Dorothy. Hair obscured in soft shadow, a dark wardrobe that could have included the ratty tee Dorothy slept in when she finally peeled off the hoodie on the weekends . . . and a face so full of hunger-pang sadness, it could swallow the world with those wide eyes.

This is the thing tall people, even tall dogs, never understand. Everyone looks at the world from three, four, even five feet up in the air. That鈥檚 where all the deception is. Everyone makes sure things look nice from that angle. Tables are kept tidy. Skirts are pressed. Floorboards are swept. Railings are dusted. Everyone wants to make a nice impression, tell a nice story from their point of view.
But when you see the world from five inches off the ground? That鈥檚 when you get the unvarnished truth.

A. J. Hackwith (she/they) is (almost) certainly not an ink witch in a hoodie. She鈥檚 a queer writer of fantasy and science fiction living in the woods of the Pacific Northwest with her partner and various pet cryptids. A.J. is the author of a number of fantasy novels, including the acclaimed LIBRARY OF THE UNWRITTEN fantasy trilogy. She is a graduate of the Viable Paradise writer鈥檚 workshop and her work appears in Uncanny Magazine and assorted anthologies. Summon A.J. at your own peril with an arcane circle of fountain pens, weird collections of rusted keys, and homebrew D&D accessories.

The story of Yellowstone began with a singular geography that gave rise to a landscape filled with fantastical geothermal features and a distinctiv

The story of Yellowstone began with a singular geography that gave rise to a landscape filled with fantastical geothermal features and a distinctive array of wildlife. For at least 11,000 years Indigenous peoples knew it as a homeland filled with essential mineral resources, opportunities for hunting and gathering, and sites with medicinal and spiritual value. In the nineteenth century, the high altitude and long winters kept Euro-American settlers and explorers at bay and, in doing so, provided a refuge for wildlife hunted to extinction elsewhere. In time, these unique qualities, combined with their perceived economic and political value, would help usher something new into the world, the first ever national park.

Deafening noise. Blinding, incinerating heat. A release of power beyond any scale of human experience. The eruption remade the continent: Erasing all life in its immediate path. Pulverizing, clogging, and burying the old topography. Blotting out the sun. Altering the climate鈥wallowing entire mountains鈥�. The 鈥渉ot spot鈥� it left allows magma to continue to accumulate below the surface, pushing the Yellowstone Plateau up almost 2,000 feet.

For more than 11,000 years, Native Americans treated Yellowstone as a homeland, a place treasured for its abundant high-quality obsidian, seasonal hunting and gathering, and the spiritual and medicinal value of its geothermal features.

The dream of a Greater Yellowstone鈥攖he vision shared by Horace Albright, John D. Rockefeller Jr., Struthers Burt, Maud Noble, and countless others stretching back to George Grinnell and General Sheridan鈥攈as today been realized, not as a single expanded Yellowstone National Park but as a mosaic of different federal, state, and private lands comprising the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. With Yellowstone at its core, the area includes Grand Teton National Park, the National Elk Refuge, seven different national forests, and an assortment of other conservation areas.

RANDALL K. WILSON, PhD, is a professor of environmental studies at Gettysburg College, where he teaches courses on environmental policy, natural resource management, sustainable communities, and the geography of the American West. He has served on the USDA Forest Service鈥檚 National Science Panel and on the board of directors for the Rural Geography Specialty Group within the Association of American Geographers. He earned a Fulbright Fellowship to the University of Vienna. His book America鈥檚 Public Lands: From Yellowstone to Smokey Bear and Beyond was named an Outstanding Academic Title from Choice Reviews and won John Brinckerhoff Jackson Prize from the Association of American Geographers.

Among the 32 members of the survey was guest artist Thomas Moran. The 40-day expedition allowed Moran, along with photographer William Henry Jackson, to visually document over 30 different sites, including present-day Old Faithful, Hayden Valley, and Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. This unique partnership with Moran and Jackson was critical to Hayden, who included their art in a comprehensive report to Congress. Jackson鈥檚 black and white photos documented Yellowstone鈥檚 unique geological formations while Moran鈥檚 paintings and watercolors captured its diverse and extravagant colors.

Saxe, a popular poet in the mid-19th century, is mostly remembered today for setting the ancient parable from India about the blind men and the elephant to verse, and making the story popular in the United States. (I have put the full poem in the blog on our website.)
The law and sausages idea was attributed to Saxe as early as 1869, and that鈥檚 the first appearance of that phrase. What he said was, 鈥渓aws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made.鈥�

Let us begin with an establishing shot. A three-story Victorian house stands alone on a hill in the White Mountains. The house boasts a wraparound

Let us begin with an establishing shot. A three-story Victorian house stands alone on a hill in the White Mountains. The house boasts a wraparound porch, mansard roof, and bay windows. Despite the building鈥檚 age, her shingles gleam, shutters sparkle. In other words, she is beloved.
We swoop in through an open window on the third floor to reveal a handsome hotel room. A woman with a face of cracked earth leans against the four-poster bed, watching a man in his thirties survey himself in a pedestal floor mirror.
I twist away from the mirror to face my housekeeper.
鈥淗ow do I look?鈥�
Danny takes her time considering me. 鈥淟ike Norman Bates,鈥� she jokes.

What if I had never met this group at all? On one hand, they were the cause of my eventual ruin. On the other, these people were fundamental to the man I鈥檝e become. For four years we were family. They shaped my beliefs and sense of humor. They cheered me on. They accepted me. Right up until they didn鈥檛.

鈥淚 was introduced to Hitchcock via North by Northwest during a film studies course in college. (If you鈥檝e read my book, this will sound familiar.) I鈥檝e been a big fan ever since. What surprised me most as I rewatched some films and watched others for the first time was how much they hold up in 2024鈥攅specially the humor. Hitchcock is known as the Master of Suspense, and he is, but I would argue he was just as much a master of comedy. I still can鈥檛 believe how funny his movies are. I don鈥檛 think humor is something my generation associates with Hitchcock unless you鈥檙e a big fan.鈥� - from The Big Thrill interview

What conclusion can a young man draw when he鈥檚 the only one who has a hard time making friendships that last? Maybe they stay away for a reason. Maybe his core is rotten. Maybe they all know something he keeps hidden from himself.

Stephanie Wrobel is the author of This Might Hurt and Darling Rose Gold, an international bestseller that has sold in twenty-one countries and was a finalist for the Edgar Award for Best First Novel. Her third book, The Hitchcock Hotel, is a USA Today bestseller that published in Fall 2024. She lives in New York City.

The absence of birds made Diz uneasy, but he wasn鈥檛 spraying birds, was he? Yet there were fewer birds around his farm. Used to be robins hunting w

The absence of birds made Diz uneasy, but he wasn鈥檛 spraying birds, was he? Yet there were fewer birds around his farm. Used to be robins hunting worms in the furrows. Used to be blackbirds around the green bins. Owls at dawn, rats in their claws. Well, maybe he had a sudden thought those could have been the rats and mice he had to poison. He thought back to how birds used to chatter as the sun rose. Now, a few sparrows, maybe, or more often just the hiss and boom of wind.

While working in her garden, Crystal appreciated how their families were like the Lord鈥檚 ivy, a weed ineradicable by human means. It grows low to the ground and can鈥檛 be mowed. It throws its stems long and roots straight down every few inches, just like the people along the river. There seems to be a Frechette or a Poe anywhere you land, but low-key, invisible. The Lord鈥檚 ivy, or ground ivy, creeping charlie, thrives under the leaves of other plants and goes wherever it is not wanted. It just keeps throwing itself along stem by stem and blooms so modestly you鈥檇 hardly mark the tiny purple flowers. People step down and pass, the weed springs up, uncrushable.

I really set it in 2008鈥ecause I don鈥檛 feel our country has ever really dealt with the fallout from 2008. I feel like there was so much that there was so much loss, that people lost homes, people lost jobs, things hollowed out in such a big way and that was never really addressed. We never really came back from that time, 2008, 2009 into the present, because the pandemic happened. - from the B&N interview

While she was in high school, the government accelerated her family鈥檚 loan payments and blow after blow had landed. They鈥檇 lost their home, their farm, everything. Except one another, they kept saying, except us.

I don鈥檛 think about politics when I write. I think about the characters and the narrative. My novels aren鈥檛 op-eds. Nobody reads a book unless the characters are powerful鈥攂ad or good or hopelessly ordinary. They have to have magnetism. If you write your characters to fit your politics, generally you get a boring story. If you let the people and the settings in the book come first, there鈥檚 a better chance that you can write a book shaped by politics that maybe people want to read. - from the Paris Review interview

This book is set during the economic collapse of 2008鈥�09. What Martin does is only what a lot of people wanted to do. I didn鈥檛 think of what he did as villainy, but yes, I suppose it was absolutely crazy, and, you know, fun to write. I have to amuse myself. - from the Bookpage interview

When I started it I thought I would be writing about and how it impacted people who were working there. They lost a lot in terms of their insurance and their benefits and wages鈥t was a really tough lockout. I wanted to write about that at first, but then I started writing something else entirely and I enjoyed writing it more so I kept with that one and it became more about a number of people living along the river. - from the B&N interview

Swiftly and violently as a gunshot a scream pierces the sloped fields lying open and fallow behind the house. Sounding like a woman being murdered

Swiftly and violently as a gunshot a scream pierces the sloped fields lying open and fallow behind the house. Sounding like a woman being murdered in the way he has seen it on television where her agony is drawn out over several breathless and voyeuristic minutes until he changes the channel. Yet he knows it is not a woman but some unnamable beast of the forest come to bewitch and maim. A mother despondent, in all her devastated keening鈥攖he fox whose children now reside in the stomachs of the hounds at Stag鈥檚 Crossing has finally returned.

The difference between wolves and foxes his father says is that wolves love to hunt and foxes love to play. A tantalizing trail of blood in the half-melted snow. Wolves only have enough foresight to kill and upon their killing they will feed ravenously and strip the bones. But foxes; they are quick-witted and brutal. When they hunt they do so with finesse stalking and pouncing then snapping the spine in their slender jaws.

If Carlyle could have had dogs for sons he would have been a happy man; but when has a Morrow man ever been happy?

No thousand acres, no grand inheritance can ever be enough to postpone their destinies. Nick will die as bitter as he came into the world. He knows this just as well at thirteen as he will in thirty years.

Yet in only ten years his children will betray him in their own inimitable ways鈥擩oshua marrying out, Nick exiling himself to a foreign land. And in their absence Stag鈥檚 Crossing will lie silent and fallow as the fields surrounding it. This place: no place for young men.

Cormac McCarthy is an all-time favorite writer for me, perhaps my favorite of favorites, and his influence is very obvious here.. 鈥� from the JamReads interview

Would he kneel before his father鈥檚 magnificence and eat oats from his hand like a wayward steer?
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Now he and Joshua must return to Stag鈥檚 Crossing. Return to that grand two-story house where as children they were left alone for hours at a time savaging each other like wild dogs.
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Finally, she turned to him. Only the slightest tilt of her neck, elegant as a swan鈥檚.
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Upon awakening she is languorous as a cat sunning itself in a windowsill.
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Joshua sees him lying down next to him perfectly still. Breathing through his nose softly like a newborn foal.

Much of the novel鈥檚 setting of Stag鈥檚 Crossing, the thousand-acre farm owned by the Morrow family, is directly based on my family鈥檚 farm in Nebraska. I always found the woods that surround our farm to be a very contemplative, mystical, and mysterious place. I knew I wanted to draw on my Chinese background for Sacrificial Animals, so I started to think about different aspects of Chinese mythology that could be a good fit for this setting. Without giving anything away, I will just say the natural world plays a huge role in the mythological elements of the novel, and foxes 鈥� as featured on the cover 鈥� are one of my favorite animals.

Kailee Pedersen writes haunted, unsettling speculative fiction. She graduated with a B.A. in Classics from Columbia University, specializing in ancient Greek. Kailee was adopted from Nanning in 1996 and grew up in Nebraska, where her family owns a farm. Her writing on LGBTQ+ and Asian American themes was awarded an Artist Fellowship by the Nebraska Arts Council in 2015. When not scribbling down her next book, you can catch her singing opera, playing video games, or working as a software engineer in New York City. Sacrificial Animals is her first novel.

At the base level it鈥檚 fear. It鈥檚 all about fear. People ask, 鈥榃hat are you afraid of?鈥� and that is not an answerable question. Any time I name a s

At the base level it鈥檚 fear. It鈥檚 all about fear. People ask, 鈥榃hat are you afraid of?鈥� and that is not an answerable question. Any time I name a source for my fear I feel it as a deflection. I mean, sure, I can get close. You know, as in: I鈥檓 afraid of people because someone I trusted fucked with me when I was a child. I was traumatized, yes, and the fear probably began there, I guess. But I don鈥檛 really know because it seems, now, somehow elemental. It embodies some ancient, sleeping doom, and the only escape is self-destruction. You know? Like, if I become my own doom I鈥檝e taken that power away from anything else. It鈥檚 preemptive. At least there鈥檚 agency in it.鈥�
She felt the laughter spill out of her in a rush. Its piercing volume was at odds with the moment and the release it brought. Leo looked at her dumbfounded.
鈥淕et the fuck out of my head, man,鈥� Celia said.

He had merely done what men had been doing since the primeval birth of jealousy. Just a spoon of love from my forty-five, save you from another man. Howlin鈥� Wolf was just singing about what thousands had wished they could do, and probably had done, before there were cops and laws and all the rest of the arbitrary bullshit. And it had felt good, hadn鈥檛 it?

Celia did an image search for the sculpture, and there it was, standing next to the modern art museum, taller than the building itself. It was huge, with thick, meandering branches and bristling snakelike twigs. Most of the branches, while not attempting verisimilitude, were formed with inherently natural shapes and gnarled twists, but here and there some were deliberately hewn into shapes that could never have occurred in nature: curving double on themselves and then back again to form tight willowy S-shapes, or turning straight downward at acute angles for a foot or two before continuing up and outward, as if infused genetically with lightning.

Daniel stood for a moment at the threshold of the branches and looked up. The wind was made louder here in contact with the tree. The gravel path went around the south side, and he followed it to where it ended at an overlook. There was a plaque on a post, but he didn鈥檛 read it. Instead of standing at the overlook and staring out to sea, as the landscape designer had intended, he turned and went in under the branches, and immediately the world of the tree took over. He was surprised鈥攈e鈥檇 thought his memory of it was hopelessly colored by LSD and shock and time, that he had probably falsely mythologized every aspect of it and it would be just a place, with soil and roots and air but not the indwelling spirit he鈥檇 imbued it with in his mind. But it was as it had been鈥攖he wind quieting and the light clarifying, damping the sun into deep greenness鈥攊nhabited by a sense of protection and safety unchanged by the years of foot traffic and human attention.

MAX LUDINGTON's first novel, Tiger in a Trance, was a New York Times Notable book, and his fiction has appeared in Tin House, Meridian, HOW Journal, Outerbridge, and On the Rocks: the KGB Bar Fiction Reader. He lives in Brooklyn, New York and teaches in the writing department at Pratt Institute.

All of us have in our minds a cartoon image of an autocratic state. There is a bad man at the top. He controls the army and the police. The army an

All of us have in our minds a cartoon image of an autocratic state. There is a bad man at the top. He controls the army and the police. The army and police threaten the people with violence. There are evil collaborators, and maybe some brave dissidents. But in the twenty-first century, that cartoon bears little resemblance to reality. Nowadays, autocracies are run not by one bad guy but by sophisticated networks relying on kleptocratic financial structures, a complex of security services鈥攎ilitary, paramilitary, police鈥攁nd technological experts who provide surveillance, propaganda and disinformation. The member of these networks are connected not only to one another within a given autocracy, but also to networks in other autocratic countries, and sometimes in democracies too.

A world in which autocracies work together to stay in power, work together to promote their system, and work together to damage democracies is not some distant dystopia. That world is the one we are living in right now.

[back in the 1990s] we had this illusion that our system was so strong that anybody could come and play around in it and it wasn鈥檛 ever going to affect us. And it didn鈥檛 really matter what happened over there in Russia because it was so far away, and they鈥檙e so weak now they can never affect us and they don鈥檛 matter anymore and we鈥檙e really interested in other things now. And that was the mistake. What we did was enabled the growth of what鈥檚 now a real security threat to us and to other Europeans. We know it was a mistake and now it鈥檚 time to backtrack and change it. - from the Tortoise interview

If people are naturally drawn to the image of human rights, to the language of democracy, to the dream of freedom, then those ideas have to be poisoned. That requires not just surveillance, and not merely a political system that defends against liberal ideas. It also requires an offensive plan, a narrative that damages the idea of democracy, wherever it is being used, anywhere in the world.

The manipulation of the strong emotions about gay rights and feminism has been widely copied throughout the autocratic world. Yoweri Museveni, president of Uganda for more than three decades, also passed an 鈥渁nti-homosexuality鈥� bill in 2014, instituting a life sentence for gay couples who marry and criminalizing the 鈥減romotion鈥� of a homosexual lifestyle. By picking a fight over gay rights, he was able to consolidate his supporters at home while neutralizing foreign criticisms of his regime. He accused democracies of 鈥渟ocial imperialism鈥�; 鈥淥utsiders cannot dictate to us; this is our country,鈥� he declared. Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary, an illiberal hybrid state, also ducks discussion of Hungarian corruption by hiding behind a culture war.

Around the world, democratic activists, from Moscow to Hong Kong to Caracas, have been warning us that our industries, our economic policies, and our research efforts are enabling the economic, and even the military aggression of others, and they are right.

Anne Applebaum is a staff writer for The Atlantic and a Pulitzer-prize winning historian. She is also a Senior Fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the SNF Agora Institute.
She was a Washington Post columnist for more than fifteen years and a member of the editorial board. She has also worked as the Foreign and Deputy Editor of the Spectator magazine in London, and as a columnist at Slate as well as the Daily and Sunday Telegraphs.

But I am no stranger to actual death and mortal concerns. By the time my father was my age, for example, he鈥檇 been dead for over four years. Tick tock. I survived a heart attack earlier this year, so have gotten up close and personal with mortality. Yet, while I do take death, my own and that of others, seriously I still retain a dark sense of humor about it all. My favorite Broadway musical of all time, for example, and tastiest, remains .

I am not particularly afraid of death, nor am I particularly eager to pass on, considering the disruption such an event could create for those left behind. (Please do not nail me to a perch) I do not believe there is a heaven or a hell. (That bucket is nicely tucked away in a corner, out of kicking range. ) But I do cleave slightly to the possibility of some conscious continuation beyond. (Just please, please don鈥檛 let it be eternity re-REMming my miserable dreams.) My cardiac crisis resulted in no out of body experiences, no tunnel vision, no life history flashing before my eyes. No looking to gain some angelic wings with an offer of assistance. No foxhole conversions. Nope, it was more like having a chicken bone stuck near the bottom of my throat, along with a remarkable fatigue.

Back to my actual close encounter - Dash off to the ER, get a quick diagnosis, get stabilized, then get shipped off to the big hospital in my general neighborhood. Thankfully, there was no need for me to be subjected to a four-thousand-volt voom. He鈥檚 not stunned, he鈥檚 restin鈥�. Well, for a while, at least. A week later I gained some new second-hand stents and a porcine (original) aortal valve. My relative lack of movement could indeed be due to bein' tired and shagged out following a prolonged squawk.

I was unable to focus well for a few months. (joined the bleedin' choir invisible!) Well, a bit faded, anyway. But not once during all this did I really feel like or fear that I was on the verge of death. (Denial?) That said, the nearest I felt to facing my earthly end was the unspeakable food served at the hospital. Delivered to my room like clockwork, it was clearly prepared in the basement by captive trolls, who added sundry bodily products as condiments. It reached the point where I would gag when the trays appeared, simply refusing to eat any of them, and begging the nurses for whatever might be tucked away in the local fridge, regardless of mold content. 'E's not pinin'! 'E's passed on! No, not passed on, but passin鈥� on the awful grub and pinin鈥� for something edible.

I did my best to irritate the staff, well, not intentionally. Almost all of them were lovely. Nurse, what's this for? What about that? What does this pill do, that one? When can you take out these tubes? Was that incision made with a fork? I would not say it was a pleasant experience for me, given the hospital's manic, relentless need to wake patients up for tests real and imaginary, or for the staff, given my ongoing demands for information, but we all managed to get out of it alive, somehow. (I presume, not having checked the obits.)

'E's shuffled off 'is mortal coil - well, shuffled, sure, but I expect to keep shuffling on this mortal coil for a good long time to come. I choose to focus on , which includes quite enjoying lots of odd bits about death and dying. And I will keep on with that. When it is finally my time to go, I would much prefer to die laughing.

Before I started searching for life in the cosmos, I just assumed scientists knew how it started on Earth. We don鈥檛.

Before I started searching for life in the cosmos, I just assumed scientists knew how it started on Earth. We don鈥檛.

鈥t is sobering to realize that for most of Earth鈥檚 history, humans would not have been able to survive on this planet. If we could rewind Earth鈥檚 history and start again, it seems unlikely that Earth would produce humans again. A planet with different starting conditions and paths of evolution has no obligation to support life similar to Earth鈥檚, let alone curious humans.

Are we alone in the cosmos? The question should have an obvious answer: yes or no. But once you try to find life somewhere else, you realize it is not so straightforward.

I spend my days trying to figure out how to find life on alien worlds, working with teams of tenacious scientists who, with much creativity and enthusiasm and, often, little sleep but lots of coffee, are building the uniquely specialized toolkit for our search.

Today, solving the puzzle of these new worlds requires using a wide range of tools like cultivating colorful biota in my biology lab, melting and tracing the glow from tiny lava worlds in my geology lab, developing strings of codes on my computer, and reaching back into the long history of Earth鈥檚 evolution for clues on what to search for. With our own Earth as our laboratory, we can test new ideas and counter challenges with data, inspired curiosity, and vision. This interaction between radiant photons, swirling gas, clouds, and dynamic surfaces driven by the strings of code within my computer, creates a symphony of possible worlds鈥攕ome vibrant with a vast diversity of life, others desolate and barren.

So far, despite wild claims to the contrary, we have not found any definitive proof of life on other planets. Until we do, we will continue to improve our toolkit and look for signs of alien life the hard way: searching planet by planet and moon by moon.

Thom Shubilla is the author of James Bond and the Sixties Spy Craze released by Applause Books and Primetime 1966-1967: The Full Spectrum of Television's First All-Color SeasonScreem and writes about classic horror films for Monster Bash Magazine. He lives in Plains Township, Pennsylvania.

Her husband died in the water in 2015, and her son was suffocated with a dry-cleaning bag in 2019.
And now she鈥檚 got a chainsaw.

Her husband died in the water in 2015, and her son was suffocated with a dry-cleaning bag in 2019.
And now she鈥檚 got a chainsaw.

鈥his is maybe the one thing I believe in in the whole world: that when it鈥檚 your time, you don鈥檛 run from it鈥攜ou stand against it, you keep your eyes open, and you rip and claw your whole way down, hope you can at least be a worthy trophy.

鈥ou know the first one is third person of course, but it鈥檚 really tight on Jade. I think when people remember My Heart is a Chainsaw, they always say Jade is a narrator, and that鈥檚 always weird to me because she鈥檚 like our narrative focus, but she鈥檚 not actually the one speaking except for in her 鈥淪lasher 101鈥� essays. Then when I figured out I was going to do a sequel and then a trilogy, I realized I鈥檝e got to modulate the delivery throughout these three books.
So what I landed on for doing that was in the second one, it鈥檚 going to shatter and splinter into a multivocal thing with a lot of people speaking in Reaper, and a lot of people鈥檚 angles. To me, that was kind of set up for missing Jade. Like 鈥淭his is fun, but I wish we had Jade.鈥� So then in the third one, if I were able to, instead of only letting her speak during the [essays], if the main part of the narrative became her voice, then I was hoping that could feel like a return a little bit. Or it could just be as simple as I knew I was having to say goodbye to Jade and I wanted to hang out with her more. And how better to hang out with her than first person? - from the Paste interview

The third installment of a trilogy always has to up the stakes and kill people we thought couldn鈥檛 die. I knew this going in, knew I鈥檇 have to do all that. In Chainsaw, Jade was fighting for herself. In Reaper, she was fighting for her friends, for this family she鈥檇 cobbled together. In Angel, she鈥檚 having to fight for her community鈥攆or Proofrock. And of course I had to adhere to Randy鈥檚 rules for the third in a trilogy, too. They were very helpful. This is my first time doing this, I mean. I needed a lot of help. - from the Nerd Daily interview

鈥ustice doesn鈥檛 extract itself, you鈥檝e got to pull it bloody and pulsing from the chest of whoever wronged you.

There鈥檚 probably 12-14 beats of the slasher. You got to have the opening blood sacrifice. You got t have the red herrings, you鈥檝e got to have the third rail body dumps. You鈥檝e got to its like you鈥檙e going around a carousel and reaching out and hitting 12 or 14 bells as you go around. You got t hit all those bells for sure. But what I think makes a really good slasher movie is if you鈥檙e doing a revenge slasher of a mystery slasher, I guess they get called both, delaying knowledge of who the slasher is. That鈥檚 the most pleasurable, such that everything crashes to a head at the reveal when the person pulls their mask off and gives their big speech about I did this because you did this to me, or whatever it is.

The rules in Scream are a basic set to survive any horror film: you can never have sex, you can never drink or do drugs, and never (ever, under any circumstances) say 鈥淚鈥檒l be right back鈥�. Ironically, Randy explains these rules during a party, with half the attendees already drunk. Still, they hold some truth: Sidney has sex with Billy, and although she鈥檚 later attacked, it鈥檚 Billy the one who ultimately dies. Tatum (Rose McGowan) goes to the basement to get more beers and is killed there, and Stu says 鈥淚鈥檒l be right back鈥� right after Randy explains the rules, and is later killed (albeit in self-defense) by Sidney. In Scream 2, the rules for a horror sequel are: the body count is always bigger, the death scenes are more elaborate (鈥渕ore blood, more gore鈥�), and the third rule is not explained in the final cut, although it was revealed in the teaser trailer to be 鈥渘ever, ever, under any circumstances assume the killer is dead鈥�.