Drew Jaehnig
Stories (4/0)
Vivarium
So you’re locked up in your house wondering when the madness outside will end. You’re bored; you have an exaggerated case of cabin fever. Some of you probably have high anxiety about your future, the state of your finances, and the world economy. It’s understandable, and sometimes we need a reminder that it could be worse. I mean, Gemma and Tom would like to leave the house too. Indeed leave their ugly little subdivision, but even that is not possible. They have no games to play, no books to read, no TV to watch and their child is from Hell.
By Drew Jaehnigabout a year ago in Geeks
Lucia Berlin – A Life
“The first word I spoke was Light” – Lucia Berlin, Welcome Home. Welcome Home by Lucia Berlin will stun you with its optimism and simplicity. The unfinished work by the deceased author is an autobiographical work that sparkles with buoyancy even in the face of hardship, and you’ll be warmed by the sentiment behind it. Consisting of the original unfinished work as well as photographs and letters compiled by her son, Jeff, the work is a fitting capstone tribute to this fascinating short story writer.
By Drew Jaehnigabout a year ago in Viva
Not Quite Tolkien, but…
A band of travelers pulled together by a mysterious magic casting mystic, that includes two small villages novices, one dwarf, two elves, and two humans of noble descent. They are on a quest to the north to destroy an evil shadow king with a magical talisman. Sound familiar? Almost but not quite right? Terry Brook‘s well-read bestseller, The Sword of Shannara (1977), is unabashedly inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien‘s The Lord of the Rings (1954). Indeed so much so that this author was surprised it was ever published. But then again, perhaps that is precisely why it was published.
By Drew Jaehnigabout a year ago in Geeks
Free Speech in the Modern World
Back in the heady days of the early 1990s, technologists predicted that the internet would herald a new era of free speech. The boundaryless nature of what they were creating would free humankind from the shackles of expression oppression. Or so the story went. For a time, the idealists were right. Then corporations and governments learned how to harness the technology differently. The great Chinese Firewall, internet sovereignty, personal information marketplaces, cyberbullying, hacking, and intelligence monitoring changed all that. Free speech simultaneously exploded and got massively curtailed, all in one fell swoop. In Timothy Garton Ash’s Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World, we explore some of the stickiest quandaries of the modern era. Has the internet become a detriment to freedom? Has it merely enabled governments to monitor the population more closely? Have we encountered the death of privacy? Is free speech free anymore?
By Drew Jaehnigabout a year ago in The Swamp
