Character-driven stories set in huge speculative worlds.

’ve always been interested in personal, character-driven stories set in huge speculative worlds. Not every story should be about saving the world/galaxy/multiverse. Sometimes, the best story is just about surviving growing up or navigating a rocky relationship. If that happens on a spaceship or in the Wild West, great. And if that spaceship happens to be in the Wild West, all the better!

Applying the user-centered process to your life (and stuff).

The defining characteristic of UX design is its focus on user research and on an iterative, user-centered, approach to creating solutions. But what if we applied the user-centered design process to ourselves, our lives, and our careers?

Writing a book is hard. But the hardest part was getting struck by lightning.

But even as a shiny new novelist with absolutely no reputation (yet) folks have already started asking me how I did it: How did I get the idea, how long did it take to write, how long to publish?

One man's contribution to the world(s) of film and television science fiction.

His ideas are the cornerstone of much of the genre fiction of the last few decades and have informed everything from the missions of the Enterprise and the Planet Express Ship to the romances of Gwyneth Paltrow. But what are these ideas of his that have so shaped science fiction over the last 50 years? Well, if you have to ask…

Ethan Hawke gets the Beatles back together.

One of the many moments in Boyhood that illustrates this blurring of fiction and reality is the occasion on Mason’s fifteenth birthday. Hawke, as Mason’s non-custodial father—Mason Sr.—presents his son with a mix CD: The Black Album, a compilation of Hawke’s favorite post-Beatles recordings by John, Paul, George and Ringo. But this moment of film fiction is much more than the trade of a prop between actors. The Black Album began its life as a real-life mix Hawke made for his daughter, Maya, and it is only with scant few edits that its touching liner notes were adapted for Boyhood’s Coltrane.

The less professional the crew, the greater the fun.

Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy presents us with the latest in a favorite subgenre of science fiction—the motley crew. These crews have been brought together through a variety of means: convenient time travel snafus, mishaps in cryogenic preservation, prison meet-cutes (and other forms of non-conformist behavior). They’re mismatched, chaotic and funny. And even when they’re saving the galaxy just to have a good laugh at its expense, it’s difficult not to love them.

So, in honor of Guardians of the Galaxy, here’s our list of the motliest crews in the galaxy.

A target and warrior of the culture wars.

Edward Wadie Said was an influential and controversial Palestinian-American literary theorist and critic whose life was as much an object of dispute as his scholarship and his pro-Palestinian politics. Of his twenty-three books, his best known is Orientalism (1978), a critical attack on the Eurocentric attitudes found in Western scholarship, art, education, and policymaking as well as the West’s perspective of the Orient as the “Other”—the binary opposite of the West.  

Photojournalism, the press, the foreign policy public, & the Iran Hostage Crisis.

A quantification of the volume, type, and tone of images used by the mass-market newsweeklies—Newsweek, Time, and U.S.News and World Report—to depict Iran and the Iran hostage crisis in an attempt to characterize related media coverage. In four chapters, this study’s quantitative approach describes the entire lifecycle of hostage crisis media—from its creation in Tehran and Washington by news service reporters and Iranian photojournalists, its communication on the pages of the American news magazines, a statistical examination of news media consumption by various strata of American society, and a comparison of the American press and its Arab analogue.

Reviewing information graphic methodologies as a means of historical argument.

The graphic visualization of ideas has been used throughout history, but rarely in the service of it. Copious figurative examples are found in the historical record. And while historians may accept the relevance of the rice-paper map, the bas-relieved roman arch, or the luminous stained glass window as a primary source, a survey of existing historical literature finds that few likewise employ sophisticated graphic techniques for the communication of their own arguments.

Teaching creative business is more than just good business.

“I could get an art student to do it for $35 and a six-pack.” I remember the first time a prospective client said that to try to intimidate me into accepting dramatically reduced fees for Website design services. I was newly self-employed and hungry for work, so I conceded. I delivered a great Web site, but I hated my client for making me work for so little—and myself for not knowing how to get what I deserved.