Commentary

After writing my essay arguing whether “Game of Thrones” is nihilistic or hard-won humanism, I realized the real debate isn’t about Martin at all—it’s about Tolkien. Reformed apologetics has so thoroughly appropriated “The Lord of the Rings,” flattening its Catholic sacramental theology into moral t

The critics who call Game of Thrones nihilistic have never been at the lever when the trolley’s barreling toward both tracks. Everyone “knows” honor matters—until honor costs you your head. Everyone condemns oathbreakers—until you’re sworn to both king and realm and your king plans genocide. Everyon

The indie publishing world accepts undisclosed ghostwriting—where someone else writes the prose and the credited author takes full credit—but treats AI-generated book covers as a betrayal of readers’ trust. This is completely ass-backwards. The line that matters to me is simple: did the credited aut

A Twitter user called me unethical for defending AI in the creation of book covers. “It is certainly unethical to use AI in the creation process of anything intended to be sold for profit,” they declared—while typing on a device built with components sourced through child slave labor and weaponized

Authors are quietly using AI for covers, marketing, research, plotting, and more, while anti-AI activists rage impotently on Twitter and threaten boycotts on BookTok that never materialize. When a Midjourney-generated cover won a fantasy reader popularity contest, 2,500 scrutinizing fans couldn’t sp

Deep in the ocean’s crushing darkness, male anglerfish are born with a single purpose: find a female and bite down. What happens next is biological horror—teeth fuse, tissues merge, and the male dissolves into her flesh. His eyes cloud. His brain shrinks. He becomes a living appendage, nothing more

We’ve internalized Golding’s vision: strip away civilization and children become monsters. But in 1965, six Tongan teenage boys actually got stranded on a deserted island for fifteen months. Instead of tribal warfare and murder, they thrived. They organized into rotating work teams, maintained a sig