Reviews

stephen king
4 minutes of reading • Original, Reviews

The Other Stephen King

Recently I was browsing the Amazon website and I saw that a new Stephen King book was available in Kindle Unlimited. It was called Infested and the Amazon summary made it sound intriguing. More importantly, though, this was a book by Stephen freaking King, one of the writing greats. In my teens and twenties I read almost everything he wrote. Lately I haven’t followed him as closely (I prefer the writing of his son, Joe Hill, these days) but I was still surprised that I hadn’t heard of this new title.

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postapocalyptic world of "the rain" from miso films
2 minutes of reading • Medium, Reviews, Videos

An Apocalypse to Die for

It’s no coincidence that the opening credits of season one of the Netflix series The Rain are reminiscent of AMC’s The Walking Dead. The two shows are strikingly similar. Both are post-apocalyptic character-driven dramas in which humankind has been decimated by a virus. Both center on a group of disparate strangers struggling to coalesce into a functional group. Both have themes about the difficulty of retaining one’s humanity in an amoral world. I could go on.

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ace hardware
8 minutes of reading • Advocacy, Medium, Reviews, Wash DC

The Curious Case of the Local Hardware Store with Lower Prices than Amazon

Americans love Amazon, and have demonstrated this affection with their wallets, making the Seattle-based online superstore extremely profitable. Each year, in fact, Amazon gets bigger relative to other online retailers, as consumers award it a larger share of their total online shopping budget.

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pigment
6 minutes of reading • Medium, Reviews, Tech

One Coloring App to Rule them All

Coloring apps (sometimes called “coloring book apps” or “coloring apps for adults”) are having a moment. For the uninitiated, coloring apps are exactly what they sound like: coloring books, but without the book part. These app simulations of coloring books run on your mobile device of choice but are especially well suited to tablets.

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13 minutes of reading • Medium, Opinion, Reviews, Tech

Five Things Apple Got Wrong with the iPhone X (and How to Fix Them)

Prior to its launch, the iPhone X was being called “the most highly-anticipated version” of the phone to date, and with good reason. Almost two years before the iPhone X’s release, back when people still called it an iPhone 8, rumors of Apple’s plans for a major iPhone design overhaul began to emerge.

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suburbia, street, car-5428045.jpg
4 minutes of reading • Mobility Lab, Planning, Reviews

Do Americans seek out a velvet rope of status in suburbia?

Why do so many Americans choose to live in the suburbs, despite the increasingly long commute times and lack of community often associated with these places Benjamin Ross, a Washington D.C.-based transit activist whose grass-roots lobbying efforts led to the planned Purple Line in Maryland, argues that suburbia has a persistent allure because it is a great “velvet rope” separating those of means from the rest of us.

Do Americans seek out a velvet rope of status in suburbia? More »

Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln)
4 minutes of reading • Controversial, Original, Planning, Reviews

The Rebirth of the Zombie and — Dare I Say it — Walkable City

Ever since George Romero’s 1978 film “Dawn of the Dead” (arguably the best zombie film of all time, with a 94% rating on Rotten Tomatoes), zombies have symbolized modern-day anxieties, specifically American consumerism. For what is a zombie but a mindless automaton consuming everything in its path? But give me a little latitude here, because I believe a strong case can be made that zombie movies also mirror migration trends and settlement patterns, and the new movie “Warm Bodies” gives hope that things are headed in the right direction.

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