“Only about 2,000 of the hybrid tea rose bushes, dubbed Barbra’s Baby, are available so far. … Streisand politely declined to comment for this story, but Dan Bifano, a master rosarian and longtime gardener to Streisand, Oprah and other famous folk, believes a rose’s name ‘is always of utmost importance; it makes the rose salable or unsalable, and anytime a rose is connected to a celebrity, it’s going to pick up the sales.’” — Jeanette Marantos, The Los Angeles Times, 25 Mar. 2025
Did you know?
Utmost, which typically communicates that something is of the greatest or highest in degree, number, or amount, is commonly found modifying words like importance, concern, and respect. But utmost can also indicate that something is, literally or figuratively, farthest or most distant—that it is outmost, as in “the utmost point.” Utmost in fact traces back to the Old English word ūtmest, a superlative adjective formed from the adverb ūt, meaning “out.” Utmost can also function as a noun referring to the highest attainable point or degree, as in “the inn provides the utmost in comfort and luxury.” The noun also often occurs in phrases such as “we did our utmost to help” where it means “the highest, greatest, or best of one’s abilities, powers, and resources.”
“The Timberwolves surprisingly advanced to the Western Conference finals last year before losing to the Mavericks. After a troublesome season, Minnesota returned before being thumped by the top-seeded Thunder. The series wasn't really close, and the Timberwolves ... will have to devise a way to compete in the Western Conference with the Lakers, Nuggets, Clippers, Spurs, Mavericks, and Warriors all chasing them.” — Gary Washburn, The Boston Globe, 1 June 2025
Did you know?
There’s something inventive about devise, a word that stems from Latin dividere, meaning “to divide.” By the time devise was being used in English, its Anglo-French forebear deviser had accumulated an array of senses, including “divide,” “distribute,” “arrange,” “order,” “plan,” “invent,” and “assign by will.” English adopted some of these and added new senses, such as “imagine” and “guess,” that have fallen out of use over time. Today devise is most commonly used as a synonym of invent or plot in situations where the objective is difficult or complicated. Note that devise is often confused with another dividere (and deviser) descendent: device refers to a technique, method, tool, or small machine or gadget. One way to help keep their spellings straight is to remember that ice, usually a noun, is found at the end of the noun device, not the verb devise.
And, well, yes! It is! The full review (here, warning, mild spoilers) also says that it is “tightly plotted” and otherwise praises the writing for catching up reader on the events of the series while still keeping things moving in the book’s here and now. And, again: Yes! I will take all that. Also, and I say this with just about every novel, it’s nice when the first trade review is a positive one. It means I can relax a little.
More news on The Shattering Peace soon. We are two months out from the release! Things are beginning to pick up momentum.
Human characters have never been essential to tell a good story. Author Caspar Geon breaks the mold of featuring boring ol’ humans in his newest novel The Immeasurable Heaven. Come along as he takes you through worlds, nay, universes, of his imagination.
CASPAR GEON:
I’ve read that if you go outside and cover a portion of the sky with your outstretched thumb, you’ll be obscuring approximately fifteen million galaxies. There was a clear sky the other night so I went out and did just that, and it’s mind-boggling. That’s fifteen million distant islands, each home to hundreds of billions of stars. And all of that just a drop in a colossal ocean.
This was the starting point for The Immeasurable Heaven: the conviction that there’s so much going on out there independent of everything we know or understand, so much that we’ll never have a hope of glimpsing, and my preoccupation with leaving all earthly issues behind to experience a tiny portion of it in some way. Pure escapism. Escapism with a capital, er, E. Fairly standard behaviour for someone who was put back a year in Primary school for ignoring his work and staring out of the window all the time.
When I finished the final book in my space opera trilogy the Amaranthine Spectrum in 2018 (which had neither earned out, nor, as far as I can tell, earned much at all) the onus was on writing something less ambitious and more commercial. Simple, right? In the Amaranthine books I’d already compiled three biggish novels about the far future of humanity and the strange plethora of mammalian forms that it would eventually become; now I had to get serious.
Elderly relatives who’d made the mistake of trying my books would counsel me earnestly to write something with more human characters and relatable storylines, and I would nod my head, go home and do precisely the opposite, feeling that wicked thrill as I struck out on an adventure with zero human characters at all, set three billion years ago in a distant ring of connected galaxies. I was still writing it five years later.
I wanted to find out what a settled galaxy would look and feel like after hundreds of millions of years of unbroken civilisation, what its inhabitants would have become, and how they would lead their lives. In that process I came up with the Throlken, omniscient machine intelligences that have set up home in the hearts of every star and ruled for a third of an aeon, forbidding violence of any kind. I met Whirazomar, a linguist forced to journey in the cramped, filthy confines of a sentient passenger spore with a hundred rowdy passengers, and Draebol, a hapless explorer of the lower dimensions. And I found the voice at the centre of it all, a prisoner sent far away for a very long time, its mind now utterly rotten.
What I’d somehow assumed would be an equivalent amount of worldbuilding to the last three novels had ballooned into a stack of notebooks heavy enough to knock me unconscious if they toppled over. Spending time in the galaxy of Yokkun’s Depth and its seven linked neighbours had become an obsession as I wrote about reality-hopping sorcerers, walking parasite cities, coral and pollen spaceships, interdimensional multiplayer games and ice moon ocean battles. The book also delved deeper into the concept of mortality than anything I’d ever written, since death is presumably a constant that most sentient beings will at some point in their existence have to contemplate, and to this eternal question there might – somewhere – lie answers.
This went hand in hand with the nature of reality itself, which, when experienced elsewhen and elsewhere, is at its core a malleable notion quantified in countless different ways, especially once you throw a variety of sensory organs and methods of perception into the mix. Who can say which is the correct reality, the one true way of seeing? And what then is death, if reality itself cannot be firmly defined? ‘The Immeasurable Heaven’ (actually the English translation of the lovely Hawaiian name for our own galaxy cluster, Laniakea) was a title I couldn’t resist.
Anyway, despite the constant risk of disappearing into my own belly button and popping out of existence entirely, my number one priority was to have as much fun as I could writing, especially since it seemed to me that this wasn’t going to be a book any traditional publisher would want to take a risk on. The fact that one eventually did still surprises me, even a week from publication.
And so, to reference the book’s afterword, I hope you’ll join me on my leisurely trip across this immeasurable heaven, for there are many more tales to tell.
"The Air Medal is awarded to anyone who distinguishes themselves through meritorious achievement while flying." — Rick Mauch, The Fort Worth (Texas) Star-Telegram, 6 Mar. 2025
Did you know?
People who demonstrate meritorious behavior certainly earn our respect, and you can use that fact to remember that meritorious has its roots in the Latin verb merēre, which means "to earn." (Merēre is also the source of the English noun and verb merit.) Nowadays, the rewards earned for meritorious acts are likely to be of an immaterial nature—gratitude, admiration, praise, etc.—but that wasn't always so. The history of meritorious recalls a reward more concrete in nature: cold, hard cash. In Latin, meritorious literally means "bringing in money."
Born in Iran and raised in Zimbabwe, Doris Lessing (October 22, 1919–November 17, 2013) was fourteen when she dropped out of school and eighty-eight when she won the Nobel Prize for smelting language into keys to “the prisons we choose to live inside.”
Having lived in writing for nearly a century, through the rise and fall of dictatorships, the ferment and fizzle of movements, the flickering of moral fashions, she understood uniquely both the power of the written word and its limitations, the way books should be read “for illumination, to enlarge one’s perception of life” and not for indoctrination, to narrow one’s scope of curiosity and replace life with the idea of life or, worse, an ideology of living.
Doris Lessing
In the preface to her 1962 classic The Golden Notebook (public library), she relays her advice to young people about how to read for maximum illumination:
There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag — and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty — and vice versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.
A century after Walt Whitman instructed in his advice on living a vibrant and rewarding life to “re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book [and] dismiss whatever insults your own soul,” she cautions against reading books as a substitute for reading the world, an admonition that applies even more sharply to the most prevalent use of the written word today — the algorithms force-feeding us easy partialities and calling them reality:
In this age of compulsive reverence for the written word… people… are missing what is before their eyes… Everywhere, if you keep your mind open, you will find the truth in words not written down. So never let the printed page be your master.
In what may be the most succinct advice on how to read that doubles as a superb summation of how to live, how to orient to self and other, she adds:
Read your way from one sympathy to another… Follow your own intuitive feeling about what you need.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
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The comic book company IDW, in conjunction with Paramount, which owns Star Trek, has come out with a limited edition comic book series called Red Shirts, which is about the security teams in the United Federation of Planets, the first issue of which came out yesterday. Clearly from the cover and the panels you can see here, the comic series will not be shying away from the essential nature of the red shirt in the Star Trek universe, which is, to die for dramatic story purposes.
As most of you know, I wrote a book 13 years ago called Redshirts, which essayed this same concept, albeit not in the Star Trek universe specifically, and it did pretty well, becoming a New York Times best seller and winning the Hugo Award for Best Novel, among others. So how do I feel about IDW/Paramount now coming in and releasing some comic books with almost exactly the same name?
I feel fine about it. One, I don’t own the trademark on “red shirt” or any variation thereof (nor did Paramount when I wrote my novel, I checked), and I wrote a novel, not a comic book series, and anyway I borrowed the concept from Star Trek’s fandom, from whence the phrase came. I can’t exactly get worked up if Paramount and IDW reappropriate a concept I appropriated in the first place. Second, the phrase and concept have been used by others in other media before – there was a card game with just about the same title a while back, as just one example. We’re all working in a same pool. Overlaps will happen.
The only real issue — one I’ve already seen online — is that some folks appear to think I have some participation in this IDW limited series. I don’t. I’m not the writer (a fellow named Christopher Cantwell is), nor did anyone involved in this comic get in touch with me. Not that they should have; from what I can tell about the story it has only the vaguest common elements with my own novel. It’s its own thing, and should be appreciated as such. I mean, I hope it’s good. I wouldn’t want something even mildly adjacent to my own work to be junk. The early reviews I’ve seen of the first installment seem to be pretty positive. So there’s that.
Anyway: Nope, not based on my thing, nope, they didn’t check in with me, nope, I’m not upset at that, and nope, I shouldn’t be upset even if I were. Give it a shot and see if you like it.
Sometimes, we all need a friend. And sometimes, that friend is a robot that accompanies you to social events so you don’t have to go alone. Follow along in author Allee Mead’s Big Idea as they tell you about how real life feelings of disconnection led to their newest novella, Isaac.
ALLEE MEAD:
I began writing Isaac at a time in my life when I felt disconnected. I had friends at work but didn’t see them much outside of it. I didn’t chat with my grad school classmates. My most cherished loved ones lived a 5-hour drive away. One day, my town was putting on a free concert of a 90s band whose music I enjoyed. I texted only one person to see if she wanted to go, but she didn’t see the message until the next day.
I began imagining a woman who owned a humanoid robot (“android” is the correct term, but “robot” was the word bouncing around my head) purely for social events. She kept him in the closet and only powered him on when she wanted to go to a movie or restaurant. In this vision, the robot finally gained enough sentience to ask if she’d leave him on for the night; eventually he left the house to see the world.
I wondered what kind of character this nameless woman was: where she’d gotten the robot, whether she had enough initiative to purchase him or if she somehow stumbled upon him. The story snowballed until the woman had a name and an estranged family and the robot had a clearer purpose.
Now, despite writing a futuristic story about androids, I’m not a fan of new technologies. I got my first smartphone in 2015 at the age of 24, but I still power on my laptop anytime I want to make an online purchase. I don’t have social media and I once asked a friend if I could drive to her house and drop off cash instead of setting up Venmo. I’m at best ambivalent about technology’s ability to help people connect. I’m also someone who tends to sit on the fence instead of developing a clear opinion about something.
So as I wrote Isaac, I asked myself, “What ways will Isaac help Eleanor reconnect with the world, and what ways will he limit her?” I wrote scenes where Isaac’s presence encouraged Eleanor to go out more than she normally would: to see movies, plays, and concerts; to try new restaurants; and even to go to a bar on a crowded weekend night. I also wrote a scene in which Eleanor is all dressed up and ready to go out, only to find Isaac in the middle of a software update. She misses the play she wanted to attend, stewing in anger until Isaac enters the room. In another scene, her workplace is planning its annual picnic; Eleanor’s excited to go until she can’t think of a story to tell her coworkers about why Isaac isn’t eating.
Ultimately, I cut these last two scenes. What I potentially lost in deleting these scenes of technological limitations I gained in the juxtaposing moments of Eleanor’s fathers John and Javi. While we don’t see John wrestling with new technology, we watch him connect with Javi. Javi, who easily makes friends wherever he goes, encourages John to reach out to his therapist and join a parent support group. John learns that he doesn’t have to do everything on his own, and Javi learns to put down roots. In these moments, it’s less about the limits of technology and more about the benefits of genuine human connection in its many forms: platonic, romantic, and community.
Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for July 17, 2025 is:
fugitive • \FYOO-juh-tiv\ • noun
Fugitive refers to a person who runs away to avoid being captured or arrested.
// The FBI regularly updates and circulates its list of most wanted fugitives, and asks communities where they might be seen to be careful and on the lookout.
“The automated plate readers, as they are known, enable authorities to track when vehicles of interest pass through certain intersections. The devices can also be mounted on police cars, allowing officers to sweep up troves of license plate data as they drive around. Police say the gadgets help investigate stolen cars, locate fugitives, and solve crimes by checking who came and went from a neighborhood on any given day.” — Libor Jany, The Los Angeles Times, 10 Apr. 2025
Did you know?
Fugitive entered English as both a noun and an adjective in the 14th century, coming ultimately from the Latin verb fugere, meaning “to flee.” As a noun, it originally referred, as it still does today, to someone who flees a country or location to escape persecution or danger, as from war, making it synonymous with another fugere descendent, refugee. The noun soon expanded beyond those fleeing peril to individuals (such as suspects, witnesses, or defendants) trying to elude law enforcement especially by fleeing the pertinent jurisdiction. The adjective fugitive describes those literally running away or intending flight, but also has multiple figurative uses, being applied to that which is elusive, of short duration, or of transient interest, among other things.
(Eopsaltria — dawn harpist — Australis — southern)
The Eastern Yellow Robin is one of my favourite birds, and I’ve spotted them in many locations on the east coast of Australia. More recently, though, there have been regular sightings of these birds in my garden.
Eastern Yellow Robin at Mount York, Blue Mountains
The photo above was taken at Mt York in the upper Blue Mountains when I was wandering along on a trail. The bright yellow breast of the robin was a beacon among the sombre green and grey gums, and these birds seem particularly willing to remain still long enough for a photo to be taken.
Eastern Yellow Robin perching, watching (Tweed Heads, NSW)
Australian robins are flycatchers, and are often spotted as they cling sideways to a branch or tree, quite close to the ground, watching out for insects. They can be found in urban areas as well as treed habitats along eastern Australia and inland areas.
Eastern Yellow Robin in The Gully, Katoomba
They are one of the first birds to greet the new day, and this is reflected in their Latin name. Early of a morning, there is usually a kookaburra or two on a branch in my garden, watchful for any insects and the like. It is regularly joined by a robin, perched nearby on a tree trunk.
Eastern Yellow Robin at The Gully, Katoomba
Male and female birds look the same, and they are often seen alone but form small family groups. They breed from June to February, and have up to three broods.
Eastern Yellow Robin, Mount Tomah Botanical Gardens
Seeing these beautiful birds up close always brings me joy. You can find out more about Eastern Yellow Robins here, and there is a gorgeous photo of one on a nest here. Do you have Eastern Yellow Robins in your area?
Anything you polish with attention will become a mirror. Anything to which you give yourself fully, vest all your strength and risk all your vulnerability, will return you to your life annealed, magnified, both unselved and more deeply yourself. It can be a garden, or a desert, or a hare. It can be, perhaps most readily, a place. “Place and a mind may interpenetrate till the nature of both is altered,” the Scottish mountaineer and poet Nan Shepherd wrote in her stunning love letter to a mountain long before neuroscience found the seat of personhood in the hippocampus — the brain’s compass for navigating space. Places can become part of us, can imprint themselves on the soul like people we have loved. Because every place is part of a larger landscape, a cell in the body of the world, to fall in love with any one place — to contact its beckoning beauty, its vulnerability, its variousness — is to come to love the world itself more deeply.
That is what Ann Zwinger (March 12, 1925–August 30, 2014) invokes in Wind in the Rock (public library) — her breathtaking 1978 account of falling in love with Utah’s rocky canyons, finding a microcosm of the world in their desolate Martian landscapes threaded with cattle trails, touching both the immediacy of life and the size of time in their elemental majesty.
She writes:
There is an enchantment in these dry canyons that once roared with water and still sometimes do, that absorbed the voices of those who came before, something of massive dignity about sandstone beds that tell of a past long before human breathing, that bear the patterns of ancient winds and water in their crossbeddings.
That enchantment only comes at the price of tremendous courage, for encountering the canyons is no picturesque excursion — Grand Gulch divides the plateau in half, its walls a menacing vertical drop of fifty feet cascading downward into a series of undercut steps nearly impossible to descend on foot except with razor caution. But impossible is just what we call the limits of our courage and imagination. One night after dinner, Zwinger sets out to climb the talus slope above her camp, four hundred feet straight up into the gloaming sky. When she finally reaches the top, crowned with a narrow pillar of rock, she sits down to write in her notebook until the last light fades, capturing the moment in what may well be a prose poem:
The wind is fierce… but somehow it’s the right wind. Up here it is fitting that there is wind, keeping open the slot in the wall, charging through, honing the air, taking voices away. The moon sharpens and brightens, bringing Saturn with it, rising in an open quadrant of sky. I absorb the strength of the earth through feet rooted in the rock. If I could raise my arms high enough I could garner thunderbolts and grasp them like a bouquet of crackling light.
She descends back to camp in the darkness — “a declivity of mind and feeling” — and when she looks up at the slope the next morning, it seems impossible that anyone could climb down in the dark. She reflects:
Perhaps when one scratches the underside of heaven one is granted a special grace. But the euphoria remains, and I can still call back that feeling of being astride the world and what it was like to be charged with the energy of the universe. Perhaps one true gift of these canyons is that they become so deeply imprinted on the psyche that they can be invoked at will, bringing back their particular charge of serene energy whenever needed.
Over and over, Zwinger discovers what we all do if we live with maximum aliveness — that we fathom our depths only by pushing against our limits. She writes:
When I crawl across a foot-wide ledge with nothing below, nearly nauseated with fear; when I claw up a sandstone wall, plastered against its abrasive curve; when I heave myself onto the top rim to see a view of such splendor that wonder washes away all my apprehension about getting back down; when I do what I knew I could not do — then I have a taste of glory.
Over and over, her stubborn courage is recompensed with something beyond beauty, beyond gladness — a rush of pure being:
When I wake up to eternity I’d prefer it to be just like this: under a venerable cottonwood just leafing out, sunlight sliding down the canyon wall, the soft rustle of dried cottonwood leaves on the ground, a canyon wren caroling, and then the silence of an April morning.
Eternity, however, is always menaced by entropy — Zwinger finds herself trying to reconcile the ancient Indian cultures embedded in the canyons with the oil drilling now scarring the face of the mountain with the pockmarks of so-called civilization. She wonders:
Will those who come after me know what it’s like to wake up in one of these canyons, hear the tentative murmurs and scratchings, feel the sixth singing sense of quickening heartbeat of hunted and hunting, of life that shuttles and scuttles and plods and leaps, leaving tracks to tell who went where and sometimes why, and the wind erasing them so that it is only the cool sand that one ever remembers?
But one does remember, for such places embed themselves in the marrow of memory, become part of knowing ourselves, a map to the terra incognita of who and what we are. As she prepares to leave the canyons, she reflects on what these austere rocks have taught her about being alive:
Darkness comes so softly now. The cliffs seem to retain the last light of day as they retain the heat of the sun and give it back at night. The willows are in silhouette but rose and tan and gray still glow on the cliffs, silver still shimmers on the river. Stars appear slowly, only the bright tones, and then galaxies of flights flood this clamshell-horizoned sky.
I don’t think I’ve ever sat and watched for so long, hypnotized with the splendor of this time, this place, this sense of being. It is enough to know why I came here: to breathe in the solitude and the silence. I simply accept what I’ve been learning in these canyons, finding resources I didn’t know I had, stretching, accepting that there are times when one has no options, and I sit here in peace because of that. I know that I will never be content without risk and challenge and the opportunity to fail, to know pain, the chance to test my endurance, unwrap my horizons, know physical stress and the blinding satisfaction of coming through. If the cost is great, the rewards are greater. And I sit here in peace because of that.
In a sentiment evocative of Willa Cather’s splendid definition of happiness as being “dissolved into something complete and great,” Zwinger adds:
And then, in that star-dark lightness, I shake open my sleeping bag and stretch out to watch the stars. A parure of ten stars lies in precise alignment against the eggshell curve of the canyon wall. They stand time still, in poised perfection, before wheeling on to other appointments.
In the quiet, the air is singing.
donating = loving
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
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Both Athena and I went to go see the new Superman film, and we both came away with differing opinions on it. We thought it would be fun for each of us to put our reviews of the film in the same post so you can see how we got to where we are on this take on the character and the story. Warning: Spoilers are ahead.
If you like this “Two Takes” concept, let us know. We might do more. — JS
ATHENA SCALZI:
I love Superman. He is my favorite superhero, and I am always defending him against those who claim he is “boring.” Needless to say, I was extremely excited for Superman (2025), and had to go and see it on the big screen. I’m sad to report I didn’t really like it all that much. Though I’ve been seeing tons of high praise across the Internet, it was pretty mid in my book, so let’s talk about it. And, of course, here is your spoiler warning.
The first thing of note that this Superman movie does differently than most is that it begins at a time that Superman is already an established hero. This is not an origin story, this is a story in a world that already knows Superman and that he has been active in as a hero for years. While most people find this to be a refreshing take, and that they don’t need to see his origin story for the hundredth time, I can’t say I like the decision. I don’t hate it, but I really love origin stories. I like seeing Superman discover his powers, or having to learn to control them, or save people in his youth and having to keep it a secret. It’s a personal thing more than anything.
Right off the bat, I absolutely hate Lex Luthor’s ensemble of evil employees that are like, video-game-playing-“Gen-Z”-written-by-Gen-X-lackeys that are all like “yes!” and fist pump the air when they land a punch on Superman using their weird consoles. It’s cringe. They’re all cringe. Lex Luthor shouting out letters and numbers is cringe. Especially the line delivery for the exposition of “wow you really seem to know what Superman is going to do next,” and “Lex Luthor has spent the past three years studying all his fights and learning his moves so now he can predict what he will do next.” Great, thanks for that explanation, guys.
So, Clark goes to work at the Daily Planet, and this movie decides to include not only Jimmy Olsen, but Cat Grant, Steve Lombard, and Ron Troupe, as well. This feels like entirely too many players on the board for the reporter gang, as Cat, Steve, and Ron, get absolutely no meaningful screentime or characterization, and the only way you’d even really know who they are is if you’ve seen other Superman media such as My Adventures With Superman, where they are actual characters and serve a purpose. They felt so thrown in at the last minute and like an afterthought in this.
Of course, the real main reporter here is Lois Lane. Now here’s something that I like about the movie. I really love how Superman handled Lois and Clark’s relationship, especially the scene where she interviews him, and it starts out as sort of fun and playful, but quickly turns into a real and meaningful conflict that has a lasting impact on both of them and their relationship. The most important thing about this scene, though, is our insight into Superman’s morals and beliefs.
While Lois grills him about breaking laws, committing potentially devastating acts against a US allied nation, and threatening to cause someone bodily harm or worse, he can’t stop retorting with “people were going to die.” More and more passionately. People were going to die, and he had to stop it. No matter the laws, no matter how the US or the media would see it, he knew he had to stop this loss of life. He knew what was about to happen was wrong, and that was enough for him to act, whether or not it was legally correct.
Lois says the world is viewing him as a representative for the United States in this situation, and he claims he’s not representing anyone but himself, and doing good. Exactly. Because that’s what Superman does. He represents good, he does good. How he goes about doing it is largely questioned by the public, the government, even his girlfriend, but he knows in his heart he is doing good, and that’s what is most important to him. Above everything else, above even the law, he will do good.
I love that this interview scene caused a real fight between Lois and Clark. He doesn’t understand why she’s “being like this.” Why is she acting so against him when he saved people? How could what he did ever be construed as a bad thing? How could people possibly be mad at him for stopping a war? A country was about to be invaded, and he told the tanks to turn around. In what universe is he not a hero here? And how could anyone, especially this person he cares about so much and is supposed to like him, too, question him about his intentions, when his sole intention is to be good and help people. It’s truly a hard watch.
I really hate in Superman media when Superman is wanted by the law, turns himself in, and immediately gets handed over to the bad guys and gets locked up and tortured. It’s so predictable and so unfortunate. I truly didn’t understand how Luthor was even keeping Metamorpho under his control. Yes, Luthor had his son held hostage, but as we later see, when Superman breaks the glass and flies over to rescue his son, Metamorpho flies over right after he does using like a jet propulsion out of his lower body. Okay, so maybe he just wasn’t strong enough to break the glass himself? But later in the movie didn’t he form a giant hammer and smash some tanks? Kind of sounds like he could’ve smashed the glass and flown over to his kid and saved him at like, any point. I guess the only explanation is when he says he can’t hold his son while he changes forms, so I guess that’s the sole reason he needed Superman’s help in rescuing his son. Pretty weak sauce, though.
Anyways, Metamorpho and his son aren’t really the part I want to talk about in the pocket universe. The part I really want to look at is the death of Malik. Malik was a normal person who liked Superman, who even helped Superman one time. And Luthor made sure he paid the price. This scene is so incredibly tragic, and so good. Superman saves people, not gets them killed. And he certainly doesn’t just watch as they get killed. Except in this case, he has to. And it hurts him, deeply. David Corenswet portrayed Superman’s agony and pain perfectly in that scene. You just know he wishes it had been him instead.
Does anyone else just really dislike the Justice Gang? What a bunch of a-holes. I hate this Green Lantern, I hate how they portrayed Hawkgirl, and Mr. Terrific is fine. Again this is another example of too many characters on the board with not enough time to devote to getting to know them or really care about them. Plus, as is shown by Superman’s numerous attempts to mitigate damage, both to civilians, property, and the Kaiju itself, these jerks don’t give a hoot or a holler about collateral damage. Yes, collateral damage happens, but the Justice Gang is so reckless and headstrong that they just shoot first, worry about bodily harm to civilians later. I don’t find them funny, I just think they’re jerks.
And yes, they do “save the day” in the end, but I give them no praise for deciding to actually go be heroes when they were already proclaiming themselves as heroes. Wow, they saved people! Umm, yeah, that’s what they should have been doing anyways? Without needing Superman to convince them to go fight the good fight? Especially Green Lantern saying he only cares about protecting Earth from alien threats. My guy, why even bother protecting a planet from aliens if it’s going to be war-torn, unjust, and cruel? How ’bout you focus on Earth first and then fight the alien threats when they show up later to your awesome, peaceful, not terrible planet.
I also dislike the weird relationship between Jimmy Olsen and Luthor’s current companion, Eve. Eve is obsessed with Jimmy, and offers him information on Luthor and Superman if he agrees to go out with her. This whole relationship is played for laughs, but I find it very uncomfortable and unfortunate for Jimmy. He doesn’t like this girl, but makes her promises in order for her to help them. It doesn’t feel funny, it just feels wrong. Especially because he wants her information, but regards her as stupid and incompetent, and makes fun of her physical appearance. It just feels gross both directions.
Moving on, I also am not a fan of the rift that tears Metropolis in two. I think the rift is like, too much conflict. We have Luthor, Ultraman, the Engineer, the Raptors, and we have the war across the world, do we really need a rift tearing through the planet? It just feels like a bit much, and very silly that the way to fix it is to “hack the system and put in a code.” It feels half-baked.
In that same vein, I don’t think Superman should’ve been stuck in Metropolis fighting his clone, I think Superman should have actually been the hero to save Jarhanpur. Those kids were holding up the Superman flag as the Boravian army invaded, and they stood against the invaders shouting Superman! And who comes to save them? GREEN FUCKING LANTERN. This felt so unsatisfactory and like total BS. Yes, Superman is the one that “called them in” but come on! I don’t want to see Green Lantern flip off tanks, I want to see Superman shield children from bullets, his red cape flowing in the wind. This isn’t a Justice Gang movie! You’re telling me Big Blue is back home throwing his clone into a black hole? Talk about boring. I want to see him SAVE PEOPLE THAT BELIVE IN HIM!
Now, one thing I think this movie gets right is Luthor’s sick obsession with Superman. He is clearly un-fucking-well, and I think this movie and Nicholas Hoult’s portrayal of Luthor really nails that characterization aspect. Hoult’s ability to switch between a cool and collected demeanor, to an absolute madman spitting venom in every hate-filled word towards Superman is wildly impressive. He thinks he is a mastermind genius but really he’s just a crazed, sick individual. And he’s not really all that smart, just a rich, power-hungry, jealous man. Hits close to home, doesn’t it?
So, yeah. I didn’t really like this movie. Which is a shame because I think they nailed Superman’s morals, beliefs, his personality, the way he would interact with the world and with people. They absolutely killed it with Superman’s character. But that’s about it. A good Superman does not a good Superman movie make.
Overall, this movie was like a 5/10, very middling. I didn’t hate it but I don’t like it much, either. To be honest, I prefer Man of Steel. That’s right, I said it. I miss Henry Cavill, what can I say?
What did you think of Superman? What is your favorite Superman movie/media? Let me know in the comments, and have a great day!
-AMS
JOHN SCALZI:
There have been several live action Superman movies, going back to Christopher Reeve’s iconic portrayal in the 1978 film (and actually before then, as there was a 1948 serial starring Kirk Alyn, but I’m doing a Jedi hand wave on that for this conversation). Across these many films and actors who have essayed the character, it’s generally agreed upon that the ’78 film, and Reeve’s turn in the blue suit, are the best of the bunch. After watching the 2025 Superman, with David Corenswet as the lead character, Reeve and the ’78 film still remain on top. But! Now there’s a new film, and new actor, in second place.
The reason for this comes down to tone. Superman is fundamentally an optimistic character; he’s decent and kind and humble (as much as a ridiculously overpowered character can be), he puts others before himself, and he fights for truth, justice and the American Way — which is understood to be a positive thing in the Superman mythos, even if in the real world the American Way is often not in a great state. In D&D parlance, he’s true Lawful Good, in a world that keeps wanting to tip over into chaos, or alternately is pushed there via Lex Luthor or other bad actors.
The problem is that lawful good is — sorry — kind of inherently boring. “Fundamentally decent” characters have a high incidence of being a snooze. You have to support them with interesting side characters, interesting situations and, particularly, an interesting antagonist. If you can give your main character an actual personality, that’s a plus too, but you can get away with not doing that if everything else falls in line.
The ’78 Superman (directed by Richard Donner and with a murderer’s row of screenwriters including Oscar winners Mario Puzo and Robert Benton) nailed all of this. The script was light, humorous a lot of the time, but serious when it needed to be. The newsroom of the Daily Planet had a terrific Lois Lane (Margot Kidder) and Perry White (Jackie Cooper). The film’s Metropolis was lived in and alive. And, of course, Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor is still the best superhero villain (with his own terrific supporting cast in Ned Beatty and Valerie Perrine), full of genial evil.
In the middle of all that worldbuilding and character work, all Christopher Reeve and his Superman had to do was be decent and kind, offer an occasional corny quip (“bad vibrations?”) and save the day. This is not to say Reeve didn’t have to act — you try selling decent and kind while everyone is chewing scenery around you. See how you do. It did mean the filmmakers gave Reeve the space and support to make his turn in the role iconic.
Contrast this with Bryan Singer’s rather ill-fated Superman Returns (2006). Brandon Routh had the look and the decency, but he didn’t have the support. Bryan Singer intentionally tried to ape Richard Donner’s vibe, but as a director he doesn’t have Donner’s lightness of touch, antic where Donner was comedic, and the script was underwhelming. Kate Bosworth’s Lois Lane wasn’t up to the task of being a foil, and Kevin Spacey’s Lex Luthor, smarmy though he was, didn’t gel. The whole affair was off, and everyone felt it.
I actually liked Zach Snyder’s darker and grittier take on the Superman mythos in Man of Steel (2013), because Snyder (and screenwriters David S. Goyer and Christopher Nolan) committed to the bit; Henry Cavill’s Superman was still decent, but the world around him was more dour and Superman darkened to match. Snyder’s problem would be that the only direction you can go from “dark and gritty” is “darker and gritter.” That’s fine for Batman, less so for Superman. Batman vs. Superman was a bummer when it came to Superman; Justice League was a slog.
For the 2025 Superman, James Gunn (who wrote as well as directed) hearkened back to the ’78 Superman vibe and plan, but unlike Bryan Singer, isn’t trying for a slavish continuation. Also unlike Singer, Gunn has an actual sense of humor. That sense of humor is not the same as the one you’ll find in the ’78 Superman — Gunn’s sense of humor is a lot more overt and rather more juvenile. Of all the things that you would call his vision of Superman, “sophisticated” isn’t one of them. But it does keep things light and moving quickly.
Gunn’s Superman, in the form of David Corenswet, matches his sensibility. Reeve’s Superman had a delivery that was dry, even if it could be corny; Corenswet’s Superman, on the other hand, is basically an adorable lunk who means well. He’s not stupid! But he might not think enough steps ahead, and he might be in over his head. He’s the strongest person on the planet but can still get flustered by a very smart, very pretty woman (that would be Lois Lane, in the form of Rachel Brosnahan, who is terrific) who isn’t taking any crap from him. Superman is famously called a “boy scout” but this is the first Superman you could actually see being a Boy Scout, really proud of his all his badges and the fact that he made Eagle Scout without once having to resort to using his superpowers to do it.
(Over on Bluesky I noted that as an actor Corenswet reminded me less of any previous Superman actor and more of Brendan Fraser circa The Mummy and Blast From the Past; this was met by several “OH MY GOD YES”‘s, so I think I’m on to something here)
I like the Gunn/Corenswet version of Superman. I like that he’s decent and kind but still feeling his way in the world, and can be outmaneuvered because of that — and indeed that’s exactly what this iteration of Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) is doing. This edition of Lex is a vainglorious billionaire who hates not being the alpha dude for the whole planet, and boy, doesn’t the idea of a billionaire weaponizing his insecurities feel a little too close to home at moment. Once again, this film has the second-best live action version of a character; Hoult isn’t going to beat Hackman as the definitive Lex Luthor — who could? — but his take is right for this particular world.
This particular world also has sunlight and color in it, which I really like, as well as probably more back story than any one single movie needs, which I am less enthused about. This is because Gunn is obliged to set up a whole new DC Cinematic Universe, this one subtitled “Gods and Monsters.” There’s criticism that this Superman is overstuffed, and the criticism is on point. I don’t know that it serves this film’s own story to jam in the “Justice Gang,” regardless of how much fun it is to point and laugh at Green Lantern Guy Gardner’s haircut (actor Nathan Fillion apparently insisted on it as it is canonical), or how much of a delightful surprise Edi Gathegi’s Mr. Terrific turns out to be (Isabela Merced’s Hawkgirl is given relatively little to do). And then there’s Krypto the dog, who is there as much for merchandising as plot. I get why Gunn did it, and, fine. It wouldn’t have hurt the film, as a film, to have focused more on Superman and his own supporting team.
With that said, this is the second-best Superman film for a reason. Overstuffed though it might be, it also hits the marks of making a good film with a fundamentally decent main character. The supporting cast ably supports. The antagonist viciously antagonizes. The worldbuilding is solid and mostly smart. The lightness and sense of humor pull us through. Is it a great film? No. But if simply being good is good enough for the character of Superman, it’s good enough for this story about him. James Gunn has put his stamp on the character and the universe, and I’m looking forward to seeing where both of them go from here.
Writers are in conversation with other writers, both the ones who are contemporary to them, and the ones who came before. In this Big Idea for The Dreaming of Man, author Nikoline Kaiser talks about what the takeaway is from these discussions, for this book as well as other things.
NIKOLINE KAISER:
I might be a writer, but I’d never claim to be a master of words. And while I feel I do have some sort of unique voice, made up of my experiences and values, there is no secret to the fact that I stand on the shoulders of giants. By this I mean that I borrow relentlessly from my favorite authors; as many a writer will tell you, reading is often the biggest source of inspiration you can find. And especially nowadays, with the near-oversaturation of tales available to us, giving a new spin to an old idea becomes a necessary go-to.
Here’s the thing though: writers have always been borrowing. Many fans of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings have heard the story of how J.R.R. himself read the Shakespeare play Macbeth, and was very unsatisfied with how the “no man of woman born” line referred to a man who came into the world via caesarean section and not, you know, a woman. Here (or so the story goes) was born his idea for Eowyn, the warrior maid who disguises herself as a man to fight, fulfilling a similar prophecy from the trilogy. (Incidentally, his ire over the walking forest in Macbeth being soldiers disguising themselves with branches, and not an actual, moving forest, is what gave birth to his idea for the Ents. Tolkien apparently had a lot of beef with Shakespeare).
Growing up, Eowyn was one of my favorite characters. There is something very affirming about seeing a female character in the kind of role she has, especially for the time the novels were written in. Plenty has been written about the cross-dressing aspect of Eowyn and other characters like her. Playing with gender roles takes on a new meaning (or maybe at times an even older one) when reading with a modern lens, and when I started my own venture into writing, I quickly found that this was a source of constant ideas. Who are we when we crawl over the walls erected around us at birth and decide to do things not because of but despite or even without thought to, our gender?
Here’s another aspect of the type of fantasy Tolkien wrote (and the type he decidedly didn’t write) and the precursors Shakespeare and his contemporaries played with in, for example, Macbeth: prophecies. In modern times, a lot of derision has been levelled against the Chosen One archetype; the one hero (usually male, usually white) who is destined to defeat the evil of the land. Of course, he succeeds despite all odds. But those aren’t really the fun prophecies, are they? They aren’t much like the prophecies we know from older times, when the Sphinx warns that Oedipus will kill his father and marry his mother and then, by the very act of trying to avoid this, it ends up happening. It’s certainly not Macbeth in the eponymous play being told that “no man of woman born” can kill him and his end will only come when a whole forest grows legs and starts walking, only for a C-section baby grown into a vengeful man and an army with foliage on their heads to arrive and end his reign.
Those are the clever prophecies, the word-twisters, the djinni-in-a-bottle giving you everything you wished for, except you really, really shouldn’t have been wishing in the first place. They’re often self-fulfilling, because if the protagonist hadn’t reacted to the prophecy, they might never have created the circumstances to make it come true in the first place. It’s here that the “master of words” thing comes back, because if you say something in the right way, any sentence can hold both the venom and the antidote. Shakespeare (who was also heavily inspired by the stories of his lifetime – Macbeth was a real person, though the historical figure seems to have been a lot nicer than his literary counterpart) took the prophecy with a specific focus: “no man of woman born.” Tolkien took his focus elsewhere: “no man of woman born.” And in the gender euphoria of Eowyn, of growing older, of learning things about myself and the world, the words changed in my head too: “no man of woman born.”
There’s no mastery of words necessary for this idea to spring forth, and thank some kind of god for that, because I might have never written my story if there were. But if the giants before me swam in the ocean, I’m in the shallows on shore, the water pooling behind from the waves they created. Plucking out the words and emphasis that suits the ideas in my head – if I could tell people only one thing about writing, I’d say to dive into the waters of those that came before and see what wonders – or horrors – lie beyond the deep.
Listen to the author reading this blog post. by Liz Walter It is very common to use prepositions and preposition-based phrases to talk about where a place is in relation to where you are yourself. This could be within a country, a region or a city. There are some subtle differences in the way …
Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for July 16, 2025 is:
abject • \AB-jekt\ • adjective
Abject usually describes things that are extremely bad or severe. It can also describe something that feels or shows shame, or someone lacking courage or strength.
// Happily, their attempts to derail the project ended in abject failure.
// The defendants were contrite, offering abject apologies for their roles in the scandal that cost so many their life savings.
// The author chose to cast all but the hero of the book as abject cowards.
“This moment ... points toward the book’s core: a question of how to distinguish tenderness from frugality. Is ‘Homework’ about a child who took a remarkably frictionless path, aided by a nation that had invested in civic institutions, from monetary hardship to the ivory tower? Merely technically. Is it a story of how members of a family, protected by a social safety net from abject desperation, developed different ideas about how to relate to material circumstance? We’re getting there.” — Daniel Felsenthal, The Los Angeles Times, 9 June 2025
Did you know?
We’re sorry to say you must cast your eyes down to fully understand abject: in Middle English the word described those lowly ones who are rejected and cast out. By the 15th century, it was applied as it still is today to anything that has sunk to, or exists in, a low state or condition; in modern use it often comes before the words poverty, misery, and failure. Applied to words like surrender and apology, it connotes hopelessness and humility. The word’s Latin source is the verb abicere, meaning “to throw away, throw down, overcome, or abandon.” Like reject, its ultimate root is the Latin verb jacere, meaning “to throw.” Subject is also from jacere, and we’ll leave you with that word as a way to change the subject.
When author Josh Rountree’s story just wasn’t quite working, he decided to change his perspective. Literally. Travel back in time in the Big Idea for his newest novel, The Unkillable Frank Lightning, and see how switching things up narratively ended up being the solution to his problem.
JOSH ROUNTREE:
Well, I’m knee deep in monsters now, aren’t I?
A lot of my Big Ideas these days seem to involve them. For a while now I’ve been working on a series of monster stories set in long ago Texas. I’ve tackled werewolves and snake-headed harvest gods. Vengeful mermaids and The Creature from the Black Lagoon. Now I’ve worked my way up to one of the greatest monsters of all time.
Frankenstein! (Cue lightning strike.)
Or Frankenstein’s monster, I guess.
My Big Idea for The Unkillable Frank Lightning was to tell a version of the Frankenstein story, set in the Old West. I had plenty I wanted to say about death. How breaking the fundamental laws of nature to bring a person back to life would be a really bad idea, with consequences that would reach far beyond the reanimated corpse and those responsible for his resurrection. Frank Lightning is not the only character in this story who has cheated death, and all carry that around like a weight on their souls. And I wanted to say a lot about the mythology of the Old West. How wild west shows and Hollywood movies have sold us an often sanitized version of the period, that centers the wrong heroes.
But also? I wanted to see my monster go on a rampage. I wanted to see what would happen when an unkillable person found himself in a gunfight. I wanted black magic and secret occult orders and townspeople with torches.
I wanted my monster to tell us his story.
But of course, the Big Idea doesn’t always unfold the way a writer expects it to. And the character you think is going to be at the center of it all isn’t always the voice that comes alive and demands to be heard. I worked several months, trying to tell this story through the monster’s point of view, and eventually realized it just wasn’t working. I tried alternating points of view, trying to tell the story through the eyes of various characters. But one voice, that of Catherine Coldbridge, spoke louder than all the rest. And I realized she was my protagonist. She was the character to tell this story.
Catherine is my “mad scientist” in this tale. My Dr. Frankenstein stand-in. She’s a doctor in the 1870’s, and she’s a member of an occult order called the Three Rose Temple. Catherine is an orphan, and when she loses her husband too, it causes her to make one terrible decision that will haunt her for decades.
Catherine is terribly flawed, and desperate to make amends. She is determined and practical and willing to forgive anyone but herself. She is an exceptionally strong woman who has, for a time, given up on her life and let the world ruin her. But as she beings to tell her story, Catherine is finally beginning to emerge from that sorry state, and planning to take control again. Catherine is endlessly fascinating to me, and as soon as she started telling the tale, it poured out of her, and it poured out of me, and I knew we were in this together.
Catherine Coldbridge is not our typical pulp western hero. But who needs more cowboys in white hats? Who needs another hard man with a thousand-yard stare to ride in and save the day?
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merriamwebster_feed) wrote2025-07-20 01:00 am
