Book Review: The Big Gang Theory Pop Culture Reference Guide

It was 2007. The era of Must-See TV had ended. There was no Friends, no Will and Grace, no Seinfeld. The broadcast airwaves were being ruled by reality television series like American Idol and Big Brother, coupled with the expanded offerings of cable networks. Only CBS was seeing some success with the traditional multi-camera sitcom structure through shows like How I Met Your Mother and Two and a Half Men. Into that very lineup, sandwiched between the two hit series, came a fresh take on the sitcom setup: What would happen if two brainy nerds found themselves living next door to a beautiful woman? And television history was made, while educating readers about pop culture and world events.

Book Review: Alternate Worlds

Alternate Worlds is a the Gathering memoir written by Brian Schneider, one of the game’s early R&D leads, about the fun and merit of growing up a gamer. Consider it a love letter to CCG, to gamers, and to anyone who woke up one day and thought, “I miss my friends.”

The book itself is a “Magic deck” of sixty short, delightful, stories -- all tales about lessons learned along the way. All profits from Alternate Worlds will be donated periodically to nonprofit organizations of the highest need.

Alternate Worlds: A Memoir From the Early Days of Playing and Making Magic: The Gathering was published November 2025.

Book Review: Generation F*cked

Cancel your subscriptions. Make coffee at home. Go to college. Don’t rent. Buy a house to build equity. That advice was built for a different economy. Today, those choices come with far less certainty.

With rising inflation, unaffordable housing, stagnant wages, and crushing student debt, the traditional ‘rules of success’ for many working- and middle-class young adults no longer lead to the outcomes once promised. This leaves younger generations searching for strategies that actually work in today’s world.

The current system isn’t sustainable. By pairing big-picture clarity with actionable, ground-level guidance, Generation F*cked offers a path toward a more stable, fair, and achievable future, serving as a guide for generations navigating a radically different economy.

Book Review: I Am the Night

At a time when televised cartoons—especially within the superhero genre—were often over-looked, Batman: The Animated Series introduced an entire generation of soon-to-be Batman fanatics to the caped crusader. The series triumphed into what is largely considered one of the best superhero cartoons of all time, and the best depiction of Batman mythology in any format.

But the road to genre-defying and genre-defining success was hardly guaranteed. Along the way, co-creator Bruce Timm and his team of artists at Warner Bros Animation battled a landscape that was often antithetical to their aims with Batman. Internal struggles led the writing team and the network to debate everything (literally everything) about how best to depict Batman—from whether or not the eco-friendly hero would have a recycling bin in the Batcave to how many women he was allowed to kiss onscreen.

Book Review: What Happened to College?

A decade after his landmark book on faculty politics, Neil Gross decided it was time to give those with the most at stake a chance to speak for themselves. Beginning in the spring of 2024, he launched a massive investigation into how our polarized politics have remade the college experience, interviewing students across the country and polling thousands more. He looked at liberal arts colleges, state schools, faith-based institutions, and elite universities and combed through studies tracking everything from campus dating habits to changes in syllabi.

What he found was startling: Undergraduates today are choosing their schools, their friends, their partners, their activities—even their majors—on the basis of their political beliefs to a degree unimaginable ten years ago, with the goal of interacting as little as possible with anyone whose views don’t line up with their own. Popular campus dating apps invite you to swipe left if you don’t like someone’s political profile—a metaphor for today’s college experience writ large. Instead of resisting this trend, some faculty and administrators encouraged it, creating a cloistered environment where students could avoid uncomfortable disagreement.

Book Review: Sit Write Here

In Sit Write Here, award-winning novelist and certified mindfulness instructor April Dávila presents a groundbreaking approach to writing that integrates the practice of Insight Meditation. Drawing from her personal journey and professional experience, Dávila reveals how mindfulness can help writers improve their craft and navigate common challenges such as writer's block, self-doubt, and ubiquitous distractions. Through practical exercises and relatable anecdotes, she demonstrates how cultivating present-moment awareness can enhance creativity and bring greater ease to the writing process.

Book Review: Too Much Too Young

In 1979, 2 Tone exploded into the national conscience as records by The Specials, The Selecter, Madness, The Beat, and The Bodysnatchers burst onto the charts and a youth movement was born. 2 Tone was black and a multi-racial force of British and Caribbean island musicians singing about social issues, racism, class and gender struggles. It spoke of injustices in society and took fight against right wing extremism.

The music of 2 Tone was white youth learning to dance to the infectious rhythm of ska and reggae; and crossed with a punk attitude to create an original hybrid. The idea of 2 Tone was born in Coventry, masterminded by a middle-class art student raised in the church. Jerry Dammers had a vision of an English Motown.

Book Review: Eternally Electric

Debbie Gibson was just sixteen when she released her multi-platinum debut album Out of the Blue and recorded “Foolish Beat” in 1988, making her the youngest person to ever write, produce, and perform a Billboard Hot 100 chart-topper. A child actress who became the original pop princess, Debbie had full creative control over her music and, when that no longer aligned with a transitioning arts scene, she went on to star in Broadway’s Les Misérables, Beauty and the Beast, and Cabaret, as well as in the London production of Grease. Yet, for all the accolades and achievements, her success came at a high price.

Book Review: Future Boy

In early 1985, Michael J. Fox was one of the biggest stars on television. His world was about to get even bigger, but only if he could survive the kind of double duty unheard of in Hollywood. Fox's days were already dedicated to rehearsing and taping the hit sitcom Family Ties, but then the chance of a lifetime came his way. Soon, he committed his nights to a new time-travel adventure film being directed by Robert Zemeckis and produced by Steven Spielberg, Back to the Future. Sitcom during the day, movie at night - day after day, for months.

Fox's nightly commute from a soundstage at Paramount to the back lot at Universal Studios, from one dream job to another, would become his own space-time continuum. It was in this time portal that Alex P. Keaton handed the baton to Marty McFly while Michael J. Fox tried to catch a few minutes of sleep. Alex's bravado, Marty's flair, and Fox's comedic virtuosity all swirled together to create something truly special.

Book Review: Prompt Me to Write

With rich story ideas, advice on pitfalls to avoid, and examples and quotes from the great writers of today and the legends of the literary world, Prompt Me to Write stands out from other books of writing prompts. Each prompt and exercise is designed to both spark ideas and help you develop your writing. It includes:

• • Original and varied writing prompts, with a final section where best-selling authors each contribute their own story ideas.
• • Full-page writing exercises to help you build worlds, craft fascinating characters, and develop page-turning plots.
• • Photos and illustrations by Vocal Vagabond that add extra inspiration and help clarify complex points. These are full colour in the hardback and black and white in the paperback.

Every chapter includes bite-sized theory so, with a little persistence, you will master the craft and create a collection of stories or a finished novel even if you only have a few minutes a day.

Book Review: The Emotion Thesaurus (2nd edition)

One of the biggest struggles for writers is how to convey emotion to readers in a unique and compelling way. When showing our characters’ feelings, we often use the first idea that comes to mind, and they end up smiling, nodding, and frowning too much.

If you need inspiration for creating characters’ emotional responses that are personalized and evocative, this ultimate show-don’t-tell guide for emotion can help. It includes:

• body language cues, thoughts, and visceral responses for 130 emotions that cover a range of intensity from mild to severe, providing innumerable options for individualizing a character’s reactions
• a breakdown of the biggest emotion-related writing problems and how to overcome them
• advice on what should be done before drafting to make sure your characters’ emotions will be realistic and consistent
• instruction for how to show hidden feelings and emotional subtext through dialogue and nonverbal cues

Book Review: Plotting Your Fantasy Novel

Do you have great worldbuilding and character ideas, but don’t know what should actually happen in your story? Have you started writing a book, only to get stuck halfway through? Do you have cool scene concepts, but don’t know how to link them together, or what to do between your big plot moments? If you said yes to any of those questions, then this book is for you.

Following a 9-Point Plot Structure, writers are show how to build their characters and plots in unison, allowing the stories to unfold in an organic, cohesive fasion. This process draws from the author's experience publishing over four fantasy novels, teaching 5000+ writers through live classes and self-paced courses, and making hundreds of in-depth YouTube videos about fantasy writing.

Book Review: Trudeau and Doonesbury

For more than 50 years, Doonesbury has helped drive the national conversation. The first comic strip to win a Pulitzer Prize, Garry Trudeau’s sprawling narrative featuring a host of beloved characters has reflected America back to itself, capturing the highlights and lowlights of American politics and culture with wit and penetrating insight. And as Doonesbury’s characters aged alongside their creator, Trudeau became one of the preeminent chroniclers of the Baby Boom generation.

Biographer Joshua Kendall tells the story of the cartoonist and what drove him to put pen to paper. He traces Trudeau’s boyhood in the Adirondack Mountains, his teenage angst in prep school, and his formative years at Yale, where he began drawing his iconic strip. And he shows the changing world it reflected; Doonesbury began appearing in papers nationwide in 1970, and big events, from Watergate to the the war in Vietnam, fueled its popularity and its significance.

Book Review: The Fiction Blueprint

You have a story in your head. Maybe it’s been there for months. Years. You’ve read craft books. Watched videos. Joined writing communities. But the story stays stuck—because you don’t have a clear path from idea to finished book.

Ian Stevens walked that path nine times. Along the way, he kept notes—what worked, what didn’t, what got him unstuck when everything felt broken. Those notes became a course: The Fiction Blueprint. It covers everything from first idea to published book. 13 modules, templates, and the exact process he used.

Beginner, Intermediate, or Advanced — start where you are. Go deeper when ready.

Book Review: Next Level

In video games creativity isn't just seen – it's played – from exploring endless landscapes, to diving into character details, to immersing ourselves in unpredictable narratives. Yet these elements are often the result of procedural generation – the creative use of algorithms to design game content. Procedural generation is the secret behind some of the biggest hits in video game history, from genre-defying titles in the 1980s, to the most famous blockbusters of today.

Next Level demystifies the collection of algorithms and procedural techniques that are often as mysterious as the things they create. Written by game designer and creative AI researcher Mike Cook, it takes us on a tour of generative systems past and present, exploring how they work, the artistic uses they have in some of our favourite games and how procedural generation didn't just change how we design games, but how we think about creativity.

Book Review: Mighty Real

From the underground dancefloors of the Seventies to the global charts of the Nineties, LGBTQ artists and audiences shaped music’s sound, style, and spirit. In Mighty Real, veteran journalist Barry Walters chronicles its LGBTQ history from the Velvet Underground to the 21st century’s dawn as he honors the artists who redefined gender, defied tradition, and dared to challenge sexual norms with the help of a record business that wasn’t as straight as commonly believed.

Drawing on his decades as a New York- and San Francisco-based music critic, Walters examines how LGBTQ musicians, music industry executives, and fans reshaped the mainstream. He connects the dots between David Bowie’s dazzling reinventions, Grace Jones’s androgynous glamor, Prince’s boundary-shattering sexuality, and the radical candor of the Indigo Girls to prove they’re all doing the same thing: fighting oppression.

Book Review: The Tribe and I Have Spoken

Rob Cesternino has probably talked more Survivor than any other person on the planet. After playing in Survivor: The Amazon and All-Stars, Rob built a community amongst Survivor’s online fans with Rob Has a Podcast. Now, this foremost scholar of the show takes readers from the beaches of Borneo on the first season all the way to the landmark fiftieth season. This cleverly illustrated ode to the show includes “The Heroes and Villains Hall of Fame,” the greatest “Watercooler Watershed Moments” in the show’s history, and Rob’s “Ultimate Survivor Playbook” (no refunds) to winning that million-dollar prize.

Whether you’re a superfan or a first timer, The Tribe and I Have Spoken is a must-read celebration for anyone who counts themselves as part of this passionate tribe of fans from around the world.

Book Review: Happiness Included

Recognized world-wide as Jan Brady, the wonderfully misunderstood middle sister on television’s The Brady Bunch, actress Eve Plumb has embraced the association that seemed destined at age 10 when she was cast on that show. The iconic 1970s TV series has been in perpetual reruns for five decades and is well known by three generations of children and adults. Her engaging memoir reveals that her stint on The Brady Bunch was only the beginning of her TV and theater career, a young lady with the confidence and spunk that her on-screen character often humorously lacked.

Today, Eve is a talented visual artist, with thirty-five years of experience, whose oil paintings have been displayed and sold in galleries here in the U.S. and Europe. Chock-full of Brady Bunch nostalgia and the skinny on countless classic TV shows with recollections straight from the set, this is Eve Plumb as you’ve never seen her.

Book Review: The Superman Wars

Almost everyone knows about the man from Krypton who, disguised as mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent working with the fearless Lois Lane, fights for the vulnerable and the oppressed. But few know the truth about this indelible character’s creation. From mobster tactics to decades-long courtroom drama, a beloved American myth was born, betrayed, and eventually reclaimed—seventy years later.

New witnesses, unpublished manuscripts, personal letters, and more reveal the complex and dramatic history of Superman and his creator, Jerry Siegel. This is a David and Goliath clash with twists, turns, and devastating upheavals. An underdog tale of a creator who fought for his rights and finally found redemption in his battle for truth, justice, and the American Way. A story that has never been fully told.

Book Review: Arsenio - A Memoir

Arsenio Hall holds a uniquely prominent place in American culture—celebrated late-night host and comedic actor, famed for starring roles in the cultural touchstones Coming to America and Harlem Nights. Now, he pulls back the curtain and takes us to a different time in Hollywood. Iconic scenes include: starting out as a young magician in Cleveland; hosting his first talk show in the basement of his apartment building when he was in elementary school; cutting his teeth at the world-famous Comedy Store in Hollywood, learning about comedy and life from legendary comedian Richard Pryor; forming lifelong bonds with legendary icons Muhammad Ali, Luther Vandross, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Eddie Murphy; tasting superstar success with Coming to America, the film that preceded The Arsenio Hall Show; conducting unforgettable, groundbreaking interviews with Magic Johnson, Bill Clinton, Tupac Shakur, Maya Angelou, Madonna, and Minister Louis Farrakhan; rescuing a family from a home-fire with Jay Leno; sharing hot sauces and blackjack with Patti LaBelle; and chilling with Prince.