Today’s theme ended up being less Labor Day than Katrina Day. But I suppose that happened with lots of people this weekend as we think less about a day without work as people without jobs, let alone homes. After days of reading about the suffering in Katrina’s wake tonight I …

Jack Shafer of Slate and Ann Gerhart of the Washington Post are doing excellent work amid this chaos.

I don’t know about you, but slash fiction is something I’ve been blissfully ignorant of. I’m usually pretty open minded but slash fiction involving underage characters seems, well, pretty weird to me. I mean, I know a person or two who played with this genre&#8212explained at Wikipedia&#8212 particularly with X-Files …

Predictably disgusting but educational

Recently I read the cover story in Newsweek sensationalizing the spread of meth across the country. Publications that should know better have done a terrible job covering the issue, many calling it an “epidemic”. For more on that see Slate’s good piece on the topic of why drug reporting is, …

I was going to wait until next week to share any more reviews but after being asked here about my thoughts on Moore, I thought I’d post this one too. In a nutshell, I think this is a great documentary and Michael Moore is a talented director and editor. My …

I have seen some excellent media coverage of the storm disaster and its impact and a great deal of terribly sensationalistic coverage. I thought I’d take a moment to point to two stories that I think are excellent, the kind of journalism I would have been proud to have run …

Robert Parker is from the old school of crime writing, but he is still a master, and with his latest book, Cold Service, he seems to return to the top of his game. While reading this, I came across several interesting sites relating to Parker. Between those sites and reviews …

I’m excited to share my first book-related item here. I’m a life-long reader and writer. Heck, I dream in words and get bored by instrumental music. I’m even currently trying to do a book discussion at my blog about the new Harry Potter book. I used to read 100-150 books …

This is my first post for Blogcritics.org and I’m kind of excited about that. I’m a reporter-turned-educator in the middle of a career change from journalism to elementary education. I write book and movie reviews for a blog I started partially to fill the need to keep writing. Time to …