The Lottery by Shirley Jackson

The Lottery Causes Outrage

First published in 1948 in The New Yorker, The Lottery both caused outrage and brought fame to Shirley Jackson. The New Yorker got more letters about this story than any other story in its history.

Justifiably so. The Lottery is a horrifying story and perfectly…

Long Meg And Her Daughters

Long Meg and her daughters is a large stone circle that lies some miles outside Penrith in Cumbria near the village of Little Salkeld. It’s the sixth-largest stone circle in North-West Europe. …

You may be familiar with the movie franchise, Men In Black (I-III), but this article is not about that. If you were hoping it was, stop reading now and go and read “Five Ways I Made $350,000 While Asleep in Bali.”

This story is about real Men In Black, or…

Can You Get What You Want Just By Wanting It?

Even those who believe that magic works would say it’s not as simple as merely wanting something and then getting it. If that were true, I’d have been happily married to Kate Bush since 1981. …

Enargia: The Ancient Art of Conjuring a Scene

You all know what enargia is even if you’d never heard the word. Enargia is a Greek word used in the art of rhetoric to describe how an author conjures a picture with all the associated emotions to charm a reader and hook them into a scene.

Let’s look at…

Curses, Lies, and Pure Baloney

The Exorcist was a horror novel by William Peter Blatty published in 1971 that quickly became a best-seller. In the story, the Mesopotamian demon Pazuzu comes to America and, with the height of bad manners, possesses a young girl.

An exorcism takes place, and all goes rather dreadfully badly. People…

What I Found Out Surprised Me

Why do people use nootropics anyway? Nootropics are a disparate bunch of substances, some are plant extracts, some are synthesized compounds, and yet others are purely pharmaceuticals and available only on prescription.

Taken together, these substances are called nootropics, on the model of the class of drugs known as psychotropics…

Here’s what my Nootropic Rhodiola Self-Experiment Showed Me.

Previously, I experimented with the nootropics L-theanine to aid and bacopa to promote memory. There were mixed results, but on the whole, they did seem to do something.

The next nootropic I tried was Rhodiola. …