How Science Fiction Got Its Start with Frakenstein

It’s not completely fanciful to say that science fiction began with three things: a dead frog, a volcano, and a teenage bride. The dead frog was one that an Italian physician named Luigi Galvani was experimenting with in the 1780s, when he found that a mild electric shock could cause the frog’s leg to twitch. It was just an induced muscle reflex, but it suggested that there might be a connection between electricity and life. The volcano was Mount Tambora in Indonesia, which exploded in ...

 Moderate Progressive Politics

We would, though, like to suggest that in some key areas, the people who are defining themselves as the progressive wing of the Democratic Party — identified with Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) — are embracing principles that are not genuinely progressive. Specifically: They want to enlarge government entitlements and hand out the benefits as broadly as possible — free college, free health care, expanded Social Security — regardless of need or available r...

 Anti-Suburbia Books from the 1950s

Mary and John are the unfortunate (fictional) protagonists of The Crack in the Picture Window, published in 1957 by John Keats, a journalist at the now defunct Washington Daily News. A lacerating (and very funny) indictment of postwar suburbs as "fresh-air slums," Keats’s polemic sold millions of copies in paperback. It revolves around the tragicomic story of the Drones, a nice young couple gulled, first, into buying a box at Rolling Knolls Estates, and then into thinking a larger, more e...