Movie #7 of 2025: Babylon 5: The River of Souls (1998) I’ve been watching my way through the last season of Babylon 5, and the viewing guide that I’m following situates this film (and the later one The Legend of the Rangers) just before the finale. Plotwise, that checks out, as the events here do …
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Book #99 of 2025: Death at the White Hart by Chris Chibnall This 2025 title is the debut novel of author Chris Chibnall, better known as the former showrunner behind Doctor Who and — more relevant here — Broadchurch. Like the latter show, it’s a murder mystery set in a coastal English village and investigated …
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Book #98 of 2025: A Burning in the Bones by Scott Reintgen (Waxways #3) This loose fantasy trilogy has offered diminishing returns for me as a reader, and this final volume again fails to reach the propulsive heights of its survival horror debut. Instead we have more of the generic political intrigues from the second …
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TV #31 of 2025: Reservation Dogs, season 2 Still looser in its plotting than I’d ideally prefer, which is especially a gamble with such a short season. Two episodes this year ditch the main cast almost entirely to develop peripheral figures in the ensemble, to somewhat mixed effect. (The rez aunties cutting loose at a …
Book #97 of 2025: Doctor Who: Spectral Scream by Hannah Fergesen This Doctor Who novel was released a few days before the end of the most recent season of the show, so as expected, it doesn’t take any events from the last few episodes into consideration. Instead it appears to be set sometime between 2×2 …
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Book #96 of 2025: King of Ashes by S. A. Cosby Another excellent slice of southern crime fiction from author S. A. Cosby, this time riffing rather obviously off The Godfather: an adult son comes home and gets increasingly involved in the local criminal activity, despite people repeatedly cautioning him that he could do so …
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Book #95 of 2025: Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson An intentionally-provocative political treatise that attempts to diagnose from the center-left why modern America seems to underperform in arenas from housing to manufacturing to scientific innovation. I would say it’s written primarily for Democratic-leaning readers who are open to intra-party criticism, as authors Ezra …
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Book #94 of 2025: Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid As fully expected, she’s done it again: author Taylor Jenkins Reid has once more delivered a triumphantly emotional novel about fictional historical celebrities, this time turning her attention to the second class of female American astronauts in the early 1980s. (Trailblazer Sally Ride is at least …
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Book #93 of 2025: Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service edited by Michael Lewis This 2025 title — a collection of previously-published Washington Post articles — is an attempt to put a face to the American federal government and the ranks of civil servants who work on complicated problems for immeasurable benefit …
TV #30 of 2025: Leverage: Redemption, season 3 Another fine but generally unremarkable run of this legacy sequel, which by now has thoroughly cemented its tone as a zanier version of the original parent show. The disguises for the cons are broader and the villains a lot more gullible, which means that the heroes rarely …
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