June 10, 2025

Mark Twain fled to Berlin in 1891 with his wife and three little daughters. He had earned a great deal of money from Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and his other writing and lectures, but he invested in ventures that lost most of it and the family was short of funds. So in the fall…

April 8, 2025

We’re going to dive down a rabbit hole into the world of collecting Lewis Carroll books. You know the phrase “going down a rabbit hole” comes from Alice In Wonderland, right? Book collecting has been called “a gentle madness.” Maybe you’ve known a collector – but do you really know what specific insanity drove that…

January 28, 2025

I’m going to change what arrives in your mailbox in a very minor way. You don’t have to do anything except whitelist my emails when they get sent to junk mail. (Gmail sometimes sends them to “Promotions” for some reason.) Here’s the short version. I’m retired from consulting but I’m still going to write about…

November 26, 2024

The Avatar Murders received a starred review from IndieReader. “Jim Rowson’s THE AVATAR MURDERS is a winning combination of classic noir and hard sci-fi. Augmented reality is already appearing in everyday life, so its use here is surprisingly grounding; none of the uses in THE AVATAR MURDERS seem far out of reach. A society built on…