Andrew R Gross

Tony wrote a novel.  It's an Iron Man novel, naturally, but it's really a stellar product that stands up whether you like the comic book character or not.  It's not confined to the typical superhero genre, either.  It's a psychological thriller with science fiction elements. archiveofourown.org/works/13791474 Check it out.  It's GOOD.

Last weekend, I went to the Women's March in Downtown LA.  While I was there, I had a specific goal.  For a while I'd thought that it was often frustrating how dependent protests were on media outlets to publicize them.  But after the protests over the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016 and 2017, I realized how critically damaging this reliance is.  It's not just about the visibility of activism: it's about publicizing the facts on the ground.  In the case of  the pipeline protests, stories came out about a woman suffering grave bodily harm when anti-riot ordinance malfunctioned and nearly took off her arm.  The police insisted that any injury had been the result of improvised explosives prepared by protesters.  This kind of uncertainty was shocking to me.  What the hell was going on in rural North Dakota?  Were protesters wildly exaggerating?  Was a peaceful protest being met with state violence and covered up?  I just wanted to...

I told Julie about a premise I read online and she wrote it out.  Take a look on her blog, here: www.ialbatross.com

I'd like to give a quick plug to a colleague, Mike Lee, who appeared on the podcast Talk Nerdy with Cara Santa Maria in episode 67 last week.  In it, Cara asks Mike to explain what we might expect life to look like on other worlds and how diving to the bottom of the ocean on Earth informs those predictions.  Mike is a graduate student at USC and a collaborator, and he speaks very well.  Follow the link and have a listen. In related news, NASA has approved the Europa Clipper mission to proceed.  Europa is a moon of Jupiter which has been considered by many to be the most likely home to extraterrestrial life in our solar system.  This reputation was built on the results of a flyby by the Galileo spacecraft two decades ago which provided evidence of a gigantic ocean beneath the surface of the moon.  Finally, a dedicated mission will provide us with new information on which to improve our predictions.  You can find more info at the links below: https:...

Another one of Julie's short stories was picked up for The NoSleep podcast.  This one is called "A Short-cut Home", and I think it is objectively better than Mailbox in the Woods.  I don't have any additional cute stories this time, so just read it here or download the podcast here .  Again, props to the people who made the podcast for their high production value.

This week, a podcast presented a short story Julie wrote several months ago.  It was a post she made on reddit.com's horror writing page, r/nosleep.  Out of the blue, she was contacted a few weeks ago by a podcast called the NoSleep Podcast ( thenosleeppodcast.com ) which presents short horror fiction from reddit.  The gave her $25 as compensation, but the far greater benefit is that they read it really well.  You can read the story she wrote here , but I encourage you to buy the podcast because it has great production value.  For $1.50 you get six stories adding up to 2 hours, which is enough horror to carry you half-way from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. There is an extra layer to her story, too, which unfortunately no one can really appreciate but us.  You see, Julie, Jack, and myself have all gotten into a show called "Gravity Falls" this past year.  It's a great cartoon on the Disney channel about fraternal twins spending the summer with their great...