Reading Round Up for January 2021

This month’s Reading Round Up offers a collection of some of the best articles I read, covering topics including NYC food delivery workers, Black time travelers, and She Who Must Not Be Named. Plus a list of my own written work. Get those tabs ready!

My Writing

2020 list: 2020 Totals: Television & Miniseries

2020 list: 2020 Totals: Movies

2020 list: 2020 Totals: Books & Comics

2020 list: 2020 Totals: Short Speculative Fiction

Book review: Truth as Fiction: When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain by Nghi Vo

Short fiction spotlight: Must-Read Speculative Short Fiction: December 2020

Book review: Portals and Horse Girls: Across the Green Grass Fields by Seanan McGuire

YA spotlight: Mechas and Monsters: New Young Adult SFF for January and February 2021

Other Works

“Tearing Down an Urban Highway Can Give Rise to a Whole New City” by Alex Marshall for CityLab: “I’m standing in the middle of a five-mile linear park in downtown Seoul called Cheonggyecheon. Around me, children play and laugh beside a man-made gurgling stream, which includes remnants of the natural one that used to run here. This is the new reality created in the mid-2000s, when Seoul tore down an elevated, interstate-style highway built in the late 1960s through the heart of downtown.”

““Many Students Are Now Taught in School to Hate Their Own Country”” by Jonathan Wilson for Blue Book Diaries: “Fundamentally, the “1776 Report” is about America’s history teachers and how they do their work. When Donald Trump signed the executive order creating the 1776 Commission, he asserted that “many students are now taught in school to hate their own country.” That incendiary statement is the heart of the controversy over the “1776 Report.””

“The Factories In The Camps” by Alison Killing and Megha Rajagopalan for Buzzfeed News: “In August, BuzzFeed News uncovered hundreds of compounds in Xinjiang bearing the hallmarks of prisons or detention camps, many built during the last three years in a rapid escalation of China’s campaign against Muslim minorities including Uighurs, Kazakhs, and others. A new analysis shows that at least 135 of these compounds also hold factory buildings. Forced labor on a vast scale is almost certainly taking place inside facilities like these, according to researchers and interviews with former detainees.”

“The Waters Of This Place: Aotearoa New Zealand Speculative Fiction” by AJ Fitzwater for Strange Horizons: “The 78th Worldcon, CoNZealand, should have been the perfect platform for us to show the world our uniqueness. Anticipated for a decade, planned for two years, not even virtual delivery of a convention in pandemic times (which other con-runners have pivoted to with flair) could have anticipated how badly things went.”

“‘We’ll Never Make That Kind of Movie Again’” by Bilge Ebiri for Vulture: “Racing against an impossible deadline rumored to be imposed by an impending Happy Meal deal, the final film was, in the words of one its co-creators, the result of the “funniest writers’ room you could possibly have. A table of people who had nothing to lose.””