Articles

Let me admit that I’m a nerd who wonders about some weird things sometimes. Just for fun… What if the United States redrew its borders so that each state had the same population? In 2016, the United States had an estimated population of over 323 million people.  That number divided equally among 50 states equals about […]

  After watching the 2009 film The Road and being so moved by the realism and bleakness of the movie, I hoped to read the novel someday.  Seeing that the novel won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction made me wonder if I was missing out by never reading a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel in my life. There […]

  Want to consider yourself “well-read” but don’t know where to start?  Amazon.com compiled a list of 100 Books to Read in a Lifetime.  For most people, reading 100 books is too lofty a goal to seem realistic.  For this list, I’ve pored through both Amazon’s and Goodreads’ lists to come up with just the […]

  Any native English-speaker who has studied Mandarin Chinese should be familiar with the Pinyin system for romanizing Chinese characters.  Did you know there’s also a romanization system for Taiwanese?  It’s called Peh-oe-ji (pronounced Beh-weh-jee). Taiwanese is a dialect of Chinese similar to the Min Nan Chinese dialect spoken in Fujian Province of southeastern China.  The official language […]

  As I was transitioning to a full-time writing career, I read a lot about it. At one point, I was reading a non-fiction book every week or two.  While most of the books I read were general books on the nebulous topic of “success,” many were explicitly about writing.  Here is a summary of the […]

  Back in 2005, Blockbuster Video was a juggernaut of a company, and a small upstart called Netflix was rapidly growing into its space.  That was also the year I tried Netflix, then enthusiastically went back to Blockbuster because they had the better deal. Netflix proved to have a more solid foundation than Blockbuster thought.  Less […]