The Nomad and the Olive Branch

Few trilogies espouse a universe so encompassing, engrossing, engaging, and breathtaking as Mass Effect, a franchise that combines the best of classic space opera and traditional science fiction elements such as cyberpunk and Lovecraftian horror into one genre-defying masterpiece that draws influence from media greats such as Blade Runner, Dune, Star Trek, Star Wars, and Deus Ex. The trilogy was an absolute blast to play, with its story of memorable characters, beautiful locales, and myriad social, political, and religious themes. It is no surprise that it is deemed as one of the greatest if not the greatest science fiction franchise of our generation . It comes to no surprise that a universe this big has other products. They already have an animated movie being released and have published several Dark Horse comics to date. While tie-in novels are considered supplementary and not stand-alones, this set of books deserves special mention for several reasons. First, the books are

This is the first post in a series of posts that deals with books I have read or come across. The first book to receive this treatment is "A History of the Arab Peoples" by the late Lebanese scholar Albert Hourani. I finished reading this book about a year ago and I remember feeling somewhat underwhelmed by its premise. The book serves as an excellent primer to Arabs at the advent of Islam, but falls short of giving us as detailed a history as possible about Arabs prior to the coming of the world's second largest religious group. It seems to run on the hypothesis that modern Arab history started with the coming of Islam, and that the Arabs have had no history prior to this. The same has been said of the Palestinians, who are accused of having no history prior to 1948. The presence of a people and the socio-political climate that governed them in the past is just as important as the one in the present. In fact, it can be argued that much of what we see in Arab society

Ever since man invented the wheel, technology as a whole has advanced farther than any of us can ever fathom. The wheel became the cart and the cart became the chariot and the chariot became the carriage and the carriage became the car. The glider got an engine which took it to space. The brick oven started to run on electricity and not on gas. Not long after, it also got the power to emit microwave radiation and the chance to blow up bowls of spaghetti. The pen gave way to the typewriter, and ENIAC gave way to the laptop computer. Writing on stone was later inscribed on leaves, papyrus, paper, and the Word document. Indeed, it would seem that technology has become almost synonymous with human progress. As much as some tried to use that technology to benefit the working man's daily life, much of it has been done for the sole purpose of ruining it altogether, and I'm not just talking about taxes and the mail delivery system. I'm talking about the other thing in life that

A common yet grave fallacy is to assume that (the actions of) (part of) the infrastructure of a particular country at a particular time and place is derived from a singular cause, of which a metaphysical nature attributed to said cause would be even more so. That said, attributing (a perception of) (failed) politics as an "outflow" of a country's culture is in my honest opinion a crock of bull. I'm not denying that culture and politics are related: there clearly is a relationship between the two in the broader historical context. However, this reductionist outlook panders to more than your garden variety racism, itself being built on misinterpretations and misunderstandings. Why is that? First of all, consider that politics and culture are mutually exclusive concepts, although their definitions may not appear to be so on the surface. Politics (according to the pseudo-omniscient Wikipedia [1] ) is a process by which groups of people make collective decisions. The