Hugin & Munin Publishing

Pierce Brown’s Red Rising begins as what looks like a familiar story: revenge. In many ways, it reads like a science fiction reimagining of The Count of Monte Cristo . But where Edmond Dantès is betrayed by jealous rivals and corrupt officials, Darrow’s betrayal is civilizational. The injustice is not personal—it is systemic. Seven hundred years before the novel opens, humanity colonized Luna and reorganized itself into a rigid hierarchy known as the Society. This system divides humanity into fourteen “Colors,” each engineered and conditioned for specific roles. At the top stand the Golds—physically larger, stronger, and trained from birth to rule. At the bottom are the Reds, expendable laborers told comforting lies about their place in the grand project of terraforming. Darrow, a sixteen-year-old Red helium-3 miner on Mars, discovers that the world he has been taught to believe in is a fiction. After his wife Eo publicly protests the system and is executed, Darrow is drawn into the ...

I just watched the first episodes of Young Sherlock , and while it is still far too early for a full review, the show left me with enough impressions to justify a few reflections. Sherlock Holmes has been adapted so many times that any new interpretation inevitably invites comparison. Even a promising first episode must stand in the shadow of more than a century of adaptations. The premise of the series is simple but potentially very interesting. Instead of presenting the already legendary consulting detective, the show explores Sherlock during his youth, before he becomes the figure we recognize from the stories of Arthur Conan Doyle . The series follows a teenage Sherlock navigating school, friendships, and the first mysteries that begin shaping his analytical mind. It is loosely inspired by the Young Sherlock Holmes , which similarly imagine Holmes’ formative years and early adventures. In this version, the focus is less on the famous detective solving intricate cases and more on ...

Whatever one thinks of Elon Musk —his personality, his politics, or his online presence—it’s difficult to dismiss the scale of what he has helped build. He was a co-founder of PayPal (via X.com), later led Tesla, Inc. to global prominence, founded SpaceX, and has since been involved in ventures like Neuralink and xAI . Some of these came after he had already made and multiplied his fortune—but that doesn’t make the technical ambition any less real. Eric Berger’s Liftoff focuses not on the larger-than-life mythology, but on the fragile, uncertain early years of SpaceX. And that is precisely what makes it so compelling. The Early Days: Intensity and Belief One of the most fascinating parts of the book is Berger’s description of Musk’s early hiring interviews. The questions were technical, probing, and often intense. Musk wasn’t just looking for résumés—he was looking for people who understood first principles, who could derive answers from physics rather than recite them from memory...

Rewatching True Detective season two is a reminder of just how much expectations shape reception. Coming off the near-mythic status of the first season, this follow-up was never going to have an easy time. Season one had already cemented itself as something close to prestige television canon, and anything that did not closely resemble it was bound to feel like a disappointment to many viewers—including, at the time, myself. Season two does share some structural DNA with its predecessor. Like season one, the story operates across two timelines, but this time the gap is measured in days rather than decades. The narrative unfolds largely in a linear fashion, without the framing device of interrogations and retrospective storytelling. The temporal shift happens roughly halfway through the season, and when it does, the tone of the series changes dramatically. Up until that point, the show initially presents itself as a relatively conventional crime thriller centered on a homicide investi...

I read The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson about a year after it was published and immediately loved it. For reasons I can’t quite explain—perhaps the long gap before the sequel—it took me much longer to pick up the following volumes. But the first book has lingered in my mind in a way few modern fantasy novels have. Revisiting similar themes recently, particularly while reading Red Rising by Pierce Brown , reminded me just how striking Dickinson’s debut really is. Both novels center on infiltrating an empire to destroy it from within. But the tools, tone, and philosophy could not be more different. The Girl Who Swore to Break an Empire The novel opens on the island of Taranoke, where young Baru Cormorant lives with her family—until the Imperial Republic of Falcrest arrives. The empire, often called the Masquerade for the distinctive masks worn by its officials, annexes the island, executes one of Baru’s fathers, and begins remaking the culture in its own image. Hygiene, ri...

Reading The Age-Proof Brain by Marc Milstein felt like stepping into a summary of how much our understanding of the brain and body has changed over the last twenty years. What strikes me most is not just the individual findings, but how dramatically the overall perspective has shifted. We’ve moved from thinking in silos—heart health, brain health, metabolism, immunity—to seeing the body as one deeply interconnected system. One of the clearest examples of this shift is the microbiome. Twenty years ago, bacteria were mostly something to eliminate. Today, we understand that we live in symbiosis with trillions of microorganisms that influence everything from digestion to inflammation to cognitive performance. Milstein highlights how gut health and brain health are intertwined, part of what’s now often called the “gut-brain axis.” That idea alone feels transformative. It’s not just about avoiding illness—it’s about cultivating an internal ecosystem. And when you start thinking about how de...

It had probably been more than a decade since I last read Jim Butcher ’s The Dresden Files . At some point in 2024, I decided to start over from the beginning. The first four books went down quickly. Then came a long pause. I didn’t pick up Death Masks until May 2025, and only recently finished Blood Rites . I had already revisited Dead Beat and Proven Guilty as standalones before starting the reread, since I’ve long considered them the peak of the series. They’re still relatively fresh in my mind. The question now is whether that “peak” holds up—or whether nostalgia has been doing some heavy lifting. Rereading a long-running series years later is a strange experience. You don’t just revisit the story—you revisit the person you were when you first read it. The Capture Problem One thing that stood out more this time around is how often Harry gets captured. It’s not literally every book—but it’s frequent enough to feel formulaic. Harry is overpowered, restrained, put into an elaborat...