Frederik Pohl's Blog, page 18

I don’t know whether you guys know it or not, but there are quite a lot of you — enough anyway to interest some advertisers into trying to wheedle you into buying their wares. Right at the moment we’ve been offered a contract to pay us money for the privilege of posting their ads in [...]

He’s the Best Government Employee We’ve Got What is it that Republicans hate so much about the mailman? It isn’t that he’s a drain on the taxpayers’ money: since 1971 he hasn’t taken a nickel of it. The government no longer pays postal salaries. The mailmen pay them themselves, with the money they get by [...]

  “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” —Frederick Douglass

A.E. van Vogt, who was born in Canada on this date in 1912 but moved early to Southern California and never left, became a major sf writer with almost his first story and remained so through the rest of the Campbelll revolution. That first story was “Black Destroyer,” in the July. 1939 issue of Astounding, [...]

  People have been asking if I am the model for the Mad Ave. advertising man who writes for Galaxy under pen names. I don’t think so. True, I did once work for a Madison Avenue ad agency, but Thwing & Altman was too tiny a shop to support all that adultery. And, yes, I [...]

  “Aggressive fighting for the right is the noblest sport the world affords.” —Theodore Roosevelt

If you’ve ever wondered why Congress seems to be populated almost exclusively by millionaires, wonder no more. They get their wealth from investments. Unlike you and me, though, they don’t speculate in a stock unless they know — not “think” but know, positively and at once — whether the stock is going to go up [...]

    Guest Post By Jack Robins   One of the articles I had written, “There Ought To Be a Law Against It,” described what had actually happened at one of the dinners we had at that Chinese restaurant we frequented.   There Ought To Be a Law Against It Wollheim, Lowndes, Cohen and I [...]

  “Our ignorance of history makes us libel our own times. People have always been like this.” —Gustave Flaubert

It isn't a real time machine. It's just a tattered copy of the August 18, 2011, Newsweek, but it's almost as good. What it did for me just this morning was take me back to those scary days when the race for delegates in the Republican Presidential nomination was poised to begin with the Iowa [...]