ICE agents in Northbrook pointed rifles at bystanders and tried to break down doors, then arrested a Salem Walk apartments resident.

John Scalzi has a talent for understated humor, and a gift for putting characters into capital-S Situations. In this case Ashley, Our Protagonist has landed a job as a community liaison for a human-minority district in an unnamed city. (District Three is inhabited mostly by sophonts from other worlds.) Her job is solve minor problems, and pass the ones she can’t handle further up the bureaucratic ladder.

Lady Tsin Nejha, the Ambassador from the Assembly sends Teren a peculiar gift. It was a book with a leather cover, tooled with the image of a kingfisher landing on a tree branch. This book is a collec...

Many of these are going to be more than a little spoilery.

So, apparently there was a situation with a mule, a plow and my Uncle Bo when he was a kid. This situation that transpired was my uncle being unable to plow in a straight line. This was then followed by further complications that resulted in my paternal grandfather shouting, “that mule is worth more than you are!” at my uncle. The body of the story is confusing, and I don’t remember many of the details.

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A few days later, Nemar Jhan sets out with four squads of wardens, in addition to a carriage, two carts with supplies, chests full of weapons and armor, and twenty servants to run errands, care for th...

This is a thing: you are telling a story that you think is funny. However, the story you are telling is not in fact funny, but you do not know this. You do not know this because you do not have the frame of reference to understand that the topic is not funny. And your only clue would be the growing discomfort of the person you're telling the story…