Can you imagine it? It’s you, 17 of your brothers, and your supervisor. You see the fire coming at you. The word inferno simply doesn’t do it justice, with 70-foot flames and temperatures about 2,000 degrees. The fire is big, hot, and moving right for you at unbelievable speed. So you do what you’ve been trained to do. You clear a space for your fire shelter, a large foil pouch lined with silica-thread cloth. You lay flat on your belly, pull the fire shelter over you. Maybe you pray. You hope it will do some good. The Yarnell Hill Fire started on June 28, 2013, near Yarnell,... Read More

Before I begin the review, I need to explain something. Friendship is a strange thing. I’ve got a good friend named Devila.* We’ve known each other since high school. She’s been there for me through ups and downs and is one of the most fundamentally decent people I’ve ever met. I sincerely love her like a sister. And yet, considering that we have this friendship that spans decades, she still made me see the breathtakingly dumb Insurgent. Insurgent is the second film in the Divergent series inspired by the YA novels of Veronica Roth. The books seem to be a fairly obvious... Read More