‘I want to see her go to jail’

The beer price is amazing

‘pursue rigorous research’

In July 2024, an avid stargazer north of New Orleans reported seeing an enormous, faintly illuminated form descend through low clouds and pass directly over a residential property. What initially resembled white birds flying in formation soon appeared to have the undulating body of a gigantic manta ...

During the 1980s, a New Jersey woman reportedly encountered three unusual men at a nightclub after recognizing one of them from a previous sighting. The experience was followed by disturbing events involving an alleged abduction, a missing pregnancy, and a serious abdominal infection.TAKEN! THE DARK...

One Saturday morning in January 2011, a British soldier woke up in his room at Barker Barracks in Paderborn, Germany, and reportedly found a tall, translucent reptilian being standing beside his bed. The silent encounter lasted approximately one minute before the soldier became unexpectedly drowsy a...

Books Teen Horror Time Machine Haves and Have Nots: R.L. Stine’s The Rich Girl Always double-check the spelling on your counterfeit money, kids. By Alissa Burger | Published on August 27, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share One theme that ‘90s teen horror books address much more effectively than I remembered from my own teen reading is the way in which money and class shape their protagonists’ lives and experiences. While this isn’t often the central focus of the plot—which is much more preoccupied with murder, mayhem, and a wide range of human and supernatural horrors—authors like R.L. Stine, Christopher Pike, and Diane Hoh often include details that highlight the stratified class hierarchy of young adulthood, including the often steep price tag of the “right” clothes and feasible post-graduation possibilities, from a college education to getting a job to help support their family.  Some of the protagonists of teen horror have never had to worry about money a day in their lives and likely never will: in Christopher Pike’s Weekend (1986), Robin and Lena Carlton are the heirs to a fortune, with a vacation house in Mexico and plenty of money to get Robin the very best medical care when she her kidneys are damaged by a poisoned beer. In R.L. Stine’s Fear Street series, Reva Dalby’s father owns Dalby’s Department Stores; he gives Reva everything she wants and she knows that someday she’ll inherit it all, without ever having to climb the corporate ladder or put in a hard day’s work. In Hoh’s Nightmare Hall book Deadly Attraction (1993), when somebody sets Robert Q. Parker’s sports car on fire, it’s no big deal: his dad just buys him a new one and has it delivered to campus.  But there are plenty of other teens who aren’t nearly as lucky. Most of the people who live on Stine’s Fear Street have chosen the neighborhood for its low house prices rather than its atmosphere, but even Fear Street is a step up from Shadyside’s Old Village, where down-on-their-luck families, runaway teens, and criminals live in inexpensive apartments and run down homes. And while there are some trust fund kids like Robert Q. Parker attending Salem University in Hoh’s Nightmare Hall series, there are lots of other students who are there on scholarship or working campus jobs to pay their way through school. In the Fear Street book Killer’s Kiss (1997), going to college is Delia’s ticket out of Shadyside, and she’s willing to kill to get the scholarship that will make it happen. Leigh Janiak’s 2021 Fear Street trilogy on Netflix tapped into this class consciousness very effectively in the tension between Shadyside and Sunnyvale.  While the impact of money and social position are implicit in many of these teen horror books, it is often one part of a larger interpersonal dynamic or series of events. But with Stine’s Fear Street book The Rich Girl (1997) these concerns take center stage. Emma Naylor and Sydney Shue have been best friends for years, but their lives and experiences are very different: “Emma lived in a tiny, run-down house in the Old Village. Sydney’s sprawling mansion sat on five acres of land in North Hills, where everybody had plenty of money […] Emma works because she has to, Sydney thought. I work because Mom and Dad don’t want me to be spoiled. They want me to learn responsibility” (4). Emma is being raised by her mom, with no dad in the picture, while Sydney’s parents are happily married. Emma drives a beat up old car that is a hand-me-down from her uncle, while Sydney’s parents bought her a new car for her birthday (though they do make her pay for the insurance). Their lives and the options these young women have available to them are very different and while Emma needs good grades if she has any hope of getting a scholarship to go to college, she needs extra hours at the movie theater even more, because her mom needs knee replacement surgery, will be unable to keep her job as a waitress if she doesn’t get it soon, and they have no health insurance. Sydney listens to Emma’s predicament and has the self-awareness to realize that while they both work the same job, Sydney is the only one who could “walk away from it without worrying about how to pay for food or clothes. Or operations” (4). Sydney, Emma, and the other teens in these books are born into their parents’ circumstances, for better or worse, and like Emma, for many of them their jobs are more than a way to make a little extra spending money or build work experience: they help keep their families financially afloat, a pressure they are rarely ready to handle. But if they’re going to have roofs over their heads, food on the tables, and (in Emma’s case) be able to afford her mother’s operation, they don’t have a choice in the matter.  At the end of their shift, Emma and Sydney take out the trash and find a duffle bag full of money stashed in the dumpster, bundles of fifty-dollar bills that they estimate to be at least $100,000. While they are both looking at the same duffle bag and gobsmacked with the same disbelief, this discovery carries dramatically different weight for the two girls, which is reflected in their initial reactions. Sydney’s immediate response is that they need to take the money to the police, a course of action that horrifies Emma, who can’t help but think about the way this kind of money could change her life. The money would be more than enough to pay for Emma’s mother’s operation and as Emma tells Sydney, “You know what else I could do with this money? I could go to college. I wouldn’t have to worry about getting that scholarship anymore. And I could buy some decent clothes!” (12-13). Sydney isn’t convinced and as she wrestles with the ethical conundrum of what they should do with the money, Emma loses patience with her in an outburst that shows just how different their worldviews are, saying “You don’t understand what it’s like to be really poor. What it’s like to want something you can’t have. But I do. And I’m telling you, we’ve got to keep this money!” (13, emphasis original). In spite of Sydney’s earlier self-awareness, Emma’s words catch her by surprise, as she wonders “Has Emma always resented me for being rich? […] Did I just not see it? I never made a big deal about having money. I never bragged about myself or put her down for being poor” (13). As sensitive as Sydney tries to be to Emma’s vastly different circumstances, she still has some blind spots and as a result of her privilege, will never see the world in quite the same way that Emma does.  The girls come to a compromise and decide to bury the money, wait a couple of weeks, and if no one has claimed it, they’ll keep it. Neither one of them wants the money in their house in the meantime though, so they bury it under a willow tree in the Fear Street woods, swear one another to secrecy, and call it a night. But of course, it’s never that easy. Sydney’s boyfriend Jason is waiting for her when she gets home and when she’s a bit cagey about where she’s been, he jumps to the conclusion that Sydney has been out with another guy. Sydney is intimidated by his anger (which is a pretty big relationship red flag in and of itself) and placates Jason by letting him in on the secret. Jason and Emma don’t like each other, but Sydney is still shocked and horrified when his immediate response is that they should kill Emma so they can keep the money all for themselves. He laughs it off as a joke, but Sydney starts to wonder about Jason’s true intentions when Emma falls down the stairs at school and says Jason pushed her. He admits that he bumped into Emma by accident and apologizes by doing some work on her car for free, which is a nice gesture … until Emma discovers that her brake lines have been cut, which almost results in Emma and Sydney getting into a bad accident.  After a couple of near-death experiences, Emma decides that the best path forward is to offer Jason a third of the money, in the hopes that if he’s an equal partner with them, he’ll be more complacent and less murder-y. But why would he settle for a third of the money when he could kill the girls and take it all? Sydney is running back to the car for a sweater while Emma and Jason dig up the money when she hears a struggle: she comes back to find Jason dead and Emma wielding a bloody shovel, claiming self-defense. While Sydney panics, Emma disposes of the body, weighing Jason down with a rock in Fear Lake, shoveling the dirt back over the money, and getting them the heck out of there. They wait for Jason’s body to be found and the questions to start, but instead, his moldering corpse pays Sydney a visit and both girls get anonymous notes calling them murderers. Emma thinks Sydney is losing it and Sydney is too terrified to reach out to anyone else about what’s going on, leaving her alone with her terror and her now-dead boyfriend.  Except he’s not really dead. Emma and Jason have been seeing one another behind Sydney’s back, pretending they hate each other to keep her from suspecting anything. Emma’s financial need is much more pressing than Jason’s, but he does have a taste for expensive sneakers and high-end electronics that his parents’ middle-class funds can’t quite satisfy. When the girls find the bag full of money, Emma and Jason come up with a plan: they’ll fake Jason’s murder and undead return, play on Sydney’s guilt and horror, and drive her crazy. Emma has no doubt that Sydney’s parents will put her in a really top notch mental health facility, thinking “It will cost them a fortune […] But so what? They can afford it” (129).  Neither Emma nor Jason seem to have any regrets, quickly moving past Sydney’s trauma to hightail it to woods and dig up their bag full of money, then on to the mall for a shopping spree. The first thing Emma wants to buy is a beautiful leather jacket, but as she pulls out some of their ill-gotten cash to pay for it, she gets a nasty surprise: the money is counterfeit. And the counterfeiting isn’t even convincing, with the typo “UNTIED STATES OF AMERICA” and an image of a Benjamin Franklin whose “eyes were crossed and he wore a backwards baseball cap over his wig” (132). Apparently, none of the teens noticed this unsubtle artistic license, with greed and obliviousness leading them down a path of fake murder and shattered sanity.  In some ways, the chain of events of The Rich Girl reads like an old-school E.C. Comic, in which unscrupulous people get their comeuppance, but it feels incomplete. As the story ends, nothing really bad has happened to Emma and Jason, aside from a snooty salesperson laughing at them, and Sydney is still in bad shape, with no clear indication of whether or not she’ll ever recover from believing she was an accomplice to a murder and haunted by her dead boyfriend. And while Emma’s initial motivation for keeping the money to pay for her mother’s operation is an understandable one, her desire for it and the lengths to which she is willing to go to keep it make her monstrous.  At the end of The Rich Girl, nobody wins. Emma and Jason have done terrible things in the pursuit of false fortune and Sydney’s future is uncertain. Even the title is open to interpretation: who is “the rich girl” and what is Stine’s lesson (if there is one)? If Sydney is the rich girl, her wealth can’t protect her from the people she thought she could trust, but who are all too willing to betray and destroy her. And if Emma’s the rich girl, lost in her imaginings of the way this money could change her life, that wealth proves meaningless and illusory. In The Rich Girl, all that glitters definitely isn’t gold, and a bag full of money can’t make you rich if it isn’t real.[end-mark] The post Haves and Have Nots: R.L. Stine’s <em>The Rich Girl</em> appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV Star Trek: Strange New Worlds “Starships are also capable of miracles” — Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: “Off-Hour” Things are tense this week, but it’s hard to understand the stakes… By Keith R.A. DeCandido | Published on August 27, 2026 Image: Paramount Comment 0 Share New Share Image: Paramount If I had to pick one word to describe the fourth season so far of Strange New Worlds, it would be polarizing. Every episode that has aired prior to today has had the most extreme of reactions in both directions. There has been very little by way of middle ground, the episodes are either viewed as superb or terrible. There also has been a rather tiresome trend toward gimmicky storytelling. How forgivable the gimmicks are depend a lot on how much you like the episode. For example, I was willing to forgive the black-and-white filming and the noir trappings of “A Case of Chiaroscuro” because it was a really good vehicle for Number One and just a generally strong story. I was less willing to forgive the Hangover riff that was “Human Best Friend” because I thought the episode was dumb. We won’t even get into the extremes of the reactions to “Level-Five Transporter Accident,” which were all over the map… All this is by way of saying that “Off-Hour” gets us back to basics. No gimmicks, no “wouldn’t it be cool if…?” storytelling, just an adventure in space where our heroes have to science the shit out of things to solve the problem. Co-executive producer Bill Wolkoff’s script also has the DNA of a bunch of other episodes, but it’s all in service of an excellent story. We’ve got a little of the original series’ “Court Martial,” more than a little of TNG’s “Disaster,” a very little of Voyager’s “Threshold,” and a little of Homicide: Life on the Street’s “Subway.” And we get another legacy character, but rather than a younger version of someone we know from the original series, instead we get another character from “The Cage.” It’s established here that Dr. Philip Boyce—played in 1964 by John Hoyt—was only the interim chief medical officer on the Enterprise when we saw him, as Pike was waiting for M’Benga to be available. Boyce had transferred off the Big E some time between “The Cage” and “Strange New Worlds,” returning more recently as the beta shift medical officer. Here, he’s played by Brian Markinson, who, like Hoyt, is from New York, though he’s appeared mostly in Canadian productions (and ones that film there, like SNW). This is Markinson’s fourth appearance and fifth role in Trek, having played Vorin in TNG’s “Homeward,” Durst in Voyager’s “Cathexis” and “Faces,” Sulan also in “Faces,” and Giger in DS9’s “In the Cards.” It’s an interesting bit of casting, as he looks younger than Hoyt, although he’s actually five years older now than Hoyt was in 1964; he’s also three inches shorter. Still, the casting works—Markinson’s an excellent actor, and he does a good job with the sour Boyce in a supporting role here. Image: Paramount (This also nicely presages M’Benga’s status quo on the original series, setting a precedent for a previous CMO to return to the ship as the beta-shift medical officer under a new CMO.) The plot is pretty straightforward. Just as the Enterprise is switching from alpha to beta shift, they hit a wormhole and wind up in a slipstream that sends them careening at high speeds. There’s no power, many systems are down or malfunctioning, and they are trapped. They have to find a way to restore power to get out of the slipstream of the wormhole, and they have a ticking clock, because they’re approaching the warp threshold (there’s the mercifully tiny “Threshold” reference) and will disintegrate if that happens. Cleverly, they don’t put a number on it, as the Voyager episode posited warp ten as the threshold, but the original series gave us occasional warp speeds in excess of ten; rather than deal with that dichotomy, Wolkoff’s script just avoids the issue all together, thus avoiding the nitpicky fangoober arguments. Plus, because of the power disruptions, people are stuck in limited areas of the ship and it’s tough to move around—made tougher when Scotty has to, in order to conserve power, cut off life support to the corridors. (That’s the similarity to “Disaster,” though at least the crew here are able to communicate with each other around the ship, unlike in the TNG episode.) It’s tremendous fun watching the crew deal with the various issues, and I especially like how they make use of already-established stuff, not for the purposes of making the reference, but because it makes sense in the story. My personal favorite example is the use of the pod that’s designed to study ion storms. We previously saw that in “Court Martial,” and the plot of that episode revolved around when Kirk was forced to eject the pod because it built up too much energy to be safe. That pod was never referenced again—until now, when Spock has to go into the pod because sensors are down and an attempt at sending a probe out to do a scan fails. And Pike is confronted with having to eject the pod with Spock still in it or risk the ship. There are other crises here and there, from the inertial dampeners—which also provide artificial gravity—going wonky. Several of the crew—among them Number One, Spock, La’an, and Boyce—are in the lounge for a piano recital when the crisis hits. When the gravity goes bad, there’s a control panel that can reset them, but it’s in the part of the room where the gravity is so heavy, it crushed the piano. The genetically enhanced Number One goes over to do it, hoping that she’s stronger than a piano. At one point, her leg is shattered by the high gravity, and it’s brutal. Just in general, Wolkoff’s script doesn’t soft-pedal how dangerous everything is. Spock gets a nasty case of radiation poisoning from being in the pod, and La’an gets a slightly less nasty case when she rescues him, Pike is electrocuted getting the shields back up, Number One’s leg is shattered, and Scotty is stuck in a Jefferies Tube (another nifty reference, as I don’t think we’ve seen one of the diagonal access tubes on SNW until now). And then there’s the big one: when the ship first falls into the wormhole and everything goes binky-bonkers, the magnetic seal holding a sickbay table in place fails and the table smashes into M’Benga’s torso and impales him. He’s still alive, and will remain so until the table is moved—right now, it’s holding all his organs in place. (This is the Homicide reference, as the episode “Subway” had something similar happen to a character played by Vincent d’Onofrio, where as soon as the subway was moved, he’d die. It was based on a real-life event, allegedly.) Image: Paramount As much fun as the various bits of problem-solving are, the real meat of this episode is the characterization. There are small things, like La’an kicking herself for letting Spock be the one to go in the pod (even though as a Vulcan-human hybrid, he stands a better chance of survival). But the big ones are particularly compelling. First off, there’s M’Benga and Chapel, whose deep friendship has been seen all over the place, particularly in “Under the Cloak of War.” They get into an argument at the top of the episode because M’Benga is thinking of transferring off, and Chapel makes it clear that she will do the same if he leaves, and he accuses her of always running away when things get too serious. That argument is curtailed—but not completely ended—by the crisis. Chapel then spends the episode trying to figure out how to save M’Benga. My only issue with this part of the story is that Chapel disobeys a direct order from Boyce to leave sickbay and join him in the lounge where there are multiple patients who need treating. Chapel pretends the comms aren’t working and stays behind to try to save M’Benga. It reeks way too much of “I don’t care about these extras who don’t have dialogue, I have to stay here and save the opening-credits regular, sorry,” a sociopathic trope that is my least favorite in all dramatic fiction. Image: Paramount Then there’s Scotty, and this is again where SNW continues to shine in showing us younger versions of the legacy characters from the original series. We know Scotty as a supremely confident miracle worker who can, to quote a Vorta from DS9’s “Rocks and Shoals,” turn rocks into replicators. More to the point, we know Scotty as someone who started a bar fight in “The Trouble with Tribbles” because a Klingon insulted the Enterprise.But Martin Quinn is playing a Scotty who views the Enterprise as an obstacle, as a glitchy machine that won’t do what it’s told. Pelia reminds him—in one of several magnificent conversations between the two of them over the intercom, as Pelia is trapped in her quarters—that all ships will glitch, but all ships also can perform miracles if you just pay attention and listen to what the ship is telling you. I like that the episode gives the entire cast something to do, and I like that it has the usual Trek thing of smart people working to solve a problem. The solution to both M’Benga’s injuries and fixing the ship are something called strong-force neutrinos, which are in abundance in the slipstream they’re stuck in. I have no idea if strong-force neutrinos are a real thing or not—if anyone in the comments who is more of a science nerd than me can speak to that, I’d be grateful—but the discussion of regular neutrinos is, I know, accurate. So even if Wolkoff pulled strong-force neutrinos out of his ass, it works—for the same reason that dilithium and quadrotriticale and tricorder all worked, they take a thing we know about and modify it enough to be something fictional that can do what the plot needs it to do. If the episode has a flaw, it’s that the suspense is significantly muted. The characters who face the most danger and the most risk of dying are Spock in the pod, the impaled M’Benga, and Scotty stuck in the Jefferies Tube, and they’re three characters who we know will survive at least to the original series. But overall this is a taut, exciting, intense episode that works as a space adventure, works as a characterization vehicle, and just works. Credit especially to director Dan Liu for a good use of split screens. There are several conversations among folks in different parts of the ship, and by using split screens to show them, it ups the intensity without having to wait the half-second for the cut to the other location. If you’ve hated this season to date, this episode will restore your faith in it. If you’ve liked this season to date, well, this should keep that streak going. Either way, this is one of SNW’s best.[end-mark] The post “Starships are also capable of miracles” — <i>Star Trek: Strange New Worlds</i>: “Off-Hour” appeared first on Reactor.

America’s housing affordability crisis isn’t a result of too little government intervention or socialism, but a tragic consequence of massive federal intervention gone awry, a new Heritage Foundation report argues. “When it comes to housing, our problem isn’t a lack of socialism but too much socialism,” John Gibbs, Heritage’s economics director, told the Daily Signal. “Heavy government involvement in mortgages promised to make homes more accessible but instead made them more expensive.” Gibbs released a report Wednesday noting that despite heavy federal intervention aimed at increasing homeownership, rates have remained essentially stable since the 1960s. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, the homeownership rate in the U.S. stood at approximately 62-63% in the early 1960s and remains at approximately 65%. “We do not make homes affordable by making debt affordable,” Gibbs explained. “We make homes affordable by reducing the policies that inflate home prices in the first place.”  “Federal mortgage policy has become a $10 trillion experiment in boosting housing demand,” he added. “The evidence suggests much of the result has been higher prices rather than higher ownership.”  Many housing economists attribute the housing affordability crisis to local zoning restrictions, environmental reviews, permitting delays, and other barriers to construction. Gibbs argued that federal mortgage subsidies deserve greater scrutiny because they increase demand for housing and therefore push prices higher when supply cannot expand quickly enough. As the report explains, the federal government aims to boost homeownership in two ways: by directly providing insurance for home loans, and by purchasing mortgages from lenders, pooling them into mortgage-backed securities, and guaranteeing those securities. The Federal Housing Administration insures certain mortgages, while government-managed enterprises such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac purchase mortgages from lenders and package them into mortgage-backed securities. Taxpayers ultimately stand behind many of these guarantees, making the loans less risky for lenders. Gibbs argues that this encourages more lending and allows buyers to borrow more money, putting upward pressure on housing prices. When the government takes some of the burden, it frees lenders to offer more loans. That’s one of the major reasons why the federal government now provides some security to between 70% and 80% of new mortgages and outstanding mortgage credit, according to the Heritage report. Most European countries do not subsidize home loans to nearly this degree. Even Canada only secures the debt of between 30% and 40% of housing, Gibbs told the Daily Signal—about half the rate the U.S. does. The federal government backs about $11.7 trillion in home loans, but this massive intervention hasn’t meaningfully increased homeownership, the report notes. Instead, it has driven up prices. “The federal government has spent decades making mortgages easier to get,” Gibbs told the Daily Signal. “The result has been higher home prices, while homeownership remains roughly where it was a generation ago.”  Why does this drive up prices? Just as government-backed student loans have increased the cost of college, government-backed home loans increase the cost of homes, he argued. “When the government intervenes to expand access to credit or subsidize loans, it artificially raises borrowers’ willingness to pay, increasing demand faster than supply can respond,” the report explains. This government intervention makes housing less affordable and transfers wealth to those who already own homes, the report states. “Rising prices reward existing owners on paper, but rapid appreciation reduces affordability for prospective buyers by raising the cost of entering the market—especially when wages fail to keep pace,” the report warns. If Americans truly want housing to be cheaper, they should urge the government to stop buying so many mortgages, Gibbs argued. His report recommends reducing the government footprint by setting a maximum value for loans the government will purchase, aiming to stop the government’s purchase of loans for expensive homes. It also recommends the government offer shorter-term mortgages that help homeowners accumulate wealth more quickly. While the report acknowledges some progress in the 21st Century Road to Housing Act—a bill Congress passed this summer that streamlines the process of housing construction by waiving certain environmental regulations—it warns against too much federal intervention to expand housing supply.

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