Stupid, Part Three: How Historical Fiction Can Save Our Brains

Stupid, Part Three: How Historical Fiction Can Save Our Brains

Today on Unedited, three authors of historical fiction join us to parse the state of modern entertainment and ponder whether we’re really living in a uniquely stupid era. We as creatures have been weaving epic fictions since at least the Iron Age—and authors have been called out for their overuse of sex and violence since at least Herodotus. But with millions of books being published (or self-published) each year, and a disproportionate number of those books trying to out-Scoville each other, can any prior century claim as stupid a literary legacy? Writer of historical thrillers Marjorie DeLuca, master of Golden Age mysteries Christopher Huang, and award-winning Western novelist and returning Unedited guest Chase Pletts help us understand what publishing houses today are asking for, why we don’t remember much of the stupid fiction from prior eras, and how stories set in other times can help us more accurately understand our own.

The Road to Dumb: The Long March from Faulkner to Fifty Shades & Walter Cronkite to Tucker Carlson

If you, like Theseus, got trapped in a maze with a Minotaur, how would you escape? Except in this case, the maze is made of video games, nonstop TV, and the 3.5 million books published on Amazon KDP in 2025. And you don’t have a ball of string to retrace your steps. Last week on Unedited, we began a discussion of stupid. Where have all the smart books gone, and, maybe more importantly, where has the appetite for smart gone? This week, Adam diagnoses our entertainment culture sickness by examining a string of symptoms: the fall of boredom, the saturation of stimuli, and the erosion of institutional guardrails.  But guard rails against what? Is stupid something with an actual lineage, or just a matter of changing tastes? To answer that, we explore the “thought-terminating cliches” of our time and contrast what the authors of today are trying to do when compared with those of yore. Join us, if you dare.

The Case for Thinking People's Fiction: From the Brontes to Bridgerton

After a kickoff discussion of sequels last month, we’re pivoting in the next few Unedited episodes to a debate around what happened to good fiction and why so many of the novels we read these days feel, well, stupid.  Is it nostalgia talking to say that the novels of fifty or one hundred years ago felt smarter than the stuff getting praised in the (increasingly decimated) newspaper reviews of today? Or that the books kids once read in school presented better lessons, better stories, and just better writing than the BookTok trends of the month? We don’t think so. In this episode, Noah gives a brief introduction to the subject of “stupid” by asking what, ultimately, fiction is, and how the novel’s adaptation to changing times and technologies turned it from a canonical artform to a beehive of buzzwords. To cap it off, we ask how (and why) to recover smart in an age of stupid.

The World of Sequels, Part 2: From Neanderthals to Narnia (and Peter Rabbit to Poirot)

Last week, we jumped into sequels—what are they, and why are they everywhere? This week, Noah gives us a different spin on the subject by asking, where did sequels come from? How did they develop? Which books and movies turned sequels into the ubiquitous format we’re surrounded by today? From caveman campfires to the books we curled up with as kids, stories with a “part two” are so common we almost forget that aren’t innate to the artform. Or are they? Are sequels as natural as sunrise and sunset? And if that’s the case, is there any difference between the three Lord of the Rings novels and the thirty three Hercule Poirot mysteries? And do the serialized stories we gobble up as kids prime us for a story landscape that’s all sequels all the time? Tune in as we weave all these threads.

The World of Sequels: Don Quixote, Die Hard & "Donroe"

This month, Unedited: From Idea to Manuscript and Shelf to Screen returns. Adam — accompanied by a surprise guest, his youngest daughter — kicks us off with an introduction to the topic of the next several episodes: sequels. Here at Inkshares, we’ve been thinking a lot about sequels as we work on follow-ups from authors like Scott Thomas, JF Dubeau, and Christopher Huang. Pretty much all of our favorite books and films have sequels of some sort or another.  But what is a sequel? And why is a sequel? What purpose should a sequel serve? What separates the good ones from the bad ones? Did the book series we read as kids condition us to consume sequels? And in an age where it seems like everything is an extended universe, is it time for sequels to die? Equally importantly, has our real world itself become nothing more than a sequel...