interesting that you should mention epstein because when macaulay culkin was interviewed about that a while ago he brought up mj. mac said that one time as a child, he was scheduled to go to epsteins island when jackson called out of the blue to ask if he wanted a tour of the neverland estate. since jackson was famous, mac and his agent went to neverland, and he and jackson apparently became friends. mac stressed that he had never even gotten a creepy vibe, just that michael genuinely liked children.
maybe this was entirely coincidental, i don't know. but there is a chance that michael knew about epstein in the 90s and tried to help people steer clear.
all i know is that culkin seems like a good guy. he's called out bad practices and abuse in the industry before, to his own detriment.
Edit: Apparently that interview was faked. bummer.
yeah that's another thing i got from that interview, he writes his own philosophy and doesn't really understand that fundamentally different worldviews exist. in his imagined perfect world, a pure meritocracy, all rules are legacy and can be disregarded if required.
i mean artemis explicitly has a black female muslim protagonist, which he got a lot of flak for since identity is political for some people. project hail mary is about the whole world banding together to fight catastrophic climate change. for him to have written those things, and then tell a right-winger in an interview that his books are nonpolitical while nutrek is too political, to me can only be ignorance.
if you read potter assuming the narrator is not only unreliable but also sleep-deprived and slightly drunk, in makes a lot more sense. it also makes rowling's unhinged lore additions from twitter, like how wizards just used to shit on the floor until plumbing came along, slot in nicely with established facts, like how a hundreds-of-years old building would have a huge network of secret tunnels in the bathrooms. it goes from incongruous to "whos- who's telling thiss story, you or me? shhhutup."
i mean, they're never apolitical, the only difference is whether the author understands the points they're making.
like that andy weir interview where he says "there are no politics in my books". i was completely taken aback by that because his stories are so political and they're researched politics. they are big allegories that make salient points. but he's not written them that way. it's completely by accident, or so he believes.
it would increase costs because that's what airlines do whenever they get a new gadget.