Good Scoop

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/10/08/the-big-idea-courtney-floyd/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57673

Though neurodivergent people tend to love the world of academia and absorbing information, the systems and structure of higher education is often antithetical to the needs of differently abled people, both mentally and physically. Author Courtney Floyd expands on this in the Big Idea for her newest novel, Higher Magic, as she recounts her experience with earning her PhD and seeing how the world of education wasn’t designed with inclusivity and accessibility in mind.

COURTNEY FLOYD:

When I first sat down to write the first draft of Higher Magic, I was two years out of my PhD program and still trying to balance the sum of my time there. My sense of the possible had shifted profoundly as I studied literature, learned to research, traveled to conferences and archives, and honed my analytical and interpretive skills. My life had changed for the better. But I was still discovering the many ways my program had taught me to ignore my body and push through exhaustion and anxiety, no matter the cost. 

In higher education, you’re supposed to act as though you’re nothing but a floating brain. Oh, nobody ever says that outright. Especially not when you’re a first generation student who slid sideways into the academy and, to everyone’s bewilderment, stuck around. But the expectation is there. Lurking.

I learned to see it sidelong, in the way I was expected to write without using the first person and also in the lack of understanding some professors showed when I couldn’t attend office hours or study groups because I was juggling several jobs to pay my tuition. It reared its head in my mentor’s office, when she snapped impatiently at me because I got jury duty, and couldn’t defer it. It showed up with the brain fog and intense hand cramps after two-hour midterms in which I had to handwrite entire essays. 

I came to see it even more clearly as an instructor, in the way boilerplate attendance policies penalized students who were late because of health issues or irregular bus schedules. It haunted me, one term, when one of my students––a veteran who’d recently undergone major surgery––apologized for every single essay he turned in, not because it was late but because he was worried his medication had made him incoherent. 

By the end of my time in grad school, I saw the floating brain edict at work every day. In the exam prep or the job search eating up my own and my peers’ lives, turning us into bleary-eyed shadows. In the exhausted way my officemate staggered back from her two week maternity leave, which we’d gone on strike only a year earlier to get. In the student in my cohort who weighed the cost on her mental health and withdrew from the program.

Mind over matter is a brutal either/or. 

Either you’re smart enough to figure it out, or you’ll drop out. Either you’ll burn your candle at both ends, or you’ll snuff yourself out trying.

In her book Teaching to Transgress, Black feminist scholar and educator, bell hooks, writes that in classrooms and other institutionalized spaces, “the person who is the most powerful has the privilege of denying their body,” of becoming the invisible default. The cog at the center of the complicated machine. But, as we’ve seen in the past couple of years, when our bodies become too inconvenient–too vocal or visible or vexing–the people in power (in and beyond the ivory tower) can decide to deny our bodies, too. Or make them disappear.

In SFF, we love a good literalized metaphor. When I first had the idea for Higher Magic, graduate students weren’t being literally disappeared for protesting, but students were being quietly pushed out of the academy for needing access and inclusion. For needing systems built to support white, male, nondisabled scholars to change, just a little, so that others could participate.

Fresh out of PhD school in 2019, I knew I wanted to write about that kind of disappearing. Because bell hooks didn’t just pinpoint a problem, she shared a solution, too: “Once we start talking in the classroom about the body, and about how we live in our bodies, we’re automatically changing the way power orchestrate[s] itself.” 

Enter Dorothe Bartleby, a first-generation, neurodivergent grad student who is trying her best to be a floating brain at the start of Higher Magic. She quickly learns it’s not sustainable, and spends the rest of the book slowly figuring out how to be a body and a brain at the same time. While tracking down her disappearing students. And getting ready for her last attempt at passing her qualifying exam.

As heavy as all of that is, Bartleby’s story isn’t somber or dark. As she notes early on, “I’d come ready for the slog. I’d thrown myself into it. Battled through overwhelm, exhaustion, burnout. … And I’d done it all because I loved it. The magic. The camaraderie. The sense that I was contributing to something that mattered.”

In writing Bartleby’s story, I tried to balance my exploration of disability, neurodivergence, and embodiment in higher education with the things that carry so many of us through the (unnecessarily) difficult parts of our degrees: curiosity, passion, camaraderie, and love. There are joyful info dumps about research, plot-relevant spreadsheets, plentiful snack breaks and magic cookie recipes. In grad school, research comes alive and ignites our days. It informs our worlds. And sometimes, if there’s a bit of magic in the air, it begins to narrate us in the form of a talking skull.

The big idea in Higher Magic isn’t just that disabled and neurodivergent folks belong in higher ed and deserve to shape what it becomes, it’s that our joy, interests, and whimsy do as well.

Higher Magic: Harlequin|Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s|Yankee Bookshop (for signed copies)

Author socials: Website|Bluesky|Instagram

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/10/08/the-big-idea-courtney-floyd/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57673

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/10/07/unwinding-at-panacea-luxury-spa-in-columbus/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57630

Back in 2023, my friend sent me a Tik Tok from a newly opened spa in Columbus called Panacea that was showing off its luxury amenities. The video showed a hot hydrotherapy pool, a cold plunge pool, a eucalyptus steam room, and a Himalayan salt sauna. It looked good enough to convince my friend and I that we needed to go and have a spa day, but much to our dismay, their services were completely booked for months out.

Fortunately for us, Panacea Luxury Spa also offers an amenities-only day-pass that gives you access to the aforementioned features, plus you get to visit their relaxation lounge, where light refreshments and small snacks are provided. While only 3 passes are sold for each 3 hour time block of the amenities pass, we were able to snag two and have ourselves a mini spa day, just enjoying the amenities and each other’s company.

Even though we didn’t book any services, we were still treated like royalty and experienced superb customer service from the relaxation lounge attendants. We had such a great time with just the amenities that we knew we eventually needed to come back and actually get services like a massage and whatnot.

Well, two years later, we finally did it, and I’m here to tell you about how amazing our time at Panacea was.

I have been to many a spa in my day, and Panacea Luxury Spa truly lives up to its name. Located just northwest of downtown Columbus in Hilliard, you will feel like you’re somewhere much more exciting than Ohio when you step foot into this oasis in the city.

When you arrive, you’re immediately given a robe and slippers and enter a phone-free zone to really enhance your zen-filled experience. After being given a locker for your items and changing, you’re free to head into the amenities room and enjoy up to two hours of amenity time before your service, as access to them is included with every service over $100 (minus the express facial). You can also opt to utilize their amenities after your services are completed, but I prefer doing it before and then having a quick shower before my service.

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I have never been brave enough to try out the cold plunge pool, but I do enjoy watching others test the waters. And who can resist a hot hydrotherapy pool? I’m a sucker for a fancy hot tub. While I have a tough time enduring the dry heat of the Himalayan salt sauna, I absolutely love the eucalyptus steam room. There’s something about a heavy, wet heat that makes it feel less like I’m a turkey on Thanksgiving roasting in the oven.

@panacealuxuryspa

Sometimes we all need a little R&R. #saunaday #spalife #relaxationtime #cbus

♬ original sound – Panacea Luxury Spa

When I’m in the steam room, I can breathe so much better than I normally am capable of. Ever since my first time having COVID in 2020, my lungs and breathing have never been the same. But when I’m in that steam room, both in 2023 and now, I can breathe so deeply and truly fill my lungs in a way I haven’t done in years.

If you end up getting a bit overheated from the hydrotherapy pool, steam room, and sauna, there’s ice-cold towels provided for you to put around your neck, on your face, etc., and plenty of water stations around to keep you hydrated.

If you want something other than water, there’s a whole beverage menu with a variety of cocktails, CBD seltzers, mocktails, wine, beer, and craft sodas. This time around, I opted for one of their melon-basil mocktails, which was nicely sweetened and refreshing. I think next time I’d like to try a CBD option.

Onto the services: my friend booked a 90-minute massage, and I went for a 60-minute Swedish massage, plus a 60-minute Cranberry Crush facial. So we parted ways for a bit to go enjoy our services.

Before starting my massage, my masseuse asked me if I would like to add-on hot stones, and I was delighted at the option because I had originally wanted a hot stone massage anyway, but when I tried to book one it said they were unavailable at the time. So I opted for the add-on because hot stones are my absolute favorite type of massage. If you haven’t had hot stones before it is truly a game changer, and dare I say life-changing.

My masseuse was really awesome, and he listened immediately when I asked for a bit lighter of pressure. Everything felt great, and I drifted off a couple times. I love a massage that includes a scalp massage, so you really feel pampered from head to toe. I mentioned my main area of pain and tension in my body is in my upper back, mostly between my shoulder blades and up into my shoulders, and he really took his time addressing that area. I felt a lot better afterwards!

I went pretty much straight from my massage to my facial, where I proceeded to have the best facial of my life.

The esthetician I got was incredibly kind and attentive right off the bat, I immediately felt so comfortable and relaxed with her. She started off our session by asking if I wanted her to describe everything she was doing and all the products she was using on me, if I wanted to have more of like a normal conversation and just chit chat, or if I wanted basically complete silence. I loved the idea of being able to choose the level of interaction I wanted, as I’m sure we’ve all had a massage or two where the person is serving you a yap-a-ccino when you’re trying to relax and drift off.

After being indecisive as heck, I finally settled on wanting a slightly more minimal version of the in-depth explanation of the process and the products, plus a little bit of normal conversation thrown in. I’m used to pretty much total silence during facials, so this was a surprisingly nice change of pace.

She examined my skin and assessed my concerns and skin issues like my acne, redness, and congested pores, and suggested some products that would help with that. I was hesitant to try the mask she was recommending, because I was afraid it would hurt (products designed to combat acne are usually pretty intense and can be a lot on more sensitive skin), and she said if it was uncomfortable at all that she would just take it right off for me and we’d try something gentler. That made me feel better, so I went for it and it wasn’t even bad at all! It was definitely a little warm and slightly tingly, but I felt fine and was happy she offered other options.

I’m obsessed with the way she applied products to my face. She was gentle but also meant business, and the same can be said for the hand, arm, neck and shoulder, and scalp massage included with the facial. Her pressure was seriously perfect throughout. And yes, it did feel amazing to basically get double massaged in those areas since I had just come from a massage. Everything felt amazing.

Literally my esthetician’s warm personality and friendliness was what made my facial go from “a nice relaxing self-care moment” to “best facial ever.” When I asked her how she got into this line of work, she said it all started when she got her first facial in her early 20’s, and felt so taken care of that she realized she wanted to give that same feeling to others. And she definitely succeeded.

Plus, I mentioned I wanted to add an exfoliator to my skincare routine, and when we were done with the facial she took me out to the boutique and went over a few different ones with me, and even let me feel them on my skin to really test them out.

I know a lot of people are hesitant to get spa treatments because they’re worried about upselling attempts or product pushing, but Panacea is really great about that sort of thing: they specifically ask on your forms if you would prefer that your provider not mention or recommend literally any products. And if you’re open to hearing about a product or two, you can pick from a long list of types of products or services that you might be interested in hearing about, which is why my esthetician brought up the exfoliator in the first place.

If you get a facial at Panacea, I can’t recommend Taylor enough.

All in all, my services were fantastic and I felt totally refreshed and relaxed afterwards. My friend said her massage was also bomb, and I’m so glad we could finally get our spa day together.

Panacea is definitely a splurge, but one that is so worth it. I truly feel like a valued guest at Panacea, and can’t wait for the chance to go back. If you’re in Columbus, it’s a must-try in my eyes, even if you just get the amenities pass.

Do you like massages? Have you ever had a facial before? Would you try the cold plunge? Let me know in the comments, check out Panacea on Instagram, and have a great day!

-AMS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/10/07/unwinding-at-panacea-luxury-spa-in-columbus/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57630

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/10/07/the-big-idea-joe-r-lansdale-3/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57643

Horror isn’t just scary for horror’s sake. Good horror entails so much more than jump scares and spooky creatures. Author Joe R. Lansdale expands on how horror can contain multitudes of other genres, and comment on society’s issues, in the Big Idea for his newest collection of short stories, The Essential Horror.

JOE R. LANSDALE:

Horror is a funny word and hard to define. As a book genre, even more difficult.

 It’s like humor. What the hell is it?

This is where I give you the big answer. Hitch up your drawers, here it comes.

I have no idea. Not really, and neither does anyone else. I think there are certain things you can point to and say this is horrible, like our politics, and be correct, but in fiction and film, comics, or even moments when someone is telling you a gripping story, the only thing that can identify a horror story truly is the hair on the back of your neck. 

But in the broader sense, well done horror can also carry political and social issues, as well as just entertaining moments, and some not so classically entertaining, but still intellectually or emotionally stimulating. That’s what I’ve tried to do with many of my stories. Some stories I’ve written in my career are mere whimsy, and some have razor blades hidden in their whimsy, and some are downright disturbing because life can be disturbing, and sometimes it’s necessary to open up a wound and let the pus out.  These types of stories are a bit different than the hair on the back of the neck sort; the creeping goosebumps that run along your arms and up your spine. These are the ones that slap you in your face, and run up your spine like wet-legged scorpions.

Okay. Maybe I will try and tell you what horror is, or as I best understand it. 

It’s an emotion.  

It can be purely entertaining in the classic sense of yodeling and tap dancing, or it can be informative or thought provoking. It can deal with racism and sexism and enough isms to fill a book. It can be written for curiosity alone.

Curiosity is good for the soul, and not just the sort of curiosity where you wonder what’s for lunch, though now that I think about it, there could easily be a horror story hidden in that.

Horror is in everything if you look hard enough, and sometimes it’s so glaring you can see it if you only get a glance at it. One reason it’s popular in bad times–and that would be now, and if you don’t believe me look at how the horror selections have grown, maybe not quite 1980s size, but close—is because it allows us to look at what’s going on more clearly. At first, that seems unlikely, but a story can tell you something that is frequently hard to see as it’s happening. It’s the old can’t see the forest for the trees concept. An example would be the fear of living in dystopia, only to discover one day that you’re already living in it.

The bottom line about horror stories really isn’t about horror alone. It’s understanding that it’s a tool for a variety of stories. A major ingredient or a marginal component. Writer’s choice.

I try and write the way I read. A variety. Not all of it is horror by any means, but almost any kind of story can be turned slightly on its edge so you can see the potential horror ingredients that lurk within, real things or purely imagined things. From serial murder to Lovecraftian creatures that lurk behind the veil. The word horror, the genre of horror, can contain it all.

The Essential Horror: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s

Author socials: Website|Bluesky|Instagram|Facebook

Read an excerpt.

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/10/07/the-big-idea-joe-r-lansdale-3/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57643

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/10/06/in-which-i-have-a-thought-on-taylor-swift-and-her-latest-album/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57623

It’s a thought I first had over on Metafilter, in a thread about Swift and The Life of a Showgirl, which came out last Friday and has already racked up 3.5+ million in sales. It will almost certainly end its first week with even more, is almost certainly debuting at #1 on the Billboard 200 chart, along with very likely clearing out most if not all of the Billboard Top Ten with the album’s tracks next week (so long, Huntr/x! Glad you got your eight weeks at #1 in!), not to mention winning the movie theater box office crown last weekend with a Showgirl listening party. Not a great week for Swift haters, not that this would stop them.

The thread about Swift and the new album goes all over the place, and I added my comment on both, and how in this moment it’s likely impossible to get a bead on the new work, and where I think Swift goes from here. I’ve reposted it all below (with very minor editing for clarity), for posterity and because I know a lot of you don’t go over to Metafilter, but still might find the comment interesting anyway.

—

The new album is fine, and basically pairs with Reputation. I suspect people who don’t like this album don’t like that one either, and that’s all right. I didn’t need to know how amazing Travis Kelce’s dick is, but I suspect he’s perfectly happy with the quality of his member being immortalized in song, even if it’s likely to get him endless shit in the locker room. The Charli XCX diss track thing is two messy humans being messy at each other, also not my favorite, but inasmuch as Charli XCX has posted an image of herself in the studio in the wake of the track, I think she’s got her own.

In a larger sense, speaking as someone with a mere fraction of Swift’s sales and even merer fraction of her social profile, who nevertheless has a unusually dogged coterie of haters (as well as a certain tranche of easily-pleased fans!): at a certain point of notability (or notoriety) it doesn’t matter what you put out, the range of opinions about it will be so wide and scattershot that anyone looking will be able to pick and choose among them to paint a picture of wild creative success or looming artistic doom. Swift’s work, love it or hate it or somewhere in-between about it, is at this point never less absolutely competent in its construction, which makes the immediate critical evaluation of it even more difficult. The inherent quality of the work will get lost in the noise of the release and it will take time (a year, possibly two, maybe more) for everything to calm down enough to get a more dispassionate bead on the work as a coherent piece of art. By which time it will have sold eight million copies, or whatever, and she’ll have moved on to whatever else she’s doing.

As an aside to the quality of the work, I do think we are at a point where Swift will be moving out of her “imperial” phase as a pop music entity, if only because time comes for every cultural phenomenon; the cultural eye is a gimlet one. The pop stars who most closely align with Swift’s cultural ubiquity – Michael Jackson, Madonna and Prince (and to a lesser extent U2) – all experienced a (relative) decline as a mover of the zeitgeist. This cultural decline doesn’t mean a decline in financial success; look at U2/Rolling Stones/Journey/etc being bigger concert draws today than when their music had immediate musical relevance. But at a certain point you stop picking up fans from the younger end of the age curve, because a fifteen-year-old doesn’t vibe with a 35-year-old. Swift is already shading into mom pop (a complementary genre to dad rock), and that’s going to become more pronounced as time goes on.

I suspect that Swift already knows this – she is extremely smart with her business and her career – and I will be interested in seeing how she will position herself moving forward. I don’t know if she’s going to slow down or “disappear,” since, based only on what I know of her from her public image, she doesn’t strike me as a person interested in slowing down for anything. But it’s possible we might be at the end of Swift’s pop star era and at the beginning of her multi-hyphenate era. All those Swifties are grown up (or are about to be) and have or will soon have a bunch of disposable income. We might be about to see Taylor Swift become whatever the white millennial version of Oprah or Martha Stewart would be. And I think that would be hugely intriguing.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/10/06/in-which-i-have-a-thought-on-taylor-swift-and-her-latest-album/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57623

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/10/06/crisis-at-the-cat-tree/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57617

Yes, it is well established that Smudge gets to claim the top spot on the cat tree, and that Spice takes the middle seat, with a third, lower seat available but usually unclaimed, or was, until Saja came and claimed it. But! Today! An usurpation! Saja has taken the middle seat, in flagrant violation of the scratching order! This aggression will not stand, man!

Yes, there is tension today in the office.

Also, Spice is currently sitting in the Eames chair. But I assure you, she is not happy about it.

Stay tuned for more internecine Scamperbeast drama!

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/10/06/crisis-at-the-cat-tree/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57617

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/10/02/the-big-idea-seamus-sullivan/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57589

Greek mythology is a mythos that is full of despair, anguish, and characters that can’t seem to a catch a break. Author Seamus Sullivan brings us some of these familiar ancient characters in his debut novel, Daedalus is Dead. Follow along to see how Sullivan’s relationship to his son contributed to the inspiration of this classic myth retelling.

SEAMUS SULLIVAN:

Years ago, when I first tried to write about Daedalus in the form of a ponderous and contraction-free short story, Maria Dahvana Headley gave me some characteristically thoughtful line edits, and one note in particular stayed with me. She had gone back into my draft and added contractions, explaining that a lot of writers instinctively reach for “I am” rather than “I’m” when writing something set in antiquity, but at the expense of distancing the story from the reader. Contractions allow for intimacy, and intimacy is what the story demands.

Years later, I tried to write about Daedalus again. I had become a parent, and the first year of my son’s life overlapped with the first year of the global COVID-19 pandemic, a brutal police crackdown on protests, the January 6th insurrection, and other delights. I was deeply angry with men, with a society built to accommodate the worst impulses of men, and with myself for being part of it. With Headley’s note at the back of my mind, I framed the story as Daedalus’s direct address to his late son, Icarus. I’d worked in this mode before, a parent directly addressing their child. There was an assumption in there somewhere that any kid born in the present day would, before long, start observing the world and demanding that the adults explain themselves.

For me, Greek mythology’s appeal has always had something to do with grandeur, with the glory and tragedy of an imagined past, sure, but also with scale and awe and durability. Maybe that’s just how it feels when you read the stuff as a kid. Writing in the Mary Renault style wouldn’t work for me – I didn’t have the skill or the eye for anthropological detail to pull that off, and anyway there was no point in pretending I wasn’t doing the literary equivalent of shaking my fist at the world immediately outside my window. So most of my narration’s intimacy came from my own day-to-day, which largely consisted of carrying an inquisitive baby around and explaining things to him, and for the grandeur I went back to Homer.

Emily Wilson’s Odyssey translation had been out for a few years by then, so I went over passages from that and from my older, Stanley Lombardo Iliad translation. Those helped with the details of how royal households worked (slave labor and all), what funeral rites were like, and a general idea of how to convey that sense of grandeur in vernacular-friendly language that would pull readers into this imagined version of a bronze age society. Wilson’s Odyssey introduction was a great resource for social context and for how composition and performance of Homeric verse might have worked. In the spring of last year I got to see Wilson perform the opening lines of The Iliad for a packed New York Public Library audience, in the original Greek, with enviable gusto; I came away with a deeper appreciation for the artistry and energy that kept these texts alive, in performance and print, for millennia.

Magpie-like, I accumulated images and ideas from other sources. Much of the opening chapter, describing the escape from Crete and the fall of Icarus, comes from Ovid. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, an intensely affecting depiction of a mother’s search for her child, has a haunting image of an older woman seeking work at the village well as a nursemaid, and this influenced my back story for Naucrate, Daedalus’s wife and Icarus’s mother. (Naucrate has a name and a job description, household slave, in Pseudo-Apollodorus, but we don’t have much surviving information on her character beyond that.) I learned about an old tradition of reluctance to mention the king of the underworld by name, referring to him only through indirect titles, and worked that into the book as well. While Daedalus, the character, has an extremely dry sense of humor, I did my best to put some jokes in, because there are jokes and boasts and coarse insults in Homer, and because I find people do crack jokes when they’re under constant stress.

All this research made the book genuinely fun to write, even though it’s a book about things in the world that make me intensely sad and angry. I did my best to make the book fun to read as well. Only an egomaniac would seriously entertain the hope that his work will stick around as long as Homeric verse, but I do like to think about the comfort and collective enjoyment that audiences would have found in hearing very old myths performed and retold centuries ago, including the many, many versions of those myths that haven’t survived into the present day. If my own version can provide some of that enjoyment for you, if we can both shake our heads, together, at the terror and grotesquerie and grandeur of the world we inhabit right now, I’ll feel like I did my job. 

Daedalus is Dead: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Books-a-Million|Powell’s

Read an excerpt.

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/10/02/the-big-idea-seamus-sullivan/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57589