Martin Dolan

3 weeks ago | thebaffler.com | Martin Dolan

Jim Dandy might be the racehorse most famous for losing. The story isn’t heartwarming enough for a folksy biopic or a Laura Hillenbrand book, but his out-of-nowhere victory at the 1930 Travers Stakes is nonetheless cemented in American equestrian lore. At the historic Saratoga Race Course—where the Travers is still held—legend has it that bookies offered odds as long as 500–1 and went bust in the upset.

Feb 14, 2024 | full-stop.net | Martin Dolan

It’s not a reach to say that video games, especially the ones with massive, multimillion-dollar production budgets that have dominated the past twenty-five years, borrow much from the literary tradition. Even beyond superficial questions of plot and narrative, games, like novels, use character to situate players in their worlds.

Dec 27, 2023 | thebaffler.com | Martin Dolan

“See that mountain?” asks Skyrim, the award-winning, sixty-million-unit selling action role-playing game that made Bethesda Game Studios the closest thing in video games to a household name. “You can climb it.”But even in 2012, before the novelty of game worlds so big they’d take you an afternoon to walk around in wore off, there wasn’t much point.

Jul 23, 2023 | themillions.com | Martin Dolan

In Ann Beattie’s Onlookers, the personal and the political aren’t as separate as its characters might like to believe. Set in present day Charlottesville, Virginia, the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally looms large in the public consciousness—so do the two most recent election cycles, the pandemic, and the intellectual battleground that the University of Virginia has become.

Jul 23, 2023 | scribd.com | Martin Dolan

In ’s the personal and the political aren’t as separate as its characters might like to believe. Set in present day Charlottesville, Virginia, the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally looms large in the public consciousness—so do the two most recent election cycles, the pandemic, and the intellectual battleground that the University of Virginia has become.