This and That
Browse October’s calendar and new stories, essays and articles
Here are key or marginalized dates to observe and note for this month:
October 5th: Steve Jobs—the motion picture I regard as 2015’s best movie—debuted in movie theaters 10 years ago. Read my review of the film adaptation of Walter Isaacson’s authorized biography. The movie, which bombed at the box office, depicts the fountainhead of Apple, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2011.
October 10th: Brandeis University was founded on this date in 1948. Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged was published in 1957 by Random House. Whiplash debuted in movie theaters in 2014.
October 12th: Weight Watchers founder Jean Nidetch was born on this date.
October 15th: Leonard Peikoff was born on this date in 1933.
October 13th: Today’s the centenary of Margaret Thatcher’s birth.
October 14th: Jews waged the only armed mass revolt against a Nazi Germany death camp at Sobibor, Poland on this date in 1943.
October 16th: Steven Spielberg’s morally gray Soviet spy thriller, Bridge of Spies, debuted in movie theaters 10 years ago today.
October 17th: Francis Ford Coppola’s The Black Stallion debuted in movie theaters on this date in 1979. Read my movie review.
October 23rd: Celebrate the centenary of Johnny Carson’s birth. Read my review of a biography of the Tonight Show host.
October 29th: Ayn Rand was granted permission to leave Soviet Russia 100 years ago today.
Update: My First Book
“Boom-Boom Goes to Jail,” my prize-winning short story, will get a second, third and fourth publication this month—the story’s available to read on Line of Advance, a Chicago literary journal for military members co-founded by three U.S. soldiers who fought the Taliban together in Afghanistan—online and in print.
This story of an erotic dancer, her husband and her dog, and her time in jail, goes online this weekend on Classic Chicago magazine. “Boom-Boom Goes to Jail” also goes to press for an anthology of stories (pictured above) winning an award during 2025’s Col. Darron L. Wright Memorial Writing Awards.
“Boom-Boom Goes to Jail” will also be featured in my forthcoming collection of short stories. I recently announced the first book on my fiction podcast for the paid Short Stories by Scott Holleran subscriber. The design, story sequence and format have been slightly edited and revised. Long Run: Short Stories, Volume One features a new foreword by English literature scholar Shoshana Milgram, PhD. and an author’s preface.
Long Run will be reviewed by my peers, including the late screenwriter and Oscar-winning movie director Robert Benton (Kramer Vs. Kramer, Feast of Love, Superman (1978), The Human Stain, Places in the Heart), an early and enthusiastic patron of my short stories. The book’s also been reviewed by one of America’s pre-eminent media studies professors and a film director who’s my former writing student. I disclosed book details for subscribers to Short Stories by Scott Holleran on September 2nd.
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