Since 2010, Unwinnable has been a showcase for weird, experimental, poignant, funny and iconoclastic stories. We're devoted to examining the intersection of the culture we love and the lives we lead. Unwinnable wants to bring you the best in pop-culture criticism, creative non-fiction, and the occasional serialized fiction once a week in a beautiful digital magazine. Unwinnable is life with culture. Ethan Sacks laments the state of the modern big budget horror film (spoiler alert: director Guillermo Del Toro appears in a cameo). Jill Scharr brings her parents to a haunted house...based on 1980s-era New York City. Ed Coleman doesn’t like horror movies and reveals the 1988’s The Lady in White is the reason why. Stu Horvath does some revealing, too, namely why he dislikes Halloween costumes. Finally, Gus Mastrapa talks to Nate Hayden, designer of the awesomely gruesome board game Psycho Raiders. Nate’s collaborator, artist Mat Brinkman is responsible for our grisly cover art. A special thanks to the both of them for letting us reprint it! And speaking of art, I’ve thrown in a monstrous photograph and Chris Martinez and Amber Harris collaborated on a cheeky bit of Halloween art. No matter what your taste, Unwinnable Weekly has you covered, so make sure to check out our selection of back issues today!

Since 2010, Unwinnable has been a showcase for offbeat, experimental, poignant and funny stories about games, books, movies and even weird stuff, like an advice column from a space marine 38,000 years in the future. We're devoted to examining the intersection of the culture we love and the lives we lead, bringing you the best in pop-cultural criticism, creative non-fiction and the occasional serialized short once a week in a beautiful digital magazine. Unwinnable is life with culture. In this issue, Matt Marrone reports from the 2014 Newport Folk Festival and Gus Mastrapa delivers the latest installment of Dungeon Crawler. Meanwhile, Owen R. Smith gets angry at the unjust world we live in and Stu Horvath muses on his life of gaming. No matter what your taste, Unwinnable Weekly has you covered, so make sure to check out our selection of back issues today!

Eight years after 9/11 and in the shadow of two protracted U.S. military campaigns in the Middle East, the enemy is not only undefeated but emboldened and resurgent. What went wrong_and what should we do going forward? Winning the Unwinnable War shows how our own policy ideas led to 9/11 and then crippled our response in the Middle East, and it makes the case for an unsettling conclusion: By subordinating military victory to perverse, allegedly moral constraints, Washington's policy has undermined our national security. Owing to the significant influence of Just War Theory and neoconservatism, the Bush administration consciously put the imperative of shielding civilians and bringing them elections above the goal of eliminating real threats to our security. Consequently, this policy left our enemies stronger, and America weaker, than before. The dominant alternative to Bush-esque idealism in foreign policy_so-called realism_has made a strong comeback under the tenure of Barack Obama. But this nonjudgmental, supposedly practical approach is precisely what helped unleash the enemy prior to 9/11. The message of the essays in this thematic collection is that only by radically re-thinking our foreign policy in the Middle East can we achieve victory over the enemy that attacked us on 9/11. We need a new moral foundation for our Mideast policy. That new starting point for U.S. policy is the moral ideal championed by the philosopher Ayn Rand: rational self-interest. Implementing this approach entails objectively defining our national interest as protecting the lives and freedoms of Americans_and then taking principled action to safeguard them. The book lays out the necessary steps for achieving victory and for securing America's long-range interests in the volatile Middle East.