John Berger and Susan Sontag’s delicious shoptalk and big hair
What a fabulous conversation this is, between two giants we’ve lost. You see here, in this quiet, quietly intense, intensely curious conversation — in which (a ...
Tag: Reading
Janet Malcolm’s Inescapable Truthfulness
At the New Yorker’s “What We’re Reading” blog, Sasha Weiss articulates some of the many reasons I so enjoy Janet Malcolm: Reading Janet ...
Middlemarch, Through Layers of Time and Sympathy
A few paragraphs into her consideration of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, New York Magazine’s Kathryn Schulz lays out a refreshingly practical definiti...
Novels Change Your Brain. So What?
A recent study found that reading novels appears to alter one’s brain connectivity — a revelation that immediately spurred a lot of coverage, and I can se...
How To Pick Apart Great Writing: Joan Didion on Ernest Hemingway
Can you pick apart the magic in a great piece of writing? No — but you can learn a lot trying. Watch Joan Didion, back in 1998 in The New Yorker, do so with one...
How I Write: With Spies, Revolvers, Whiskey, and Luck
The good folks at Matter and Medium asked me how I got started writing and how I write. My answer, which they first ran at Medium (and an enormous photo), is re...
Pandemics P*rn – Great Reads About Nasty Bugs
Note: This post first appeared at Slate this past December 28, where it came at the end of a fine series on Pandemics; it seeks to direct you to the best readin...
Growing Up on Zoloft – Talking Drugs, Depression, and Identity With Katherine Sharpe
The new book "Coming of Age on Zoloft" explores the running debate about overmedication for depression and what it means to come of age -- and of identity -- wh...
SMILE: A Simple Act Becomes a Too-Simple eBook
As I noted a few days ago, I’m now one of the editor-reviewers at Download The Universe, a site dedicated to reviewing ebooks about science. My colleagues...
When a Smile Turns Ugly: My Review of TED Books’ “SMILE”
Is there such a thing as too much good cheer? I argue more or less that over at the new science e-book site Download The Universe, where in dismay I’ve re...