Perhaps so. Rivendell Books, here in Montpelier, didn’t waste anytime putting this where it belongs, right out front. I think of Matthiessen late as I go birding, for he set the bird hook in my long ago with Wildife in America and then the African books. On down the track. I’m finding the death […]
Continue reading →Monday, April 7, 5 pm, at the University of Vermont, I’ll talk about how to shape a mess of reading and reporting into a magazine story — specifically, “Beautiful Brains,” my National Geographic cover story about adolescent brain and behavior. If you’re around Burlington, come join us. Event is free and open to the public. Here’s […]
Continue reading →One of the underrated pleasures of the internet is all the old stuff we can now read — goodies that 20 years ago you could read only by going to a major library and hunting. A few weeks back, someone or something pointed me to a sort of English major’s dream hiding within The New York Times of […]
Continue reading →I’ve been combing through various of the Paris Review “Writers At Work” interviews, which are spectacular. William Faulkner looks like a pretty tough assignment. INTERVIEWER Mr. Faulkner, you were saying a while ago that you don’t like interviews. WILLIAM FAULKNER The reason I don’t like interviews is that I seem to react violently to personal […]
Continue reading →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 Malcolm’s essay on the German photographer Thomas Struth (it originally appeared in the magazine, and is collected in her recent book “Forty-one False Starts”), I’m struck by the similarity of her eye […]
Continue reading →Many have liked “Die, Selfish Gene, Die,” my Aeon piece challenging Richard Dawkins “Selfish Gene” meme. Quite a few readers have objected to and disagreed with the story, sometimes sharply. Some readers have both liked it and objected to it. At least one objected both rudely and inaccurately; I answer that here. I want to thank everyone who’s read […]
Continue reading →Clive Thompson, who’s now trying to juggle his book tour with presumably actually doing newer work, steered me toward this gem from programmer Paul Graham. Feel free to substitute “writer” for maker throughout. I feel the maker’s pain. One reason programmers dislike meetings so much is that they’re on a different type of schedule from other people. […]
Continue reading →He just refused to do the rational thing and quit. In a longer piece, well worth reading in toto, Brain Pickings describes how best-selling author Michael Lewis (barely) got his start in writing: Even though his thesis adviser at Princeton praised the intellectual angle of his senior thesis but admonished him to never attempt making a […]
Continue reading →This Anthony Lane homage to Elmore Leonard is not only the best thing I’ve read on Leonard. It’s the best new thing I’ve read in weeks. Every sentence rings. Here’s a prime bit: One problem was that a single page of him made other writers, especially the loftier and more lauded variety, seem about as […]
Continue reading →A glorious find for any Virginia Woolf fan. For a Virginia Woolf fan writing a book about a scientifico-botanical metaphor about the nature of sensitivity and flexibility, it is a treasure. This is from Forster’s slim 1942 volume, Virginia Woolf, taken from lectures he gave in Cambridge and London in the year after her suicide. There […]
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