Books to Read In a Cabin in the Woods
This piece was originally published in June 2009. Growing up, my family and I vacationed in an Upstate New York cabin. A lake spread out, cold and tranquil, just across a gravel road. Hiking trails looped through the woods, a nature center offered pamphlets and kayaks, and our neighbors let us borrow their canoe. Did I visit the nature center to learn about the flora and fauna? No. Did I water ski? Not unless whee...
BREAKING NEWS: You Heard It Here First
All the President's Men is indisputably the all-time best film about journalism ever made in the history of the universe of films being made about journalism. (Take that, Citizen Kane.) It's not about journalism in the boring sense, but the golden snitch for every journalist: breaking the story. (And, some weird lobstery guy who, I understand, did a couple of dumb things as president.) If Hollywood is to be believ...
Facts, Errors, and the Kindle
From More Intelligent Life: Facts, Errors, and the Kindle. Nietzsche famously said that there are no such things as facts, only interpretations. Be that as it may, every writer knows that there are certainly such things as factual mistakes. Errors are common in all forms of media, but it is mistakes in the printed word that are perhaps the most pernicious. Once a "fact" has been pressed onto paper, it becomes a trus...
On being an uncultured oaf (maybe)
From the New York Times: Half an Oaf. On the theory that a certified intellectual might be able to enlighten me, I decided to consult someone I know who is an officer of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. There's no substitute for going right to the top. Here's what the certified intellectual had to say about the sentence in question: "I suppose it's meant to imply that culture (whatever that is) has allowed (...
Brevity’s Pull
From the NY Times Magazine - In Praise of the American Short Story. The near-simultaneous appearance of three new literary biographies offers a powerful and concentrated challenge to the habit of undervaluing the short story. The subjects of these lives - Flannery O'Connor, John Cheever and Donald Barthelme - all produced longer work as well, but their reputations rest on shorter work. And this work, far from being m...
What Ghosts Teach:Oliver Sacks’s Awakenings, Part I
Book available on Amazon.com. What could being asleep for fifty years, and then awakening, teach a person about life? You might tell me to Google Washington Irving or the Brothers Grimm and see what lessons they intended, but I am dead serious when I ask this question. I ask it because in the early part of the 20th century, the disease Encephalitis Lethargica turned people into living statues for as long as Rip V...
