Despite occasional entreaties from readers, I haven’t been very good at staying on top of The Paris Review‘s DNA of Literature Project. It’s so impressive — so accessible and extensive — that I end up stalling every time the magazine posts another decade’s worth of interviews. The 70’s interviews went up a few weeks ago, and I’ve finally read Linda . . .
In the San Francisco Chronicle, Alan Greenblatt calls attention to bloggers’ habitual “too busy to blog” excuses. He highlights offenders like James Wolcott, Alex Ross, Terry Teachout, Roger Simon, and me. (He’s right, of course. I just can’t shut up about my bad teeth.) Greenblatt said “habitual excuse notes” bugged him: until I realized that blogs perform much the same . . .
At the University of Florida, where I went to school, you don’t find many dedicated writers in undergraduate creative writing classes. In fact, you don’t meet many liberal arts majors there who are interested in doing too much more than getting laid, partaking of the local weed, trying to make a $150 paycheck cover a month’s worth of meals (supplemented . . .
Ignoring a vile and deceptive political book won’t stop its rise on the bestseller charts, Dahlia Lithwick rightly observes — particularly not when the book is being pimped by Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Fox News. Men in Black: How the Supreme Court Is Destroying America has been brought to us by the same abhorrent organization that published Unfit for . . .