Archive for March, 2010

On the viability of book covers in an ebook world

A couple months ago I saw a girl press onto the subway, give the boy next to her a once-over, and casually tilt her iPhone — accidentally on purpose — so he could see what she was listening to. After a couple tries, it worked. By the time we reached Jay Street, they were talking about music. As I told . . .

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Day in the Life: Hynes’ reading list for Next

My friend James Hynes’ Next is a departure from his prior novels in many ways, not least in that the action is set in a single day. Writing for the Los Angeles Times, Tod Goldberg says the book, is “wildly inventive, stunning… an essential piece of American literature that is both of its time and ultimately without present compare.” Michael . . .

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Sarah Palin’s Planet Earth different from yours, mine

The Awl has published my examination of Sarah Palin’s fundamentalist background — a background not entirely dissimilar to my own. I have a hunch about what she’s up to with her new reality show, and it scares the hell of out me. When Sarah Palin began shopping around a “Planet Earth-type” reality series based in Alaska earlier this month, the . . .

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Out of humor: an obsolete but actual condition

Recently I was diagnosed with a disorder of the humors.* By a licensed gastroenterologist and everything. The bile thinners notwithstanding, I honestly can’t think of a verdict that would’ve pleased me more. So Aristotelian, so Elizabethan, so hypochondriacal and tied in with my mother’s weird religious ordering of the world. “I’m surprised they didn’t find fire and brimstone in there,” . . .

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