Alexander the Great’s death is an unsolved mystery. Was he a victim of natural causes, felled by some kind of fever, or did his marshals assassinate him, angered by his tyrannical ways? An autopsy… | Continue reading
How do novel reviews begin? Just like novels very often: Motherless boys may be pitied by mothers but are not infrequently envied by other boys. For the friends of the Piontek family, August 31st, … | Continue reading
In the early winter of 1875, the US Congress grappled with the vexing question of what should be done about the racial mayhem in Louisiana. In the lead-up to statewide elections, the White League a… | Continue reading
“Extraneous baggage”—that was how Albert Erskine, line editor of Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree, described slow sections of the submitted manuscript. McCarthy listened. He spent months revising and cond… | Continue reading
When author Chelsea Martin published her novella, Mickey, in 2016, Lena Dunham declared her the “preeminent chronicler of Internet age malaise.” Electric Literature, in a glowing 1,200-word r… | Continue reading
Enrico Fermi is one of the most important figures in modern nuclear physics. Among the many programs he was involved in was the Manhattan Project, in which he helped establish the conditions for a … | Continue reading
On November 19, 1948, the two most enthusiastic and prolific lobotomists in the Western world faced off against each other in the operating theater at the Institute of Living in Hartford, Connectic… | Continue reading
Albert Einstein once said, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” That’s the essence of a good science writer: make it simple for readers to understand but not too simp… | Continue reading
“I am Myra Breckinridge, whom no man will ever possess.” With that imperious opening sentence, Gore Vidal introduced his flamboyant transsexual heroine, one of the most willful and amusingly self-a… | Continue reading
The following essay originally appeared in Vol. 37, No. 4 of NER. Translation is a kind of traffic, in nearly every sense of the word. There’s the most obvious sense, in that translations cross bor… | Continue reading
I. The Poetics of Hatred A man and his wife name their son John Wayne. At the baby shower the wife’s best friend pulls her aside: “Maybe it’s not my place to say it, but I just can’t believe you’d … | Continue reading
It’s May 2014, just over a year after an asteroid shook Chelyabinsk, and the folks at the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) have a little problem. There’s another one on the way. It s… | Continue reading
If you heard one book called “universally acknowledged as the most important of all printed books,” which do you expect it would be? If you were Margaret Leslie Davis, the answer would be obvious. … | Continue reading
In the fifth episode of Ulysses, “The Lotus Eaters,” Leopold Bloom stops in to Sweny’s Pharmacy for some face cream for his wife Molly, and, after a sniff, adds a bar of lemon soap to his purchase.… | Continue reading
Sometime during the 1990s, Peter Matthiessen, the novelist, naturalist, and Zen roshi, swallowed his doubts and bought a personal computer. Matthiessen was born in 1927, and like many writers of hi… | Continue reading
Each moment was different from the one before, but each had its own unique threat, its own unmistakable sign that something serious was happening. The plane was still moving, so I knew it hadn’t ye… | Continue reading
The Revolution will be posted. At the height of the backlash against feminism in 1989, an Australian woman who thought American teen magazines were all “preserved in aspic,” started a new magazine,… | Continue reading
When I was a teenager, my father and I shared books. We didn’t share the physical copy, at least not often—my dad was serving a ten-year sentence in California, and I was at school in Bath, England… | Continue reading
Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World used to be seen as mutually exclusive dystopias. In 1984, however, while Neil Postman was writing Amusing Ourselves to Death, Aldous Huxley’s biographer Syb… | Continue reading
On a cold morning in a port a few miles outside Stockholm, a group of boys who don’t usually read are huddled around a table of books. “Is there any more coffee?” one of them shouts. The boys live … | Continue reading
I keep a bulging plastic bin under my bed filled with diaries I’ve had since elementary school. They are an archive of my life, literal baggage I tote around from apartment to apartment as an adult… | Continue reading
I am, more or less, allergic to writing advice. This is a problem these days, because writing advice is floating in the air like pollen in springtime, I await the Top Ten List of Top Ten Writing Ti… | Continue reading
“Here, try it on!” the punk poetess Patti Smith urged me. Together with the photographer Dennis Morris and her guitarist Lenny Kaye, we were sifting the racks of a Japanese store, unusual for the t… | Continue reading
When a writer talks about the sport they play, you can see something of how their mind works in how they have chosen to use their body. Hemingway’s frustrated fascination with machismo was written … | Continue reading
If you had to group pitches into two categories, you would choose “fastball” and “other.” The “other” makes pitching interesting. If the ball went straight every time, pitchers would essentially be… | Continue reading
There can be few more damning or more useless terms than “the Dark Ages.” They sound fun in an orcs‐and‐elves sort of way and suggest a very low benchmark from which we have since, as a… | Continue reading
In 1956, Sergio D’Angelo made a journey by train from Moscow southwest to the Soviet-made writers’ colony Peredelkino. He was there to meet the rock-star famous writer Boris Pasternak, whose poetry… | Continue reading
During the 1980s, in the aftermath of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, clinicians were reluctant to suggest electroconvulsive therapy and more likely to face opposition by the patient’s family if t… | Continue reading
“To an editor,” Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin and Hobbes, wrote in 2001, “space may be money, but to a cartoonist, space is time. Space provides the tempo and rhythm of th… | Continue reading
A wooden box containing one of the most valuable books in the world arrives in Los Angeles on October 14, 1950, with little more fanfare—or security—than a Sears catalog. Code-named “the commode,” … | Continue reading
Earthquakes are happening constantly around the world. The seismic network that measures earthquakes in Southern California, where I live and spent my career as a seismologist, has an alarm built i… | Continue reading
Developing the right visual or metaphor to express a concept or to communicate the unseen is a powerful exercise for two reasons. First, in the process of conjuring up new and communicative visuals… | Continue reading
Will Schwalbe: Hi. I’m Will Schwalbe, and you’re listening to But That’s Another Story. In Hamlet, the character Polonius famously counsels his son Laertes, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.” I’… | Continue reading
Ask a literarily inclined friend who wrote the first autobiography and they might mention in passing short works by Cicero or Saint Paul, but they’ll ultimately land on the book-length account Augu… | Continue reading
Many writers rely more heavily on pronouns than I’d suggest is useful. For me this sort of thing comes under the heading Remember that Writing Is Not Speaking. When we talk, we can usually make our… | Continue reading
Read Neal Cassady’s a never-before-published excerpt from the infamous “Joan Anderson Letter” at Alta Magazine. The audience at the Beat Museum in San Francisco’s North Beach was small, and it fit … | Continue reading
“Lawrence was a great initiating bridge and a stepping stone for young writers. He made poetry accessible to a wide audience.” –Neeli Cherkovski * For 43 years, Peter Munks has washed the windows a… | Continue reading
This week, the world’s economic glitterati have gathered for the World Economic Forum in Davos, a secluded ski resort in the northern Swiss Alps, as they have been doing every January since 1971. F… | Continue reading
When Columbus arrived in the Bahamas in 1492, and when Giovanni Caboto (John Cabot in English) landed on the mainland of North America in 1497, they arrived in a vast land, but also in an equally v… | Continue reading
Sometime during the snowy winter of 1793, under cover of night, a small group of thieves pried open a wooden door leading into the Church of Saint-Roch. Forced entry into the Paris sanctuary was ne… | Continue reading
I read hundreds of pages a week for my English PhD program. When I left my program after four years, I discovered an unexpected side effect: I could no longer read the vast majority of adult fictio… | Continue reading
If you can believe it, Japanese novelist, talking cat enthusiast, and weird ear chronicler Haruki Murakami turned 70 years old this weekend. 70! But I suppose we should believe it, despite the yout… | Continue reading
When Marcel Proust died in November 1922 only The Way by Swann’s, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, The Guermantes Way and Sodom and Gomorrah had been published; The Prisoner, The Fugitive an… | Continue reading
In my twenties the question was never “What do I want to read?” but rather “Who do I want to be?”—and bookstores were shrines I pilgrimaged to for answers. I didn’t have much money and had to be in… | Continue reading
It’s mid-December, and likely you are sick and tired of best-of lists. I know, because I am too—especially after reading 52 of them and tracking their contents for the very piece you are read… | Continue reading
When the gurus on your block outnumber the tradespeople or teachers or artists, surely that’s a sign that the world has lost its footing. Because even as the guru seduces you with his wicked poetry… | Continue reading
The following is adapted from a lecture originally given at the World Conference of Screenwriters in Berlin, in October of this year. * I was recently invited to give the keynote address to the Wor… | Continue reading