Sunday, November 20, 2022
Charming and savvy detail from Ana Araujo’s new book on the work of Florence Knoll, “No Compromise”: In 1964, the company Knoll released this letter it says it received from one of its textile suppliers, running it as a print ad (one assumes full-page): Dear Sir, Thank you for your letter of the 6th of October which we have received today. Please be assured that we have not forgotten about you.Sunday, December 9, 2018
At the close of Coates’ recent interview with Chris Hayes, the host asks him if he’s working on a new book. The dodge Coates gives, not wanting to discuss a project-in-process, ends up being a terrific toast to the necessity of sharp, tough early readers and editors: I do, I do have a writing project and I love you people so much, let me tell you how much I love you.Wednesday, December 28, 2016
From "The Secret Life of Time," published in The New Yorker: Years ago, long before I had children or was even married, a friend with children said, “The thing about having kids is that after a while you forget what it was like before you had them.” The idea was shocking. Busy enough with my own life, I couldn’t envisage a future self whose comings and goings were circumscribed, apparently happily, by the wants and needs of people half my size.Monday, December 2, 2013
In my first post on Medium, I write briefly about attending a performance of Prison Performing Arts, whose Board I’m on.Friday, September 6, 2013
A lovely short essay by Alexis C. Madrigal.Tuesday, April 9, 2013
I’ve written before of the penetrating, often funny essays of Aleksandar Hemon, the Bosnian writer who, fortunately for us, calls Chicago home. His new collection, The Book of My Lives, is terrific, whether the subject is gravely serious (war, illness) or much more fun (pick-up soccer with a crew of fellow refugees). Here’s one opening paragraph I quite liked from the essay “The Lives of Grandmasters,” which has just been published online as well:Sunday, March 24, 2013
Continually impressed by David Remnick, who, between serving as the bloody EIC of The New Yorker, has time not just to bust out whip-smart blog posts on Obama in Israel and Philip Roth, but to pen 11,000-word, richly reported pieces on, say, the Russian ballet. Here’s a characteristically wonderful paragraph: I lived in Moscow in the last years of the Soviet era, when tickets to the Bolshoi were cheap, and I used to go whenever I could, happily enduring even Grigorovich’s agitprop warhorses “Spartacus” and “Ivan the Terrible.Tuesday, March 12, 2013
In this New Yorker podcast, the great Jane Mayer talks about food, kitchens, and using evening cooking time to let her mind relax and repair amid heavy reporting assignments: Certain things were good to stir with, and certain things were not good to stir with … Certain poetry. I used to stir risotto to “The Four Quartets,” which I thought had a very, very good rhythm. But I made the mistake of one day writing that I stirred my polenta to John Ashbery.Saturday, May 12, 2012
Barack Obama, writing in his early twenties with confidence and style to girlfriend Genevieve Cook, as published in Vanity Fair: Moments trip gently along over here. Snow caps the bushes in unexpected ways, birds shoot and spin like balls of sound. My feet hum over the dry walks. A storm smoothes the sky, impounding the city lights, returning to us a dull yellow glow. I run every other day at the small indoor track [at Columbia] which slants slightly upward like a plate; I stretch long and slow, twist and shake, the fatigue, the inertia finding home in different parts of the body.Saturday, February 18, 2012
At newyorker.com: When he came to the Washington Post about a decade ago to serve as a correspondent, I was working as an editor at the paper. I asked a standard job-interview question about his goals in the years ahead, and he provided one of the most striking, emphatic answers I can recall from countless discussions of that type: He intended to move to the Middle East, to chronicle in every dimension possible the upheavals in Arab societies that would inevitably follow the September 11th attacks, and to do nothing else, professionally.Friday, February 10, 2012
An entertaining exchange, which the magazine introduces this way: From The Lifespan of a Fact, by writer John D’Agata and Jim Fingal, published in February 2012 by W. W. Norton. In 2005, as an intern at The Believer, Fingal began fact-checking D’Agata’s article on the 2002 suicide of Las Vegas teenager Levi Presley. The book is based on emails exchanged by D’Agata and Fingal. The fact-checked article appeared in The Believer in 2010.