From the category archives:

Linkblog

A selection of my published work since 2001 is available here. Contact me with any specific requests.

Linkblog

IMAGE OF THE DAY: The Seals Have ‘Eyes’

IMAGE OF THE DAY: The Seals Have ‘Eyes’
CSIRO/AFP/Getty Images
This handout image was released by Australia’s Antarctic Climate and Ecosystem Cooperative Research Center on …

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Linkblog

Merlin Mann: What Makes for a Good Blog?

Merlin Mann: What Makes for a Good Blog?
A list of nine best practices. One of the smartest: “Good blogs are the product of attention

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Linkblog

Now that Brooklyn has been officially sanctioned as “hip” and “literary”—and you’ll excuse me for a second here while I roll on the floor in a spasm of ironic hilarity—it is high time for the bridge-and-tunnel literati to turn its gaze Verrazano Bridge–ward and begin discovering one of that borough’s most intriguing and authentic homegrown talents. Sorrentino’s Bay Ridge deserves to be appreciated alongside Malamud’s Crown Heights, Arthur Miller’s Coney Island, Henry Miller’s and Betty Smith’s Williamsburg, Hamill’s and Auster’s Park Slope, and Lethem’s Boerum Hill. Time to get on that Fourth Avenue local.

Now that Brooklyn has been officially sanctioned as “hip” and “literary”—and you’ll excuse me for a second here while I roll on the floor in …

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Linkblog

This whole scene is cast in an immensely unflattering light in Sorrentino’s roman à clef–ish 1971 novel Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, which might be described as a master class in distinguishing between writers with drinking problems and drinkers with writing problems—think Dawn Powell with an MFA from Brown. An unsparing catalogue of the endless varieties of self-deception, dilettantism, fraudulence, and self-serving malarkey among the marginally talented, it has always seemed to me a seriously bridge-burning sort of book (“Art is the undoing of many a hick … Wait till the folks in Terre Haute see this!” is one of its milder provocations).

This whole scene is cast in an immensely unflattering light in Sorrentino’s roman à clef–ish 1971 novel Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, which might be …

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