From the category archives:

Linkblog

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

Linkblog

What makes this book, bred of a midlife crisis, extraordinary is the way King weaves his autobiography into the account of his collection, deftly demonstrating that the two stories are essentially one. “I lost and found myself in remote topical aisles of scholarship-wreck,” he says of his hours in Yale’s library, reading the most obscure books he could find. His hard-won self-awareness gives his disclosures an intensity that will likely resonate with all readers, even those whose collections of nothing contain nothing at all.

What makes this book, bred of a midlife crisis, extraordinary is the way King weaves his autobiography into the account of his collection, deftly demonstrating …

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The Girls of Jezebel

The Girls of Jezebel

CULTURE BUZZ – The bloggers at Jezebel get chewed out for being allegedly drunk and saying irresponsible things while appearing on …

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● POW camp economics

● POW camp economics

How a rough system of barter developed into a more complex system of trade in WWII POW camps. This is …

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So much of what passes for quality writing online these days is little more than lurid typing, and I’m not into that. I had hoped the blogosphere would be a great literary groundswell, an electronic distillation of art and beauty for the 21st century. Turns out that generation blog just Google-maps the contours of our own navels, and the greatest oversharers get the biggest prize.

So much of what passes for quality writing online these days is little more than lurid typing, and I’m not into that. I had hoped …

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Linkblog

The popular history of a humdrum object—that faddish genre in which the most boring items on your dining-room table (salt, cod, potatoes, bananas, chocolate) are revealed to be secret juggernauts of profound social change—has recently become so popular that it’s probably time for someone to write a popular history of it. If I were forced, I’d diagnose the trend as yet another symptom (like $4 gas or home foreclosures) of our current flavor of late-phase capitalism—a commercialism so far advanced we’ve begun transferring historical glories from our leaders (Napoleon, Churchill, Gandhi) to our products, so that we find ourselves surrounded by greatness in every aisle of Whole Foods. I’d also add, if forced, that the genre’s wild success seems to predict its own obsolescence: The conclusion that everything is integral to the history of everything is perilously close, in the end, to no conclusion at all.

The popular history of a humdrum object—that faddish genre in which the most boring items on your dining-room table (salt, cod, potatoes, bananas, chocolate) are …

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Linkblog

Burp Castle (2)/5) on Yelp.com

Burp Castle (2)/5) on Yelp.com
The beers—or rather their prices—are overripe, even if this abbey is a piece of East Village solace. I’ll try it …

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Linkblog

How to bitch about your big break in the New York Times [We Read Twitter So You Don’t Have To]

How to bitch about your big break in the New York Times [We Read Twitter So You Don’t Have To]
Attention wannabe celebrities of the …

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Linkblog

Writing advice from Zadie Smith: write it then put it in

Writing advice from Zadie Smith: write it then put it in

Writing advice from Zadie Smith: write it then put it in a drawer.…

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