An iPad recently came to live in my house. I was given it for my birthday, and I’ve enjoyed playing with it. So have my children, who are 7 and 9 and drawn to anything with a screen. By luck or habit or genetic inheritance, they’re also great readers, so I downloaded a couple of… Continue reading »
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A Cure for “Curated”
Yesterday, in one of the fits of linguistic pique I’m prone to, I suggested via Twitter that “the use of the word ‘curated’ has really gotten out of hand.” This outburst was prompted by a mention of a table of books at the Strand that a well-known novelist had “curated.” Nothing against the Strand or… Continue reading »
A Merwin Moment
This isn’t a post about books but about broccoli. At least it begins with broccoli. If you’re a gardener on the East Coast of the United States, you’re likely to be harvesting some broccoli around now. We had a good, early harvest from our community-garden plot this year (no thanks to the produce thieves who… Continue reading »
Eight Pretty Good Reasons to Write (and Three Not-So-Good Ones)
There was a time when every journalist starting out got some version of the fire-in-the-belly speech from his or her editor. The speech went like this: Writing’s a tough game, kid. The pay’s as short as the hours are long. The world doesn’t give a crap about your deathless prose. So if you don’t have… Continue reading »
In Praise of the Telephone
According to the New York times, it’s fashionable to hate the phone (“Don’t Call Me, I Won’t Call You,” by Pamela Paul, NYT, March 28, 2011). I appreciate some of the anti-phone arguments. If a telemarketer rings you up at the dinner hour , it tends not to improve the evening. If you work as… Continue reading »
