Without going into a lot of detail about it (no time!) I wanted to quote from this article discussing the ideas of Jonathan Haidt. It’s actually supposed to be a review of George Lakoff’s writing on political language, but it gets further into Haidt’s ideas and research as a better alternative. He’s not so kind […]

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I’m a huge fan of Jonathan Lethem. And I hadn’t gotten round to reading all of his essay in Harper’s until just lately. Here’s a slice. And yes, the writing is this sharp and elegant all the way through:
“The ecstasy of influence: A plagiarism” by Jonathan Lethem (Harper’s Magazine)
For substantially all ideas are secondhand, […]

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The incredibly talented Kyle Webster is doing the art for a new graphic novel called Light Children. The story sounds fascinating: creepy orphans with special powers, a macabre carnival of some kind, and lots of mysterious intrigue. I can’t wait to see it come to life.
From the site:

The first chapter of the book […]

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Slate reviews Garry Wills’ “What Paul Meant”
If anyone can wean his fellow liberal Christians from their historic habit of denigrating Paul, it is Wills, whose translation of Chapter 13 of First Corinthians, tying Paul tightly to Jesus as a preacher of love, is characteristically fresh and gripping. The last six verses read: “Love will never […]

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In my last post, I opined at excruciating length about how so much of what makes one’s message in corporate life effective is the context and how one plays that context. It has to do with much more than appearance, which is just one factor; it’s about presence. That self-assurance that in some people seems […]

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As an adoptee who is also a fan of AM Homes, I was astonished I hadn’t seen this yet.
AM Homes: The Mistress’s Daughter
I follow up with a call. Her voice is low, nasal, gravelly, vaguely animal. I tell her who I am and she screams, “Oh, my God! This is the most wonderful day […]

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Jeffrey Skinner, my mentor from what seems a previous life, recently published a new book of poems: Salt Water Amnesia (published by Ausable Press, and also available on Amazon.)
I realize it came out in September, but it’s still “recent” by poetry publishing standards.
I’m awaiting arrival of the book to my mailbox, but I’ve read […]

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Good luck to Lou Rosenfeld’s new enterprise: Rosenfeld Media - Publisher of user experience design books. If anybody can make this kind of thing happen, Lou can.
There’s also an excellent interview with Lou about his venture over at Boxes & Arrows.

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I ran across a new article in Wired about Ray Kurzweil’s ideas about immortality — using technology to transform ourselves into everlasting containers of our essential being — and it occurred to me that the concept behaves much like the horcrux from Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.
Maybe Arthur C Clarke was right about […]

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Adam Gopnik has an excellent piece on C.S. Lewis in this week’s New Yorker: Prisoner of Narnia.
He reminds us of a few important things to keep in mind about Lewis (he’s viewed differently in Britain, for instance), and discusses his brand of religious belief, and how it kept him in a sort of internal […]

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Poet Sharon Olds wrote back to the White House (to Laura Bush) her reasons for not attending the National Book Festival as a featured writer & speaker. It’s reprinted at The Nation. The quotation below is something she leads up to, and doesn’t just come right out and say in the beginning. In fact, the […]

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My erstwhile MFA classmate Steve Almond posts about the 50th anniversary of Lolita:
AlterNet: MediaCulture: ‘Lolita’ Hits Fifty
Nabokov is nothing less than a poet of desire… Big ideas, witty observations and tricky plotlines are all fine and well. But the engine of any great book is desire. And by that standard, Lolita is a Mack […]

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