Articles Written By Robert Birnbaum
Robert Birnbaum is editor-at-large at Identity Theory. All the sketchy details of his life will be (re)fabricated in his memoir-in-progress, Just Talking: How to Do Things With Words. His weblog can be found here.
-
Reading
Book Digest: September 18, 2006
President Bush’s press conference of Sept. 15 should be noted as a landmark of sorts, as he continued to use the presidential bully pulpit to elevate public discourse and educate...
-
Reading
Book Digest: September 11, 2006
Publishers Weekly and The New York Times must have been too busy to note that Dandy Dan Wickett, founder of the Emerging Writers Network and the hardest working man in...
-
Reading
Book Digest: September 4, 2006
Journalism being what it is—it seems driven by lists and so-called service features and other banalities—there have been occasions when I have been tempted to stoop to such,...
-
Birnbaum v.
Sebastian Junger
Reporting a civil war in Africa sounds tough, but try investigating a 40-year-old crime in America’s quietest suburb. A chat with journalist Sebastian Junger about his new book on the Boston Strangler.
-
Reading
Book Digest: August 21, 2006
No tawdry headlines, scandals, feuds, vicious reviews, or dumb awards—what a pleasant week! I took pause to contemplate the late Susan Sontag’s view that, “To have access to...
-
Reading
Book Digest: August 14, 2006
I didn’t previously have a particular picture of a perfect or at least prototypical New England day—yesterday in Peterborough, N.H., at the MacDowell Colony will ever onward...
-
Reading
Book Digest: August 7, 2006
A South African journalist—I wish I could recall his name—once poignantly quipped “a patriot is someone who saves his country from its government.” Looking around the world (actually...
-
Birnbaum v.
Susan Straight
The great American novel doesn’t exist—except in the minds of marketers (and those who believe New Yorkers write the best books). A conversation with Susan Straight about regional writing, as American as apple pie.
-
Reading
Book Digest: July 17, 2006
It looked as if this was a week when none of the folks I have identified as Enemies of Literature were wreaking havoc such as creating the Best Book about...
-
Reading
Book Digest: July 10, 2006
The fetishism for full disclosure is variously amusing and vexing, especially when it comes from this, the journalistic quadrant. Of course, it’s a practice that I engage in, albeit...
-
Birnbaum v.
Gay Talese
A rowdy conversation about Talese’s new memoir, Lorena Bobbitt’s Hollywood agent, attending fights with James Baldwin, and a hundred other reports about the joys and pains of getting a story right.
-
Reading
Book Digest: June 26, 2006
Watching the United States Millionaire’s Club latest so-called debate about the American military adventure in Iraq inevitably lead me back to Karl Kraus, who observed in April of 1917: “War:...