This is the time of year when football, America’s Game, the most insidious video game of all, overtakes large parts of the country’s population, most of whom fall into the classification known as human tubers—ostensibly sentient beings almost totally unaware of what is required to play this
James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency and proprietor of the delightful web journal Clusterfuck Nation, is probably—based on his views of the oil peak, suburbia, and America’s gimme-something-for-nothing ethos—viewed as a kook, mountebank, or whatever is currently the worst thing to be
Apparently there’s been keening by a number of white women writers that the New York Times disproportionately touts white males—in this case, Jonathan Franzen and his new opus Freedom received some attention (disproportionate to the relevance of their complaints) here and there. Personally, I might have taken the
Reading a Guardian article headlined “Jodi Picoult attacks favoritism towards ‘white male literary darlings’—Bestselling author attacks New York Times for narrow focus of its review coverage” had me checking to ascertain that I wasn’t somehow shanghaied and thrown back into the 20th century via a time machine. That
Perhaps future anthropologists, stirring the entrails of our American civilization, will find it remarkable that in the third millennium of the Christian era, Time magazine placed novelist Jonathan Franzen on its cover. What I find remarkable is that anyone thinks the dying gasps of an endangered media species are news
Our man in Boston sits down to chat with author Jennifer Egan about her new novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad, and what it's like to write in PowerPoint.
Last week’s version of this bulletin included notice of Tony Judt’s latest opus. Sadly, this week’s news is that Judt has passed on, as some express it, to his greater glory. Here’s the New York Timesobituary. My colleague Mike Smith at this fortress of truth and
More than a few people have expressed to me some inchoate feeling that, yes, August is upon us. This seems to be an expression of discomfort with the rapidity with which the current season is falling away. And in my view, a minor symptom of a larger distemper which is,
Ten years after their first conversation, author David Mitchell and our man in Boston discuss 18th-century Japan, shoplifting from other novels, and Mitchell's annual Christmas party.
Inquire of any observer within reasonable proximity of his or her wits and I doubt any would say that last week represented a hopeful moment in the life of our ailing republic. You, of course, already know the other symptoms—imperialistic hubris run amuck; “too big to fail” capitalist hyenas
