July 2009
7 posts
Bright Lights, Big Internet
I have an op-ed in Thursday’s Times on how the Internet is (and isn’t) like New York. An excerpt:
Is New York still worth the trip? Recessions tend to be hard on youthful dreams, but this downturn has proved especially dispiriting. Those in the print media have come to see their present fiscal woes as not merely cyclical but structural, and so their slashed workforce and diminished...
Curb Day - October 24th →
This is a great idea: a pre-set day when everyone leaves their junk out in front of their house for others to take as they like. It’s a nationwide freecycle event. In New York, of course, every day is Curb Day, but other places really need this.
Thy Neighbor's Wife
I contributed a short appreciation of Gay Talese’s book Thy Neighbor’s Wife to the great literary blog The Second Pass. Here’s the opening:
Of all the mass utopian notions of the twentieth century, the Sexual Revolution was both the most spectacularly successful and, in the end, the most thwarted. Whereas most political or spiritual or cultural movements, from Communism to...
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
I was consumed with book tour during the dust-up a few weeks ago over Caleb Crain’s NYT review of Alain de Botton’s new book The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. (After Crain posted a link to the review at his blog here, Botton commented somewhat hysterically in the thread here, and the inevitable bloggy eruption ensued.) I made a note to go back and read the review, perhaps because as a...
End of the book tour
is today! Went through Seattle, Mountain View, Santa Cruz, New York, Washington, and today Philadelphia. Here’s the real video (David Rees’s Rickrolling notwithstanding) from the event in Santa Cruz, which actually was one of the most enjoyable I did. (I don’t think I made any sour faces.)
If, seventy minutes later, you’re still hungering to hear me talk more about...
Live-Blogging the Jackson Memorial Live-Blogs →
Heartening to see that it’s the Wall Street Journal, of all places, that had the foresight to come up with a concept this awesomely ridiculous. Via TPM.