[Not single-page.] Some call this the closing of the conservative mind. Alas, the conservative mind has proved itself only too open, these past years, to all manner of intellectual pollen. Call it instead the drying up of conservative creativity. It’s clearly true that the country faces daunting economic troubles. It’s also true that the wrong […]
New York magazine
Posted inUncategorized
(Not single-page) For some, reclaiming her old seat has become the sine qua non of her recovery, part of its definition. In the book she offers a simple, heartfelt declaration: “I will get stronger. I will return.” But there are other options if it takes longer than expected. One of the daydreams floating through the […]
Posted inUncategorized
Still, a man who at 105—he’ll be 106 on December 19—has never had a life-threatening disease, who takes no cholesterol or blood-pressure medications and can give himself a clean shave each morning (not to mention a “serious sponge bath with vigorous rubbing all around”), invites certain questions. Is there something about his habits that predisposed […]
Posted inUncategorized
What’s as intriguing as Occupy Wall Street itself is that once again our Establishment, left, right, and center, did not see the wave coming or understand what it meant as it broke. Maybe it’s just human nature and the power of denial, or maybe it’s a stubborn strain of all-American optimism, but at each aftershock […]
Posted inUncategorized
Possibly the best living American essayist and probably the most influential, Didion has always maintained that she doesn’t know what she’s thinking until she writes it down. Yet over the past decade, she’s been writing down more about her own life than ever before. If you want to know about her upbringing, readWhere I Was […]
Posted inUncategorized
And so six o’clock dawned on the South Pacific. And there was nothing. Reached on his doorstep the following morning, Camping was, he said, “flabbergasted.” He was visibly shaken. “It has been a really tough weekend,” he acknowledged. He said he was “looking for answers.” And so in the hours that followed he pulled the […]
Posted inUncategorized
When Jeffrey Eugenides moved to New York, he was 28 years old and things were not looking good. After graduating from Brown in 1983, he and Rick Moody, a college friend, had driven out to San Francisco with no real plan other than making a go of it as writers, and lived together awhile on […]
Posted inUncategorized
Lewis does his best to ignore what he calls “the noise.” “I’m sensitive enough to criticism that if I pay attention to it, it may make me a worse writer,” he says, maneuvering his car through the Berkeley Hills. “When I sit down to write, I like to think everybody’s going to love me,” he […]
Posted inUncategorized
“At Twitter, where anxiety and optimism are never far from one another, the leadership is surprisingly frank about these problems. To start with, the audience is alarmingly fickle. Nielsen estimated that user-retention rates were around 40 percent. Twitter was easy to use at an entry level, but after a while it was hard for some […]
Posted inUncategorized
“One recalled that as a girl, she would enact a nocturnal parental ritual in reverse: She, the child, would creep out from her bed to listen at her mother’s door for the precious sound of breathing. ‘She was just terrified,’ Morris says, ‘that her mother would die.’” “Parents of a Certain Age.” — Lisa Miller, […]