Listicles are: legion. We’ve reached the post-listicle age. Listicles about listicles are all that’s left for writers feeding the internet beast at 10 cents a word. As far as the “authors appearing in films of their own works” listicle, the obvious suspects appear in almost every piece. Stephen King hams it up as a dingbat in […]
Please, read this article on my dream job. Record stores: it’s not all bad. Nice to see someone’s paying writers for the type of mash piece music fans write when they’re 17. A note on Wu Lyf, re the statement “NOBODY sounded like them,” as this article purports: this was true only if you hadn’t listened to about […]
As a fourth grader, I was introduced to Adventure and other text-only computer games by our school principal, who dragged six of us down to his office to see the TRS-80 he probably spent his entire day messing with, rather than breaking up fights or firing lousy teachers or whatever else a principal is expected to do, […]
Stephen Witt’s superb “How Music Got Free” administers a bone saw to the music industry’s corpse and details the official cause of death with a pathologist’s detail. It’s a slow, circuitous death, and every corner is set in fascinating detail, from Karlheinz Brandenberg’s use of research on the possible spectrum of heard sounds in order […]
You read a little of this, a little of that. The celebrated prizewinners deliver as expected, but the majority of their books fall away from memory. Those that stick aren’t the technical best, oddly. Maybe technical prowess is only a superficial concern when it comes to lasting art. Maybe this is how Kate Atkinson’s “Life […]
Not so unusual to have a madman close to running our country considering America was founded upon the abuse of alcohol. Susan Cheever’s slight but pleasing “Drinking in America” clarifies our major malfunction, beginning with the Mayflower’s decision to put in at Plymouth only because they’d run out of beer. Those Revolutionary War stories […]
After word of mouth drove me to the killer first of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, frustration with a library waiting list longer than a movie theater concession line necessitated my cash forkover for the next three (shout out to the Mysterious Bookshop, NYC). To say they didn’t disappoint understates overstatements. Sadly, a fifth volume is […]
Unprepared for how heartbreaking The Replacements, All Over But the Shouting: An Oral History would be, I read it while rocking my second child this past weekend, reflux-sufferer that she is (but otherwise healthy as an ox in all other respects), and now I will forever associate her infant-hood with tales of Bob Stinson walking […]
Stop Loving Everything 