Entries from March 2010

Mar. 31, 2010

Dr. Johnson: Libraries and “the vanity of human hopes”

“No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library; for who can see the wall crowded on every side by mighty volumes, the works of laborious meditations and accurate inquiry, now scarcely known but by the catalogue…” — Samuel Johnson, Rambler #106 (March 23, 1751) (source) (click [...]

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Mar. 30, 2010

The Writer-in-Chief

I love the image of President Obama and his speechwriter Jon Favreau that made the rounds of the web yesterday. (The detail above is just a teaser. Click through to see the much larger original.) (via) Robert Draper had an interesting profile of Obama as writer in GQ. The piece includes this quote from Jerry [...]

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Mar. 29, 2010

Dickens’ Outlines

Dickens’ notes are a rare opportunity for a young writer to watch a master at work.

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Mar. 25, 2010

An Interview

An interview I did today with a blog called D.A. Confidential, which also had nice things to say about this very blog. The interview is mostly about writing and my own path to publication. The blogger, Mark Pryor, is an assistant D.A. in Texas. He is currently shopping his first novel. Good luck, Mark!

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Mar. 23, 2010

“Wolf Hall”

Hilary Mantel’s Booker Prize-winning “Wolf Hall” re-imagines Henry VIII’s chief minister and henchman Thomas Cromwell as the true modern man and the sainted Thomas More as a mad, hair-shirted religious zealot.

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Mar. 18, 2010

Baseball’s Yankee Problem

In baseball, the deck is stacked. It’s worse than unfair; it’s boring.

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Mar. 14, 2010

The issue is inequality, not total wealth

On almost every index of quality of life, or wellness, or deprivation, there is a gradient showing a strong correlation between a country’s level of economic inequality and its social outcomes. … This has nothing to do with total wealth or even the average per-capita income. America is one of the world’s richest nations, with [...]

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Mar. 13, 2010

Hilary Mantel: “locked in competition with myself”

“The idea of authors competing with each other is strange, not strange on a worldly level, but on a psychic level. I have always seen myself as locked in competition with myself, my own doubts and hesitations, my own limitations, and like any working writer I live with a daily process of selecting and judging [...]

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Mar. 12, 2010

A Facelift

This site has gotten a little makeover this week. Since I launched my blog last May, I have been fiddling with the design nonstop, trying to come up with something that suits me. I haven’t found the perfect fit yet, but this update moves me a little closer. Here is what I’m after. To me, [...]

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Mar. 9, 2010

Done!

My new novel explores our eternal fascination with crime stories.

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