David Alm

In an Op/Ed for today’s New York Times, Arthur Brooks offers himself as evidence that cheap, zero-residence higher education not only works, but is a moral imperative. The moral imperative has less to do with the correspondence part of the equation, and more with the low cost that correspondence (i.e. online) education allows. See, Brooks [...]

Every day at around 1 or 2:00, I take a 20-minute nap. Usually I’m at home at that time, so napping is as easy as lying down on the couch and setting my cell phone alarm for 20 minutes later. But I’ve been known to nap sitting up, too — in my office chair at [...]

In Hal Ashby’s first film, The Landlord, a young white man (played with smarmy aplomb by Beau Bridges) announces to his very rich family that he’s just bought a brownstone in Park Slope, Brooklyn. The year was 1970, and Bridges was 29. After an awkward pause, his brother asks, “Are you aware that that’s a [...]

You might think that if comedy met Buddha on the road, they would just continue on their respective journeys. But that’s just, like, your opinion, man. To wit, the Dude is back — not to wreak unintended havoc all over LA, but to enlighten. Jeff Bridges has just released a book with the Zen master [...]

If you, like many other people — including some seasoned reporters at the New York Times — were relieved to learn that you could keep reading new content from Philip Roth following the 79-year-old author’s retirement from novel writing through Twitter, I have some bad news. The real Philip Roth — yes, him — has [...]

I once asked my father, who had majored in English, gotten his master’s degree in English, and for years had dreams of being a full professor of English before he decided (wisely) to pursue a more stable career instead, why he no longer read novels. I was in college at the time, and just discovering [...]

While state funding for higher education plummets, tuition soars to make up the difference. As a result, young people are often being saddled with insurmountable debt, all in the name of getting that all-important college degree. So they drop out along the way, presumably because it’s too expensive to do all at once (at least [...]

Last week, the New York Times published a piece on its website about the seemingly insurmountable challenge of teaching students how to write. The author, an English teacher, concludes not that students need to read more non-fiction (the vast majority of their high school curricula is already non-fiction), but better non-fiction. She cites the example [...]

One irony of modern life is that as technology makes more and more things possible, we often find ourselves working in tighter and tighter confines. This is especially true for writers. Where 10 years ago, a professional writer might have been working on a 2,000-word feature for one magazine, a 1,500-word review for another, and [...]

Last year, Philip Roth said he was done reading fiction. Now he says he’s done writing it, too. Roth’s literary output could be compared to Woody Allen’s with film. Since he published his first collection of short stories, in 1959, he has written 27 novels and two books of non-fiction, as well as several essays. [...]

Writing ranks pretty low on the list of guaranteed paths to success — down there with sculpting and growing exotic plants. No one goes into it because it’s a sure thing. And I’m not just talking about being a novelist or writing for the New Yorker. Writing, like acting, can take many forms: you can [...]

Dear Ethicist: I am a runner. I haven’t taken more than two weeks off from the sport since my father gave me my first pair of running shoes on my 23rd birthday, 14 years ago. Even when I was hobbled by a pinched nerve in my leg, I stupidly insisted on running before the nerve [...]

Unfortunately, I now understand what it’s like to live through a hurricane. Sandy tore through my city from Sunday night through early Tuesday morning, forcing millions of people to either abandon their homes or “hunker down,” to use the politicians’ nomenclature for enduring the storm from the confines of your house. I was one of [...]