David Alm

In this month’s Atlantic, Peg Tyre writes about a school on Staten Island that has “revolutionized” writing pedagogy: by going back to basics. Judith Hochman, who originally developed the very old-fashioned approach to writing pedagogy that New Dorp High School is now using, told Tyre that “kids need a formula, at least at first, because what [...]

About six years ago, I mentioned to someone that I’d just read an interesting article in the Atlantic that concerned whatever it was we were talking about at the time. She was a bit older than me, in her 40s, and visibly taken aback. “What are you doing reading the Atlantic?” she asked, as though [...]

This one is for the writers out there. In what context do you find yourself producing your best, most original work? When you have the time to sit and ponder a piece for weeks or months on end, or when you dash something off in a matter of one day, an hour, or even less? [...]

Philip Roth writes novels that he insists are not autobiographical despite the undeniable parallels between his life and those of his protagonists. Roth is now 79, and if his creation, the controversial Jewish “novelist” Nathan Zuckerman, were still “alive,” he would be about the same age. So would David Kapesh, another Roth alter-ego, albeit a [...]

Years ago, I saw Tom Waits in concert. Between two songs, he said something that’s stuck with me ever since: “It’s not that the world is overpopulated,” he said. “It’s just that everyone wants to live in the same places.” I was living in Minneapolis at the time, having just graduated from college and plotting [...]

Not long ago, a middle-aged man made a great deal of money by selling book reviews directly to authors and publishers. He realized that — surprise! — people like it when you say nice things about them, and in many cases, are willing to pay for it. So he started a business writing positive book [...]

A professor at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy in Kings Point, New York, has been suspended from his job teaching humanities on account of a joke he made just weeks after the Colorado shooting that left 12 dead last month. Greg Sullivan had just put a DVD in classroom’s media player and was turning out the lights. [...]

Whatever happened to all those dot-com millionaires? That question comes up a lot, and you’d think I’d know the answer. A little over a decade ago, I spent one year in the middle of the dot-com party, right before reality swept in and flipped on the floodlights. I had just arrived in New York, and [...]

In June of this year, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles fired its chief curator of 22 years, Paul Schimmel. Its new director, the famous New York gallery owner Jeffrey Deitch, said he would take over that role. A month later and a few thousand miles east, in Oxford, Mississippi, the founding editor-in-chief [...]

While many universities are beefing up their online course offerings, those of us who had memorable college experiences may console ourselves with one thought: the college will still be there, for anyone who wants to take classes in real time with real professors and fellow students in the same room. It may be a small [...]

When you think of slackers, Malcolm Gladwell is probably not the first person to come to mind. He’s an enormously successful author who became a staff writer at the New Yorker when he was just 33. He’s at the apex of New York’s professional class, which has about as many slackers as Minnesota has surfers. [...]

Philip Roth once described his nightly routine as one involving dinner, a walk, and then reading. He said that he’d been re-reading authors he loved when he was young, and I admired him for it. But I also thought: Why would anyone want to re-read something? There’s so much one hasn’t read. Re-reading seemed not [...]

This story, which I wrote this morning and for which I do not expect to win any literary awards, contains 14 words that no one (except maybe Vladimir Nabokov) has used in the past 100 years. I found them in a list of “old-timey” words that should be brought back into fashion, and they really [...]