I learned of Steve Jobs’s death the way millions of people probably did: by turning on my MacBook. There, on the Apple homepage, was a photo of Jobs and the years 1955-2011. I was shocked, but not terribly so. His cancer and departure from Apple in August were never secret, and everyone following the situation [...]

In early 2008, I read a disturbing story of young lust and murderous rage, fueled by alcohol one late night, that left a 21-year-old woman dead in Perugia, Italy. I read about the murderers: an attractive couple in their early 20s, who looked like any clean-cut college students you’d see on any campus in the [...]

When I started college, in 1993, there was a notion going around that education was subversive. It allowed those of us lucky enough to be studying the liberal arts to engage with serio us texts, ask serious questions, and develop critical perspectives on the world. It allowed us to exist, mentally at least, outside the [...]

It’s been said that Bob Dylan, like Levi’s, is an American original. Only he might not be as original as he once was, if he was ever as original as people thought. The iconic troubadour isn’t talking, but to look at the evidence, it seems that Dylan has become a copyist of not inconsiderable talent: [...]

One of the arguments against e-readers is that you can’ t see wha t other people are reading anymore. It used to be that you’d spot an interesting-looking person on the train, or at a cafe, or wherever, and take a minute to check out the cover of their book of choice. Now, all you [...]

It’s fascinating, the difference in reading a novel as an adult that you loved at fifteen. There’s both a deepening and defrauding. In search of an easy reread, I recently took up Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady during an eight-hour international flight. I was shocked by how the novel had changed in my [...]

I had an interesting sensation this morning as I left my commuter train and made the six-block walk to my office. During the commute I started reading Volt, the debut short story collection by Chicago native Alan Heathcock. The first story, “The Staying Freight”, is set (as apparently are all of the others in the [...]

Today’s New York Times reported, in a front page article, that President Obama plans to push a tax plan which will tax any Americans making over a million dollars a year at the same rate at which middle-class Americans are taxed. This new tax system would replace or revamp the alternative minimum tax, and has [...]

This is not a news report on an enormous tragedy. I don’t have all the facts. No one does – yet. This is me in tears writing down the terrifying reality of a capsized cargo ship, the overloaded MV Spice, and its hundreds of passengers, mostly teenagers and children, who all sunk down in the [...]

I’ve come across an odd phrase in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895) that I thought I’d share here. I’m reading the book as part of my Summer of Classics, and though I briefly considered abandoning it as August ended, I’m enjoying it just well enough to keep reading. In this passage, the schoolmaster Phillotson [...]

And you wipe the snow out of your hair and get back into your car and drive off toward an accumulation of the usual daily stuff–there is dinner to be made and laundry to be done and helping the kids with their homework and watching television on the couch with the dog resting her muzzle [...]

From Dan Chaon’s Await Your Reply, how an image can make words come alive: Without the image: Her thoughts were not clearly articulated in her mind, but she could feel them moving swiftly, gathering. “What are you thinking about?” George Orson said, and when he spoke, her thoughts scattered, broke up into fragments of memories. [...]

In Await Your Reply, published in 2009, Dan Chaon uses repetition in a very cool way. Instead of bogging down the original scene, he pushes the action forward first, then a bit later, moves in for a close-up or two, adding additional details. For example, on page 246, Miles wakes up in bed with a [...]