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 [...]

I always thought I’d be a fiction writer. As a kid, I was transfixed by stories, sometimes becoming so engrossed in them my parents wondered if they should take me to a neurologist. When I entered college, I became an English major, a course of study that is almost entirely predicated on fiction. Then something [...]

I just went to my first-ever football game: my friend Scout’s high school students getting whupped by a fancy private school with cheerleading boxes. Look at them, we kept saying as the score hit the mid-thirties to zero, they have cheerleading boxes. I felt, before I went, that I kind of knew what football was [...]

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? [...]

I was on my way home from the art fair when I saw the two tarantulas. My husband and I recently moved to a small town in north Texas so I could take a job as a Visiting Assistant Professor at a small liberal arts college. My previous experience with Texas was limited to one [...]

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 [...]

Last week I finished reading Richard Wright’s Native Son, which I first read during high school. Overall I found the book to be rather uneven – there are some stretches of excellent, riveting narrative (particularly the span between Mary’s murder and Bigger’s capture), but also passages that were overwhelmed by sermonizing dialogue where the plot [...]

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 [...]

Her name was Malula.  She was a witch with a magical garden my sister and her best friend spent hours – years – plotting to steal from.  These were girls who had an imaginary enemy instead of an imaginary friend.  They knew the value of a worthy foe. Good foes – real archenemies – do something [...]