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Via Arts & Letters Daily, I discovered a blog written by board members of the National Book Critics Circle. They have a guest post: Morris Dickstein on the Critical Landscape Today. I like some of the points he makes, and I too lament the falling-away of book reviews in major newspapers. I can’t help thinking [...]

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You’ll need to watch an ad to get a one-day pass if you don’t already subscribe to Salon, but this essay made my day: Let us now praise editors
I’ve also worked with writers who have reacted to my gentle suggestion that one of their precious, ungrammatical commas might perhaps be removed as if I’d insisted [...]

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My article on Quakers in Second Life has been published in the June issue of 2Life Magazine (pdf download).

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As an editor who receives many unsolicited books for review, I sometimes dream of writing a book review like this one from the New York Times: An Assault on Hawaii. On Grammar Too.
On the basis of that detail, you might expect a high level of fastidiousness from “Pearl Harbor.”
And you would be spectacularly wrong.

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Longer excerpts of the interviews I conducted with members of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Second Life have been published as a companion to the story I wrote. The excerpts include one interview that was cut from the edited story.

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I wrote the article now featured on the uuworld.org home page: Religious reality in a virtual world.
A dragon, an angel, and a bug-eyed monster sit down in a Unitarian Universalist church. No, it’s not the beginning of a bad joke. If you’re in the popular online world of Second Life, it may just be a [...]

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The current issue of UU World has my review of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma.

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I’ve had a month of not always knowing if I’m coming or going. It started off the second week of May with a visit to Fry Communications, which prints and mails UU World, to meet our account rep, see the magazine on the press, and get a tour. Fry is located in Mechanicsburg, Pa., so [...]

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Michael Wex’s Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods is entertaining, informative, sometimes uncomfortable, and uneven. I’m glad to have read most of it and skimmed the rest.
Faint praise, huh? But it really wouldn’t be in the spirit of the book to praise it, now would it?
Wex ranges widely through [...]

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A very cleverly written article in Bookforum about Dorothy Parker’s bequest to the NAACP and her friendship with Lillian Hellman (via A&L Daily). It includes a fair sampling of Parker’s wit:
One of her neighbors, the writer Peter Feibleman, overheard her exchange words with another neighbor, a silly woman who began gushing over Campbell’s death and [...]

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