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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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Great essay on being an editor on Ursula K. Le Guin’s website: Being an Editor, by Michael Kandel.
The greatest quality in an editor, I have concluded, is common sense.

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Here is the initial offering of the work task that has consumed me for months: uuworld.org : liberal religion and life.

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Today is World Press Freedom Day.
Imagine the unthinkable: Having to pay with your life for an article you wrote, a photo you took. Because it offended someone, because it touched a sensitive subject.

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From today’s Yahoo:

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Yet another entry into this cultural skirmish: The Vocabula Review - September 2003 - Singular They: The Pronoun That Came in from the Cold - jjoan ttaber altieri
“[N]ative speakers of English automatically rely on singular they (their, them) as the pronoun of choice.”
I prefer the commentary by another Quaker member of copyediting-l, that people don’t [...]

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Poets & Writers Magazine has a great article on literary criticism.
Clearly, critics and authors share a deep desire to maintain a culture that values reading and writing. “In the best of all possible worlds,” says Caldwell, “we’re all on the same side–toward the greater good of the novel or the cultural dialogue, or whatever you [...]

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