Monthly Archives: April 2008

New Blog Post

My new post is up at the milspouse.com blog. Enjoy!

Who’s the Bigger Dork?

Last month, when Danielle and I went car shopping for a “family tank,” we were watching a lot of Battlestar Galactica. So, when it came time to name the new ride, Danielle suggested the Raptor. (For anyone not familiar with the show, (a) Shame on you, and (b) here’s Wikipedia’s Raptor page.) As if that

Well, I’ve Done It

I’ve finally stopped marking up old drafts and outlining and daydreaming. I’m rewriting Lithium. Complete rewrites are painful, but also freeing. I can’t believe I’m doing it.

The View From Denmark

My friend Walter, who works for the State Department, just forwarded this e-mail from a friend of his in Denmark: “We in Denmark cannot figure out why you are even bothering to hold an election. On one side, you have a bitch who is a lawyer married to a lawyer, or a lawyer who is

Future Slums?

Continuing on the subject of housing, check out this article from the Atlantic.

American Spirit

Danielle found this cool article over at the New York Times. It’s the story of a family who renovated a seriously broken down house over the course of twelve years. Isn’t there just something quintessentially American about someone who will pay $65,000 for a 1913 Tudor and then do almost all the renovation work (minus

Shiny New Blog

I posted my first entry over at the milspouse.com blog. It’s just your basic introductory blog post, but check it out, anyway. If you look over to the right-hand column on this blog, you’ll see a nifty little widget that will automatically display links to my new posts over there. I’ll be posting about once

True Story!

What is this contemporary obsession with true stories? Why are we so in love with the memoir as a form? Why have we shifted our reading habits from fiction to non-fiction? And, finally, why do people get so bent out of shape when they learn that a memoir or piece of narrative fiction isn’t one-hundred-percent-absolutely-totally-true,

“Haw haw your medium is dying.”

So goes the jab from Nelson on the Simpsons toward a print journalist sitting on a discussion panel. It’s pretty funny. But the trials and travails of print journalism – specifically newspapers – are quite real. This New Yorker article examines the issue in depth. Eric Alterman has written a broad review of print journalism’s

Poorly Read Partners

I read the essay in the Times and I was going to link directly to it, but going through the Stuff White People Like version is so much more fun.