take that!

The site is simple to use, just sign in with Twitter via Oauth and then your off. Once logged in you can do the following tasks. You can m...

Dr. Mutti

Was checking in on Twitter with the usual shame and self-loathing, when what to my wondering eyes should appear, but a retweet from Anatol S...

gloom

When I first started blogging I was young(er) and naive.  I linked blithely away, confident that whatever I linked to would always be there....

discretion

Ratio of published posts to drafts: 1149:636.

modern times

But, more than the data-compressed brevity and just-the-facts utilitarianism forced on us by our times, it's the etherealization of wri...

(mute)

Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome, to take the most pervasive of these models, had been a highly popular way to theorize the internet in the ...

die fetten Jahre sind vorbei

I had NO IDEA until I read it in the Times that writers had stopped keeping blogs!! Three or four years ago—that’s just when I started blo...

the Maginot Line

Our friends at Wikipedia remind you of what you once knew about the Maginot Line: The Maginot Line ( French : Ligne Maginot , IPA:  [liɲ ma...

erschöpft

Elena, the Russian poet I stayed with in Paris, came to Berlin for a couple of days. She stayed one night in the room with the sofa futon an...

my poor head

While I was in New York I went to a film screening at the apartment of my agent, Edward Orloff. I did not really want to go but I thought I ...

Trying to answer some questions, including one about cuts in review sections in print media. I check in on some blogs and find this on Rajiv...

useful & cool (dulce et utile)

I was playing around on Khan Academy (as one does).  As one does if one is unable to block out the world and write a book because unable to...

MR had a post on the Khan Academy , had a look at what Salman Khan is doing; this is extraordinary. But no Ancient Greek, I see.  (Arabic, H...

I have a piece in the latest issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction ("Awesome, or The Internet as Consolation"). There will b...

I'm going over to Washington tomorrow for a few weeks to visit my mother, who has had another operation; probably going up to New York ...

black swans

Andrew Gelman revisits his review of Taleb's The Black Swan. And then there are parts of the review that make me really uncomfortable. ...

samizdat

A long time ago I was invited to submit some short stories to Harper's. The editor who wrote to me loved the 2 stories I sent in. She s...

Internet as Consolation

Joshua Cohen has asked me to write a piece on Internet as Consolation for the Dalkey Archive's Review of Contemporary Fiction. What abou...

The adolescent purgatory of FaceBook — with its castings into the Eternal Now of instant praise, acceptance, and rejection — reflects, magni...

Awesomeness of Internet

She meets a reader for coffee. He tells her she's being defeatist. Think of the Awesomeness of the Internet! She gets an email from a ...