Jeff VanderMeer is the Donald Trump of speculative fiction. He is a toxic and narcissistic bully who will harass you if he doesn’t get his way. And he will lie through his opportunistic teeth to get what he feels is entitled to him. This essay, which includes a toxic exchange that Jeff perpetuated near the end of 2010, documents the awful relationship I had with Jeff VanderMeeer. And I urge everyone to not have anything to do with this monomaniacal narcissist.
In the sixth installment of this NaNoWriMo experiment, veteran publicist Bill Flogaast tries to recuperate from a rough day, but his efforts to preserve his wellbeing are felled by a sinister visitor.
James McPherson’s remarkable volume on the Civil War is a terrific historical synthesis, but does it speak to the concerns of 2020?
Ashley Flowers had a job, a dog, a friend who shared her birthday, and a weekly Monday morning radio spot. But that still wasn’t enough. She wanted more and she was willing to do anything to get it.
On the evening of September 25, 2014, I did something awful and tried to kill myself the next morning. I lost everything I had. Is this apparent monster worth forgiving? Or is he not so much of a monster? This 50,000 word essay is a personal reckoning with what I did, who I really am, a treatise on public shaming and how we express ourselves and the importance of getting facts right, as well as a thorough rebuttal to the many invented charges against me.
A new book by Jason Boog examines the effect of digital devices upon a toddler’s reading development, raising important questions on whether or not parents will be sufficiently prepared to deal with Common Core standards. Will the next generation of readers and thinkers be agile enough to meet tomorrow’s challenges?
Why are we so consumed with providing every moment of our lives to a faceless corporation who will share this data with other companies without our consent? What makes the NSA worse than the Stasi? And to what extent are we determined to become enslaved by convenience? We talk with journalist Julia Angwin, author of DRAGNET NATION, about these dilemmas, the inevitability of mutually assured disinformation, and why the black helicopter lifestyle is becoming more legitimate.
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This is the second of two shows devoted to Halloween. Did you know that there was once a chocolate bar called the Chicken Dinner? That cigarette companies once considered candy to be a threat to discretionary spending? Or that candy was used by the military for safety purposes? We didn’t either, until we read Samira Kawash’s Candy: A Century of Panic and Pleasure. We discuss the serpentine history of candy with the Candy Professor herself!
[MP3, 58 minutes]
Nicholson Baker returns to our program for a rip-roaring 78 minute conversation. We discuss TRAVELING SPRINKLER, the many parallels between Baker and Paul Chowder. There is quite a bit of music and audio talk, vivacious arguments for and against Robin Thicke, a lively dialectic on whether or not Algebra 2 should be an educational requirement, and a vital discussion on alternative names for sexual organs.
[MP3, 78 minutes]
[Notes and partial transcript]
This 10,000 word consideration presents thirty-five arguments against Google Glass, revealing how privacy, kindness, respect, the disclosure of information, violence, and confidentiality will all change.
In this 50 minute radio interview, Cole Stryker discussed Anonymous, hacktivism, the inevitability of ideology, cyberbullying, and the difficulties of investigating a group that doesn’t want to be understood.
In this very special and very personal essay, the absolute voice of a new generation describes life’s horrors and why she hates Wes Anderson.
This lengthy report reveals the extent of Mike Daisey’s lies on This American Life and the responses of theaters to the news.
In this 40 minute radio interview, author Susan Cain discusses Quiet, differences between introverts and extroverts, Jung, conformity, Steve Wozniak, Csikszentmihalyi, and the fine line between introversion and misanthropy.
In this 40 minute radio interview, Joyce Carol Oates discusses The Corn Maiden, the history of narrative violence, the allure of vacuum cleaning, and what it means to be a woman writer. The conversation also features a Dickensian exchange involving a “heater.”
Our fourth roundtable installment features Susan Straight remarking upon the book after a death in the family, Porochista Khakpour coming to grips with her Los Angeles past and her academic present, Roxane Gay pursuing the issue of supporting women’s writers, and Judith Zissman investigating memory.
In this lengthy email conversation, Stewart O’Nan discusses Emily, Alone, Richard Yates, creating dimensional characters, and what a writer can learn from John Gardner.
One of David Fincher’s best movies also includes some of the sharpest material that Aaron Sorkin has ever written for film or television. It’s a highly entertaining movie possessed of stones.
The Tropical Movies (2012) In October 2012, I began making the Tropical Movies, a series of documentaries in which a singular idea fixed in our culture is investigated through a series of interviews, eccentric divagation, and other assorted contexts. The Tropical Movies are shot using a one person lo-fi rig in which the camera is […]
As Simon Owens recently observed, tr.im — a service that shortened URLs — is now gone. The links that it once helpfully compressed are now useless. For those who may have passed on a link to a pal, tweeted a particularly helpful article, or otherwise stopped an unruly URL from breaking in two because of […]
(This is the fifth of a five-part roundtable discussion of Ellen Ruppel Shell’s Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture. Other installments: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, and Part Four.) (A podcast interview with author Ellen Ruppel Shell will follow this afternoon. Thanks to all the roundtable participants for their input, Penguin Press for […]
(This is the second of a five-part roundtable discussion of Ellen Ruppel Shell’s Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture. Other installments: Part One, Part Three, Part Four, and Part Five.) Kathleen Maher writes: I am not quite finished reading Cheap, but I have to admit that I’m finding it more interesting than I expected, […]
At BookExpo America, Wet Asphalt’s Eric Rosenfield entered into a lengthy conversation with Brian O’Leary of Magellan Media. And it became necessary to capture their quasi-caffeinated colloquy for reasons that will soon become apparent. I had seen O’Leary earlier in the year at the “Challenging Notions of Free” panel at Tools of Change, along with […]
There will be one last (and extremely lengthy) post that will attempt to corral all of my remaining notes concerning Tools of Change, which will include the above panel that Kevin moderated.
The New York Times may very well be the only newspaper that has an R&D Lab. And as Nick Bilton boasted on Wednesday morning at a keynote address, there don’t appear to be any publishers with an R&D lab either. Bilton had called about ten publishers “just for fun” to see if any of them […]
Panelists: Kassia Kroszer (moderator), Angela James, Malle Valik, Sarah Wendell (For related coverage, you can check out my video interview with Wendell shortly after the panel.) So if you’ve been following these lengthy reports, you’ve probably developed a sense that there is a profound disconnect between the geeks who develop the technology and the readers […]
Panelists: Mark Coker (moderator), Joe Wikert, April Hamilton, David Rothman, Russell Wilcox If I had to compare Tuesday’s panel with Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, I would say this. Claire Danes was superior to April Hamilton. Russ Wilcox, a rather cocky gentleman who spoke like some snobby Yale know-it-all with his head held high […]
Jon Orwant is a highly confident man. Some might say (and a few certainly did to me) that he is one of the great egotists of our epoch. By his own admission, he is certainly not an amateur. But then when you’re the Engineering Manager for the world’s biggest search engine, and you’re white, and […]