For those who aren’t following along, I run a small book subscription service called Curious Reading Club. It’s focused on sharing non-fiction books that I’ve enjoyed, often about science, technology, history and society—mostly new (but not always) and with a curveball memoir or handbook thrown in for fun now and then. The books I choose are generally written from a journalistic point of view, and I particularly try to find titles and authors that deserve […]
A few weeks ago I announced a little hobby project that I’ve been working on: Curious Reading Club. I’d love it if you became a member. The idea is pretty simple: I pick a terrific non-fiction book each month, send a copy to you, then we come together and talk with the author and each other. Membership costs $25 each month—that’s cheaper than the cost of buying the book itself—and you get a few little […]
The first thing I noticed when opening up Good Tape, a new print magazine for the audio industry put together by my friend Alana Levinson and crew, was how BIG it is. Broadsheet format. Newsprint. This is how we used to read the news! But there’s a lot you can do with those huge spreads, and they have a lot of fun with it. There’s not a lot of information online about its contents, so […]
I haven’t read Going Infinite, the new Michael Lewis book on Sam Bankman-Fried and the collapse of FTX. I’ve enjoyed some of his past work. Clearly there have been some major questions raised about previous stories, and I do wonder about the speed at which these semi-biographical tomes are being turned out across the industry: for example Lewis’s pandemic book, The Premonition, came out in May 2021… which feels a little early to be declaring […]
Writing is many things, and one of them is channeling. As a writer you are a conduit, a crucible. You are a voice, whether you are interrogating your own ideas, bringing life to characters fictional or real, or simply reporting what you have seen so that others can understand. When you write you are often channeling other people directly, and when you are not it is because you are doing it indirectly: building on the […]
• Brocken spectres are the terrifying ghosts that appear when you cast a shadow on a cloud that has a light source behind it. • Marcin Wichary is getting ready to launch his many–years-in-the-making book about keyboards, Shift Happens. The effort and dedication to making this thing is visible in every element of how he has put it together, including the book’s delightful website. • Did you know the CIA has a museum?
I started tracking my book reading habits a few years ago as a way of remembering what I’ve been consuming. Extra benefit: It’s also helped me see patterns or trends. The trouble is that I can also now look back and see when I’m losing the plot. Here’s what I mean: Last year my reading pace felt like it had fallen off a cliff—there were three months or so of total freeze during the pandemic. […]
“I believe that the books and stories we fall in love with make us who we are, or, not to claim too much, the beloved tale becomes a part of the way in which we understand things and make judgments and choices in our daily lives. A book may cease to speak to us as we grow older, and our feeling for it will fade. Or we may suddenly, as our lives shape and hopefully […]
A lot of things were hard this year. We had it better than many, better than most. No serious illnesses here, mainly just sadness and loneliness and tedium stitched together with moments of dread and panic. But those are all things that you can cope with. In my head, they were circumstances you could adapt to, even if you didn’t like them. People are capable of a lot. But the change that probably surprised me […]
A man sits, hands hovering over a keyboard, puffy encircled eyes turned to a square of sky he witnesses through the window and between the rooftops. Over there, his kid watches The Simpsons. He’s really into The Simpsons right now. Over in the other direction, the kitchen is strewn with the debris of a Christmas season that has definitely been well spent, but is now definitely well spent. He recalls these twelve months that are crawling out of view. […]
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