A battered old journalist from the dear, long-gone Boston Evening Transcript was fond of grousing about deadlines and hack-work, as were many of his equally-hardened colleagues in the newsroom. He watched the endless parade of periodical columns with a permanent pained grimace, and at least a few times a week, he could be found at […]
I recently re-read Paul Auster’s 2002 essay “The Story of My Typewriter,” which is about both his old Olympia portable typewriter and his now decades-long refusal to switch from that machine to any of the new writing technology that’s sprung up in the fifty years since he bought that Olympia from an old college friend. […]
It’s slightly different for every person, but in all cases, you know it when you feel it: that moment when you’re sure something’s wrong. You skin suddenly feels thinner; your ears are more sensitive; simple movements become not only burdensome but uncoordinated. You feel muggy and slightly overheated; your head-space tightens so that even blinking […]
The listicles are already well underway. You’ve probably seen a few of them by now: lists of Hollywood’s upcoming roster of movies adapted from books. It happens every year, of course. Most major Hollywood studios have long since abandoned any but flimsiest gestures at actual originality; instead, they forage far and wide for some old […]
Like the five summers before it, the summer of 2019 will go into the record books as the hottest summer on record, and even at summer’s end in the Northern Hemisphere, large swaths of the United States are still engulfed in a heat that hasn’t abated in weeks. But even so, here in New England […]