Like many people across America, I was totally captivated by the podcast “Serial,” which, if you haven’t yet been accosted by a raving fan, is about a 1999 murder and hinges on whether you believe one of the two former teenagers at the heart of the case: Adnan, in prison for the murder of his […]
Culture
What the cover of “About a Girl” says about today’s publishing world
The traditional publishing industry is located in one of the most liberal cities in America. On the whole its employees skew left. Still, while homosexuality has been explored in YA novels for quite some time, it still says something that the cover for my friend Sarah McCarry’s About a Girl felt like something new. The […]
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory at fifty
Happy fiftieth birthday to Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which was originally published in 1964. To celebrate, Penguin has a new paperback edition plus a golden ticket sweepstakes. It’s hard to imagine a book that was more influential for me than Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and all of Roald Dahl’s books for that matter, […]
What Jiro Dreams of Sushi means for writers
Like many people I know, I have been seriously obsessed with the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi, which is available for streaming on Netflix and Amazon. Jiro Ono has been making sushi for over 70 years. His restaurant, a humble space that is literally located in a subway station, has been awarded three Michelin stars. […]
On a love of weather
Talking about the weather is almost by definition the height of banality. When you have absolutely nothing else to talk about with someone, well, at least there’s the weather. You can chitchat about how nice it is or how horrible or gosh I hear we’re going to get some snow tomorrow. And yet the weather […]
The Terrifying Permanence of the Internet
There’s a moment in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go where two of the characters go looking for a cassette tape in a coastal town in England. One of the characters had lost a tape in her childhood and she hadn’t heard it in years. They go hunting through second hand shops until, magically, there […]