March 8, 2016
Clowns and War Stories (Part Two)
Nicholas Kristof imagines, in a recent New York Times op-ed column, “President Donald J. Trump in a tense international crisis, indignant and impatient, with his sweaty finger on the nuclear […]
January 18, 2015
Doubling Down on the Clown (Part One)
Reading Peter Baker’s piece in today’s New York Times about the two older Bush brothers, I came across these 1988 statements by the youngest brother, Marvin: “Jeb is the serious […]
June 28, 2014
Send in the Contemporary American Comic Fiction Writers
In the June issue of The Atlantic, Julie Beck offers a quick roundup of some recent studies on laughter. My favorite, by far: “Women undergoing in vitro fertilization were 16 […]
June 30, 2012
“The real world we think we inhabit”
“We need a dream-world in order to discover the features of the real world we think we inhabit” is the old line by Feyerabend, discovered sometime in college, that often […]
May 3, 2012
Mix Tape: Only Human
How to introduce an author—and how not to. Case in point: “Should a beloved, Pulitzer Prize-winning author have to hear the president of Northwestern’s Jewish students’ society call him Michael […]