Soon, the rewards of leaning in doubled. Then they quadrupled. Then they began to increase exponentially. I leaned in some more. I ate protein bars and made important telephone calls during my morning commute. I stopped reading novels so I could write more articles and memos and make more handicrafts to contribute to the school […]
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Posted inPodcasts, Quotes
Jazz's Influence on the Beat Generation
These principal writers in various ways all tried to capture something of the flavor of jazz. Certainly Ginsberg and Kerouac. Kerouac wanted to write lines of prose or poetry that captured something of, say, the saxophonist art. He was interested in extemporization; he was interested in improvisation. And when he heard figures like Lester Young, […]
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Are You In A Haruki Murakami Novel?
An elephant mysteriously vanishes. A giant frog is waiting in your apartment. Your cat mysteriously vanishes. Two moons hang in the sky. Your wife mysteriously vanishes. A strange man comes to you and asks you to find a sheep, or a woman calls and asks for ten minutes of your time. You might be the […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Big Problem with Financial Journalism
One great problem with financial journalism, especially in the decades leading up to the crash, has been that it’s often written in an argot understandable only to the already highly financially literate. Andrew Ross Sorkin doesn’t usually employ such specialized language. This has led to the mistaken belief that he’s explaining the industry to regular […]
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The Financial Reality of a $200,000 Book Advance
In 2008 I sold a book-in-progress for $200,000 ($170,000 after commission, to be paid in four installments), which still seems to me like a lot of money. At the time, though, it seemed infinite. The resulting book—a “paperback original,” as they’re called—has sold around 8,000 copies, which is about a fifth of what it needed […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Supernatural Sightings By Japanese Tsunami Survivors
Haltingly, apologetically, then with increasing fluency, the survivors spoke of the terror of the wave, the pain of bereavement and their fears for the future. They also talked about encounters with the supernatural. They described sightings of ghostly strangers, friends and neighbours, and dead loved ones. They reported hauntings at home, at work, in offices […]
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The Writing Genius of Harold Ramis
Of all of his collaborations with Bill Murray, Groundhog Day was his masterpiece.
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Revolutions and the Public Square
Ukraine is the size of Texas, but for the last three months its burgeoning protest movement has largely crowded into the space of 10 city blocks. The name for the movement itself, Euromaidan, is a neologism fusing the prefixeuro, a nod to the opposition’s desire to move closer to the EU and away from Russia, with the Ukrainian (and originally […]
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Quotes
What Wall Street and Teach For America Have in Common
Mike: Jeremy and Samson seemed so miserable and I was rooting for them to quit and do something else. But something seemed to be holding them back—they didn’t like the idea of leaving the well-paid jobs they hated for an uncertain future. Which is funny to me, because being worried about an uncertain future is […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Confessions of a WikiLeaks Ghostwriter: A Cautionary Tale About Agreeing to a Book Deal
I wrote through the night to assemble what we had. The thinness could become a kind of statement, I asserted; it could become a modernist autobiography. But the jokes wouldn’t hold and Julian, despite promising his publishers and me that he’d produce pages, paragraphs, even notes towards his book, produced nothing in all the months […]