Every day, Alain de Botton refuses to touch his trust fund It’s there. Presumably earning interest. But de Botton prefers to live off the sweat of his brow — his own intellectual capital — than rely on his family’s wealth. The fact that philosophy has been good business for de Botton… Well, that’s beside the …
We plunge into The Gunslinger, groping for a beginning On page one, we catch the story by the tail. The gunslinger, Roland, already carries his father’s weapons. They are heavy with bullets. We wonder whether they’ll unload into the man in black. So we’re off — already straining after the finale. And are we any …
Richard Osman has been both sides of the screen Long before he presented television, he watched it, nose smudging the glass. His rule? The closer the better. For when he was a couple of inches of the tube, the flickering reds and blacks took on elaborate life. They became The Dukes of Hazzard. Further back, …
When I dream of Hawaii, the waves are warm, turquoise, and reassuringly strong — nothing like the ‘small, dark-faced, windblown’ waves described by William Finnegan. Go ahead and trust him over my fantasies. I dream. He was there. His autobiography Barbarian Days begins with a boyhood on the islands. Then it moves like a swell …
I’ve been down a rabbit hole, learning about David Foster Wallace. And there’s a lot to sift through. The tennis… the footnotes… the depressive episodes and abusive relationships… the posthumous Pulitzer Prize… My research twisted in on itself. Facts were repeated, underscored. A Sunday afternoon drained away. I heard about Wallace as a good man …
All SaturdayI beamed For the happiness In my breast HappinessLike a dagger The sheath that wasMy chest Happiness so at homeIt became me Ripped ragged as if readyTo rend Bursting and flaringWith radiance A smile beyond lipsWithout end
Aliens crash in a cornfield and set out to conquer Earth… The aliens are petrifying in their strangeness… Humans resist with tanks and planes… That’s a typical sci-fi story — the kind you’d get in pulp magazines from the 1950s: Fantastic Science Fiction or Amazing Stories. Ursula K. Le Guin read those titles as a …
Hunter S. Thompson was not short of opinions. You could get him riffing on Nixon or disco or motorcycles or breakfast — anything, really. He’d gibber into a handheld recorder until the cassette stopped or the beer ran dry. That was his method: to observe close-up, with extreme prejudice. To fill the pages of Rolling …
Within ten miles,The thirst-crazed grassRoiled with hoppers,Which ricochetedAgainst my glossy tracks.Those trainers — black —Adhered to lines,Packed dirt on leathered flats.The sun was lecherousAnd high:Scouring bogs,Souring marshes,Polishing salt to pinprick spackle.O, the tortured snows of August.O, the madness of my march.
Joan Didion could deal with hippies. She could deal with addicts and officers of the law. But she couldn’t deal with the deadline set by The Saturday Evening Post. The paper had partnered Didion with the photojournalist Ted Streshinsky – and sent the pair of them into Haight-Ashbury. Their assignment was to gather an impression …
