"Before the Internet”: Delightful Nostalgia [Humor, Kind Of]
New Yorker
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6/26/17
"Before the Internet, you’d have yawning summer afternoons when you’d flop down on one couch, then flop down on another, then decide to craft a fake F.B.I. card. You’d get some paper from your dad’s office, copy the F.B.I. logo and your signature, laminate it with Scotch tape, put it in your wallet, take it out of your wallet, look at it, then put it back in your wallet with a secretive smile.”
We Need To Be Well Read. (About Journalists, But For Everyone)
Columbia Journalism Review
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6/14/17
“Being well-read is a transcendent achievement similar to training to run 26.2 miles, then showing up for a marathon in New York City and finding 50,000 people there. It is at once superhuman and pedestrian… There are only so many hours in a day, but the most common workaround for devoted readers is surprisingly uninventive. “I have yet to meet a great journalist who is not well and widely read,” Tom Lutz, editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books, told me. “In my life, the only way that happens is if one carries a book at all times, and uses the odd moments life provides to read.””