In 2024, I was invited to serve as a juror on a three-judge panel that evaluated 99 entries for the Works-in-Progress Awards of the J. Anthony Lukas Prizes, sponsored by the Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. After months of reading the book proposals and sample chapters, and many Zoom discussions among the three panelists, we announced a shortlist of…
In turning to the NY Times' Obituary section today, I see that a bestselling author for many decades, Desmond Morris, has died, age 98. Douglas Martin has written an excellent obituary headlined, "Desmond Morris, 98, Dies; Explored Humans’ Animal Instincts in ‘The Naked Ape,’" linked to here (no paywall). My wife Kyle Gallup and I had the good fortune to meet Mr. Morris in Oxford, England, in…
I'm sharing an essay I wrote in 1995 for the weekly newsletter of B'Nai Jeshurun, a synagogue congregation where I was then active, titled "What Price Freedom?" In it I sought to understand and explain why in the Passover narrative God continually hardens Pharaoh's heart, and why the plagues then descend on the Egyptians, right up to the tenth plague when their firstborn children die. To summarize…
I'm delighted that under the rubric "Two Poems to End the Winter, The Seaboard Review of Books has published two poems today , one of mine, "Creature Comforts," and another, "Love's Mantle," by my friend and agency client Alexis Greene. "Creature Comforts" explores nature, the animal kingdom, the wild, and our place in the world vis-a-vis animals. It's composed in rhyming verse, and was written as…
An exciting event coming on April 20, for friends interested in Devouring Time , the recently published biography of Jim Harrison. Novelist Colum McCann , author of Let the Great World Spin —who knew Harrison well, and was one of 100 interviewees biographer Todd Goddard talked to for the book—will be in conversation with Todd, who is a client of Philip Turner Book Productions, at the NYPL…
