A writer in Brooklyn
About a month ago, I went viral. It was the first day of a three-day heat wave in New York, and I had just completed a Cross Fit hero workout—a twenty-one-minute partner AMRAP of rowing, lateral burpees, and power cleans. I had my pump on, as the gym bros say, and was nice and sweaty. … Continue reading On going viral
I know pretty much nothing about artificial intelligence (AI) except what I’ve read about it. Take what follows with a grain of salt, therefore. As I try to understand the world that AI is going to create, there are a couple of metaphors I keep coming back to. One is of a highway system that … Continue reading Letter from an unplugged region of my mind
I reviewed Craig Fehrman’s This Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis & Clark for the 1 June 2026 issue of the New Yorker.
News item #1: A new short story of mine is published in the April issue of Harper’smagazine. It’s called “Trying to Find the Right and True Way to Talk about Death Is Funny.” It’s about death, philosophy, and saying good-bye. I’m grateful to editors Christine Smallwood and Chris Carroll for taking a chance on it. … Continue reading Two pieces of news
Peter and I are trying to revive an old practice, reading a poem together when we get up in the morning. The first one in the anthology we’ve chosen is “Beeny Cliff,” by Thomas Hardy, about a seaside rock face in Cornwall that Hardy visited with his first wife, Emma Lavinia Gifford, soon after they … Continue reading The nether sky
I want to have a New Year’s resolution but I can’t think of one. I already don’t smoke or drink, and a minor and extremely tedious recent health issue cost me five pounds last month that I didn’t want to lose and have been trying to get back. Read more books and fewer social-media feeds, … Continue reading Irresolute
For at least half a century, if not since basically forever, it has been unfashionable to take R. Waldo Emerson too seriously as a philosopher. He does, however, have a theory of the world, and I’ve found it useful. Emerson’s idea, to put it in my own untranscendent prose, is that the world consists of … Continue reading WWRWED?
I’ve signed up again for my gym’s annual fundraiser, a grueling workout called Fight Gone Bad, to be held this coming Saturday. It’s for a good cause, Brooklyn Community Housing & Services, a group that provides support and safe, clean housing for people who are unhoused or at risk of becoming so. This year my … Continue reading Fight Gone Bad 2025!
I was interviewed about Moby-Dick for a podcast the other day (keep an eye out for an episode of The World in Time, from Lapham’s Quarterly), which triggered a re-reading. I think this was my sixth time through? I am now the age of Ahab, who, in chapter 132, tells Starbuck that he started whaling … Continue reading Another cruise