Last Saturday night, at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner President Biden urged reporters to follow his lead by covering what he wants them to cover. The problem with his plea was not that he made it. The problem would be if reporters heeded his advice. Read more
In Washingtonian magazine this month, New York Times book critic Carlos Lozada discussed how he turns the straw of reading political memoirs into the gold of an art form. Read more
Calling out your political or ideological opponent or opposite has long been easy intellectually. If attacked, you can appeal to like-minded supporters. Calling out someone on your own political “team” or tribe—well, that’s a dicey proposition. Read more
How author David Fryxell, former editor of Writer’s Digest, organizes and structures his writing. Read more
Is American journalism facing, as a recent Atlantic story said, an “existential moment”? The news about the news might not be as unrelievedly bad as described. Read more
The chief theme of Netflix’s popular series “American Nightmare” is hardly groundbreaking. It was noted nearly eighty years ago by none other than George Orwell. Read more
By acting as a personalized box score, even a discarded notebook can help you read a lot more books. Read more
Today marks what would be the 215th birthday of writer and poet Edgar Allan Poe. He is the rare writer whose Romantic and Gothic stories about death, subjectivity, rationality, and despair were so good I can remember where I was when I read them. Read more
Typewriters are like bicycles or stick shift cars. They command your full attention. Make a mistake and you pay the price. In a digital age, that’s more a blessing than a curse. Read more
The Times can take one of two paths: rededicate itself to its venerable creed or practice (progressive) opinion journalism honestly. Read more
