To do the world’s worst writing, imagine that a simple idea is complex, and then courageously refuse to simplify it.
Jan 102024
Writing
If it had been your exact thought you would have used my exact words.
Dec 142023
The audience demands that you write not only for them but with them and about them — that you see with their eyes, only better.
Nov 102023
To encounter an author who writes of how things are is a great shock, from which we recover by disputing how he might wish them to be.
Sep 222023
Pretentious nonsense is written in a certain unmistakable cadence, a low hum calculated to lull you into acquiescence through inattention. You’re not supposed to try too hard to piece the meaning together, and you are always sorry if you do.
Sep 182023
The market is always rising for jeremiads on decline.
Aug 142023
The Stages of Loss and Grief
1. People will understand you
2. People will understand your book
3. People will read your book
4. People will buy your book
Jul 272023
Journalism enjoyed a unique sunlit holiday of public trust, beginning with Murrow and ending with Woodward and Bernstein, which evokes intense nostalgia in journalists of a certain age. The historical norm, to which we have now reverted, is No Confidence Whatsoever.
Apr 282023
The translator before the text must choose, like the citizen before the law, to be faithful to its spirit or its letter.
Mar 272023
One way to mark an important event is if the people who constantly opine in public suddenly have nothing to say.
Mar 222023
No aphorism wants to be born a cliché; every aphorism wants to die one.