I’ve been listening to Ry Cooder’s album Chavez Ravine for about half a year now. It’s an amazing album — an impressionistic, lively, even danceable historical tour through the Chavez Ravine neighborhood of Los Angeles — a predominantly Mexican neighborhood that was bulldozed in the 1950s to make ro
Set among the servants and masters in a huge, old Irish castle during World War II, this is a masterfully-written, very modern, short novel (published 1945) with beautiful, restrained description and pitch-perfect dialogue. There’s very little interiority–you almost never learn what the characters a
Seven years ago, I started a company called Utipia with two other people: a fellow journalist, and a talented developer who happened to be my brother. We wrote a business plan, raised some money from friends and family, incorporated, and built a working demo to show how our clever content could be c
My story on the Sony Reader and the e-book market is the lead story on Wired News this morning. Check it out! Wired News: Screening the Latest Bestseller Electronic books have traditionally gone straight from the manufacturer to the remainders bin — but the market has never gone away entirely, despi
Electronic books have traditionally gone straight from the manufacturer to the remainders bin — but the market has never gone away entirely, despite years of tepid sales and failed predictions. Now a new device from Sony is generating buzz worthy of a Stephen King novel. Some people are even wonderi
In case you were wondering what the life of a freelancer is like, here’s John Scalzi’s Utterly Useless Writing Advice. (Note that by “Utterly Useless” he actually means “Incredibly Long-Winded.”)
Bound to Please, by Michael Dirda What can I say? I haven’t felt this transformed by a collection of essays since I read Jeffrey Steingarten’s first book, The Man Who Ate Everything. Like Steingarten, Dirda has an infectious enthusiasm for his topic (for Dirda it’s literature, instead of food); an i
If all agriculture is wiped out, all we have to do is make our way to Spitsbergen, Norway, and pick up some seeds: New Scientist News – Doomsday vault to avert world famine