Rough Drafts

Useful, practical book on Vipassana (insight) meditation: Mindfulness In Plain English (via Gary Gach

Thanks to ReadyMade magazine, I’m now a T-shirt-folding ninja. Here’s the video that shows how you, too, can fold a shirt in 3 seconds and amaze your family and friends. (Old news, I know, but laundry time makes me feel so badass now that I just can’t resist sharing with the few of you who […]

Apparently I’m a scholar — or at least some people think so. If so, it’s news to me–but the citations are sure flattering!

Personally, I like turning off the monitor and just typing blind for awhile. 43 Folders: Hack your way out of writer’s block

What if we turned everything that’s currently red into purple?

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” ~Philip K. Dick … and some other choice irreligious quotes from George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and Abraham Lincoln, on this useful page: Evolution vs. Intelligent Design Theory

I love this rollicking review of Tom Wolfe’s new novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons. As background, he talks about Wolfe’s earlier exhortations to American novelists: “‘A battalion, a brigade of Zolas’ is what we need, Wolfe evangelized, then put on his dress-white uniform, screwed on his bayonet, and we

Just realized that I’ve been writing this blog for 5 years — my first post was November 4, 1999, using Blogger — quite the novelty at the time. I blogged pretty regularly up until April 2000, then sporadically for the rest of that year (and, sadly, much of the archives from mid-late 2000 got lost […

Is it just me, or is Sen. Orrin Hatch (R.-Utah) seeming more and more like one of those unstoppable monster-movie zombies that just keeps coming at you no matter how many times you knock him down? Wired News: Senate May Ram Copyright Bill

Michelle Goldberg’s longish piece in Salon is the most thoughtful reaction to the whole Red State-Blue State divide that I’ve seen yet: If at first you don’t secede. Honestly, I’m a bit irritated by the recent flood of gratuitous fuck-yous and pathetic disavowals; both seem divisive and unproductive

The onslaught of comment spam on my Movable Type blog finally made me scream uncle: I switched to WordPress this weekend. MT is an amazingly flexible tool, but it is slow, slow, slow, and it’s not set up well to deal with comment spam. It takes several minutes just to delete a single comment–and the

State-by-state election returns make the U.S. look like a deeply divided country–red Republicans in the South and middle; blue Democrats on the coasts. (The division is eerily reminiscent of the division between free and slave states before the Civil War–how long the shadows of that ugly history are