Blowing & Drifting

Best reportage James Fallows, “Living With a Computer,” The Atlantic Monthly, July 1982 This article from 28 years ago was meant as a kind of primer on acquiring – assembling, really – a personal computer avant la lettre, but serves now as an astonishing window into what we know now to have been the earliest [...]

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Best blog post: Mary Walters, “In Praise of Revision, or the Four Fails of Trying to Write the Last Draft First” – an excellent essay which expands on the hoary but oh-so-true idea that “writing is revision.” That the piece is superbly written shows, as much as a redlined printout might, that is has been [...]

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1. Things I Read A. Online Article “Blogging, Now and Then” by Robert Darnton, in the New York Review of Books‘ NYRBlog How new, then, is bloggery? Should we think of it as a by-product of the modern means of communication and a sign of a time when newspapers seem doomed to obsolescence? It makes [...]

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In five (or six) units… 1. Articles I Read: A. Popular “God Said Multiply, and Did She Ever” (Joseph Berger, New York Times, February 18, 2010) When Yitta Schwartz died last month at 93, she left behind 15 children, more than 200 grandchildren and so many great- and great-great-grandchildren that, by her family’s count, she [...]

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The best five things in January: 1. Article I read: John Ed Bradley, “Hang ‘em High,” Sports Illustrated (December 21, 2009) Statistics suggest that this is the golden age of NFL punting. During the first 12 weeks of the season, the average punt went 44.3 yards, a half yard farther than the record set last [...]

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