Articles by Thomas Beckwith
June 19, 2013
“Godfather? Me?” 0
Recommended Reading: “The Loneliness of Certain American States” by Catherine Lacey.
June 19, 2013
The Case of the Selfless Detective 0
In one among several lost Nancy Drew books, the girl detective asks herself “why she feels compelled to spend all her time and energy solving other people’s problems.”
June 19, 2013
Strange Brew 0
Lorrie Moore once said in an interview that what’s good for writing is bad for life. In this vein, we might assume that coffee, which is bad for your health but good for your writing, neatly supports her conjecture. But what if it turns out that coffee is a detriment to creativity? Maria Konnikova investigates [...]
June 19, 2013
More from Leon Wieseltier 0
A couple weeks ago, I wrote about this year’s Brandeis commencement, at which New Republic editor Leon Wieseltier argued that the humanities are under siege in America. In this week’s issue of Prospect Magazine, Malcolm Nicholson interviews Wieseltier, who claims that “we live in a culture of worthless praise.”
June 19, 2013
“A secret, writerly sympathy for the hoarder” 0
Adding to a review by Pamela Erens for The Millions, Zoë Heller reads Janet Malcolm’s Forty One False Starts for the New York Review of Books. Among other things, she concludes that the writer’s job, at least in Malcolm’s estimation, is “to vanquish mess.” (You could also read a review in The Nation I wrote about a few weeks [...]
June 18, 2013
A Story of Decline 0
Last month, in a review for The Millions, Chris Barsanti called George Packer’s The Unwinding an “awe-inspiring X-Ray of the modern American soul.” Now, in The Guardian, Sukhdev Sandhu calls the book “decent, meticulous and concerned,” though it could have benefited from the “roiling prose-fire of Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi.”