I first came across John Jeremiah Sullivan in his role as the editor of David Foster Wallace’s collection about tennis, String Theory. I noticed that he had his own collection titled Pulphead Essays, and given his admiration for Wallace’s non-fiction (which I love), I thought it would be worth the try.  I started the first…

Robertson Davies existed for me as the name of a Canadian author who was recognizable, but not on the radar of someone to read.  The problem is that Canada has a bad habit of employing a kind of affirmative action for our artists, giving them priority simply because they are Canadian. This creates a sense…

The most common response to my living in New Jersey and commuting to Brooklyn is some combination of a smile (laugh?), amazement and then pity. I can’t say this didn’t make me nervous before we moved. For the last seven years my commute was anywhere from 3-5 minutes, depending on how many red lights I…

There are words being used today that I’ve had trouble making any sense of, like the use of “genocide” when describing what Israel is doing to the Palestinians, or “settler-colonialism” as a description of Zionism itself.  I’ve had a hard time telling whether they are outright lies, distortions of language, or something else entirely.  Adam…

Some time ago, I heard an interview on the 18Forty podcast where Rabbi Bashevkin interviewed someone who had been convicted of a white collar crime, and they discussed what this man learned from the experience.  Part of the story revolved around the man’s experience at a prison in upstate New York where there is a…

I read two very different books over Rosh Hashana, and since they each have a Yom Kippur component, I don’t think it’s too late to share.  The first I came across quite serendipitously.  I had just finished an errand for school and was looking for somewhere to get a sandwich before heading home.  On the…

There are few people as creative and imaginative as Neil Gaiman.  He’s often put into the fantasy genre, but to think that he has anything substantive in common with J.R.R. Tolkien or Brandon Sanderson would be incredibly misleading.  He uses a lot of mythological tropes, and has little interest in conventional narrative storytelling.  He kills…

There are some books that I think would be better as a TED talk or article than a full length book.  The Talent Code, by Daniel Coyle, while enjoyable, was one of them.  There are some good nuggets of ideas about how to develop talent, and a lot of good stories, but not so much…