Archive

My Life and Times

19 April 2012

Snakes, trees, devils, and also dams, vineyards, and Martin Bryant, a young man with hair like a Dogtown skater who murdered thirty-five people one day with an AR-15 machine gun. Of all these topics of conversation and others, the one that kept appearing in the most unexpected places was the Museum of Old and New Art, founded last year by a native Tasmanian. More…

Reading, Writing, and Publishing

27 February 2012

The e-book is usually said to have been invented in 1971, when an undergrad at the University of Illinois, Michael S. Hart, decided to upload The Declaration of Independence onto an ARPAnet server. Sitting in the Materials Research Lab among hulking, warmly breathing Xerox Sigma V processors, Hart went on to input and share, with a quixotic singularity of purpose, text after text. More…

American Politics

1 July 2011

For the last few years I’ve been seeing woodsmen on my city’s streets. They wear long beards and long hair, or long beards and no hair. They favor beat-up leather boots and wool beanies and jobs involving wood. At Best Made Co., they purchase hand-painted axes and canvas portage packs. At APC, they try on pieces by Carhartt that have been recut for slimmer legs and thicker wallets. More…