Archives

Annie Dillard in her book on what it takes to be a writer, The Writing Life, recounts the story of a fellow writer who was asked, “Do you think I could be a writer?” The response was: [...]

There is a kind of beauty in clarity and accuracy that can’t be achieved by even the most skillful deployment of rhetoric. I’ve been reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, by [...]

I listened recently to a BBC programme devoted to the subject of failure. The presenter wondered why heroic failures – Scott, who failed to reach the South Pole, Irvine and  Mallory, who failed [...]