On a recent weekday, 126 messages made it to my e-mail in-box. Twenty-five were directed to me and me alone: 14 from friends or family, nine business-related and the other two conveying timely information about commercial accounts of mine. The rest ...
On Monday, Roger Federer took on Tommy Robredo in the fourth round of the U.S. Open. Federer, the No. 1 tennis player in the world, had an 8-0 lifetime record against Robredo, a Spaniard ranked No. 15. In those eight wins, he had dropped only two sets. ...
Ben Yagoda teaches journalism at the University of Delaware and is working on a book about the rise of memoir culture. He is the author of When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It: The Parts of Speech, for Better and/or Worse and other books. Join the ...
In 1837, the American Anti-Slavery Society published the life story of a fugitive slave who went by the name of James Williams. The book, narrated in Williams' first-person voice, told of his harsh treatment on an Alabama plantation and the torture he ...
According to the census bureau, roughly 40 percent of the American populace was born after 1981, which means that Steve Martin has not been a stand-up comedian in their lifetime. What do these youths make of Martin? I guess they think of him as a ...
I want to tell you about a memoir I read not long ago. It's about how this guy grows up in a family on the far fringes of Protestant evangelism. His mother dies of cancer when the kid, an only child, is 7, and after that his father, a scientist whose ...
World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz Upon reading an article this week referring to charges that embattled World Bank chief Paul Wolfowitz had "used his influence to raise the salary of his girlfriend," veteran New York Times readers in mid-coffee ...
Way, way back in the day, before memoirs lost its s, when all the memoirs that had ever been written could fit in a couple of modest bookcases, the form represented a brilliant innovation in genre. Or so it seemed to Samuel Johnson. Writing in 1759, ...
One night last week, I explained to a youthful hotel desk clerk that my family and I were interested in playing cards up in our room, then asked her if the hotel had a deck. She made this sound: . Then she said no. The sound she made was familiar to me. ...
You don't want to own an amusement park. How to get a word into the dictionary. George W. Bush sees needy people. "Anyone who harbors terrorists needs to fear the U.S.," he stated recently. And in an address about Iraq: "The ...
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