Some of the following links lead to whole articles, others to previews. Write to me if there’s something you’d like to read in full.
This small cluster of articles about crime fiction previews some of the concerns on display in my recent book, and also follows some tangents from those ideas:
The Case of the Elusive Case, turnrow literary review
Reality Catches Up to Highsmith’s Hard-Boiled Fiction
The Last Testament of Ross Macdonald
Robert B. Parker, the Hard-Boiled Professor
These three originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal:
The Hero Is Hardboiled [PDF]
Gold MacDonald [PDF]
Bound for Perdition [PDF]
Here are some reviews that appear on the Barnes and Noble Review website:
This one is on the Library of America’s anthology of true crime writing, and
This one looks at the novels of Charles Ardai and his Hard Case Crime publishing line.
And here’s one on Richard Stark’s Parker novels
And this is a review of the second, latest, and best Patricia Highsmith biography.
This look at the work of Richard Wright also touches my interest in crime fiction:
This article is about a different kind of popular fiction:
And here’s an un-appreciation of the popular writer J.D. Salinger on the occasion of his death. In retrospect, my timing here was a mistake; Salinger’s admirers deserved their time. I still hold to the arguments I made, though.
Bobby Fischer got a lot of attention for his lunatic politics when he died. As a longtime chessplayer, I thought that these potshots missed the main point:
I wrote the first essay in this cluster right after the events of September 11th. The second is a kind of a sequel, written a few years later. Both are concerned with the corruption of language by politics.
I’ve long enjoyed the writing of Oliver Sacks, and have wondered what makes it so oddly compelling. In addition to these two articles, I wrote another one on Sacks in 2002. (It appears in a volume called Disability Studies, published by MLA Press.)
The Uncanny Symphony of Oliver Sacks
Oliver Sacks: The P.T. Barnum of the Postmodern World?
Here’s a related article that was also the subject of an online colloquy sponsored by the Chronicle of Higher Education, which published it. You can reach both article and colloquy here:
This review of a book about the human head and this one about the mathematical search for design in the world further reflect my interest in what might be called romantic science. So does this shorter look at a book about the periodic table.
A physics professor friend suggested in 2002 that I look into the case of a Bell Labs physicist whose results were a little too perfect. The more I saw, the more interesting the case looked, until I dropped everything and started digging as deeply and widely into it as I could. The result was an article that appeared shortly before an appointed panel formally accused the scientist of fraud:
This article was so well received (it eventually won a national science writing award) that I wrote another article about the unlikely process of writing it:
On a different note, here’s my sportswriting debut, an article about the broadcaster John Madden
As a followup to football, I branched out here into a different sport, tennis.
This piece remembers Pete Seeger on the occasion of his 90th birthday.
I always figured I should be interested in biographies, and would become puzzled when I couldn’t get through them. In this article I wondered why that should be so:
The Silhouette and the Secret Self: Theorizing Biography In Our Times
I have a longstanding interest and an insider’s view of the workings of academic culture, so I write occasional reports from the cultural front.
Here’s my first article for the Chronicle of Higher Education (which I’ve written for many times since). The academic job market has gotten worse, if anything, since I wrote this:
Pressures Fuel the Professionalization of Today’s Graduate Students
When it’s publish or perish, exactly how should “publish” work? Here’s what one professor did:
Professors decide what gets published, who gets grant money, and who gets tenure through a peer review process that allows the judge to be anonymous while the petitioner stands exposed. This has never seemed fair to me, so I wrote this column in protest:
Also on the subject of evaluation, I argue in Why Grading Is Part of My Job that professors need to evaluate their students’ work themselves and maintain final say over their grades.
In 2007 Harvard released a report that called for greater attention to teaching by its professors. But from where should that extra attention be diverted?
Academic fields need good public relations and periodic self-evaluation to stay well-nourished and sound. This column looks at the state of American studies through a landmark encyclopedia that attempts to sum it up:
I also served as a member of the Modern Language Association’s Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion. Our report is available online