Exploring a Grandmother’s Secret Life

As we reach the end of 2024, I’d say my favourite book of the past year is Sadiya Ansari‘s In Exile: Rupture, Reunion, and my Grandmother’s Secret Life. Ansari is a Parkistani-Canadian journalist living in London, UK. She set out to investigate a family mystery, one that her parents and other family members had been […]

Classics Illustrated

  Some of my favorite early reading as a kid were Classics Illustrated. They were perfect because I’d outgrown Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse comics and the superhero universe (as its now called) never appealed to me. I loved reading books but wasn’t quite ready for the serious classics, until I discovered them in comic […]

Swissa Piccola

The Swissa Piccola was a popular post-war typewriter, a continuation of one of the earliest truly portable machines. (At the time, people understood the need for a small, lightweight typewriter that was, in a sense, like a netbook or tablet of the era.) Its predecessor was the Patria, invented by engineer Otto Haas and produced […]

The Literary Legacy of Joseph Mitchell

“It is equipped with electricity, but the bar is stubbornly illuminated with a pair of gas lamps, which flicker fitfully and throw shadows on the low, cobwebby ceiling each time someone opens the street door. There is no cash register. Coins are dropped in soup bowls—one for nickels, one for dimes, one for quarters, and […]

John McPhee on Wordle

In “Tabula Rasa” (No.4) published in The New Yorker last May, the legendary nonfiction writer John McPhee shared his tactics around Wordle. I wasn’t surprised he’d made a study out of something many of us do by the seat of our pants every day. For example, he has used the following words: “…vague, suave, juice, […]

Writer as Cabinetmaker

“I’m definitely more a cabinetmaker than a tormented artist. Not that writing comes easy. I don’t know about cabinetmakers, but I often get stuck. Then I get sleepy and have to lie down. Or I make myself leave the house—walking sometimes produces a solution. The problem is usually one of logic or point of view.” […]

History of Nagra

I love history like this. Anyone of a certain age who is into audio — from TV/doc filmmakers to musicians to journalists — has heard of Nagra tape machines. But I’d never read the story behind it until today. It was originally designed by Polish inventor Stefan Kudelski (Nagra means “[it] will record” in Polish). […]

Catch Me If You Can

Catch Me If You Can A Gentleman and a Thief: The Daring Jewel Heists of a Jazz Age Rogue By Dean Jobb He was an accomplished con artist, a prince of thieves, a folk hero of Jazz Age New York. Audacious, charming, a gentleman with gentle manners who stood apart from the criminal riffraff. Impeccably […]

Longform No More

For the past decade, I’ve been listening to Lonform, the podcast started by three journalists, Aaron Lammer, Max Linsky, and Evan Ratliff. From its beginning — a microphone on a table in a spare room at The Atavist, the magazine Ratliff co-founded — they invited creative nonfiction writers to talk about their work and themselves. […]

The Writing Life

I recently re-read Annie Dillard’s 1989 book, The Writing Life, and found it to be as companionable as I remembered from when I first read it three decades ago. In fact I can appreciate even more her musings on the pain, as well the pleasures, of writing. The most famous quote from The Writing Life […]