Caleb Crain
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The Story Is the Concepts: Philosophizing with Ryan Ruby
Ryan Ruby talks about his debut novel The Zero and the One, the challenges of pacing and plot, and the fun of inventing a book of philosophy for the novel.
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Away We Go
Over at the New Yorker, Caleb Crain tackles the ambiguity on the use of “farther” and “further” in contemporary writing: Farther or further? I vary them more or less thoughtlessly in my writing, sometimes to the consternation of copy editors, a number of…
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Cyber Stalking Really Is That Bad
Caleb Crain over at The Nation digs in deep to James Lasdun’s new memoir, Give Me Everything You Have, the seemingly terrifying story of his “persecution on the internet by a clever, mentally unbalanced person.” The cyber-harassment (a wildly tame description…
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On Publishing and Letting Go
“It’s even possible that there’s something retrospective in the nature of writing itself. Probably every writer’s first piece of writing, if it were possible to excavate such a thing, would be found to look backward. Writing tries to fix the…
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Malcolm Gladwell, James Wood, and Christine Smallwood Get Evangelical
At a recent n+1 panel discussion, Malcolm Gladwell, James Wood, and Christine Smallwood discussed God as trade, unmetaphysical writers, and intellectualism versus how religion makes you feel.
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Notable New York, This Week 12/7 – 12/13
This week in New York Malcolm Gladwell and James Wood talk about Evangelicalism and the Contemporary Intellectual, members of the Velvet Underground reunite at the New York Public Library, 60 Writers/60 Places screens, Anne Carson performs, Andy Warhol films get…
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Not the Greatest Villains Then Living in the World
The other week, The New Yorker published an excellent article by Caleb Crain about the peculiar economics and politics of life aboard a pirate ship in the 17th and 18th centuries. When the captain of an English slave ship was…
