A Brush With Death and a First Novel
This commentary originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal, “A Brush With Death and a First Novel,” by Richard Dooling. I was 34 in July 1988—a lawyer living in St. Louis. I was at my desk, leaning back in my swivel chair, hands folded on top of my head, when […]
The Baby Boomers Are Arriving In Montana
By Richard Dooling Originally published in the Wall Street Journal. In the 1950s and ’60s, when televisions had three channels, the “Davy Crockett” series about the fearless frontiersman was so popular that Disney sold 5,000 imitation coonskin caps a day. I wore one of those caps for several summers. My […]
Has A Witch Spirit Taken Over Your Soul?
The issue, then, is whether a witch person, or witch host would always know he or she had a witch spirit. The Mende disagree on this point, and so do the anthropologists. Some say that when a witch enters a village, it is like a powerful sound in a room […]
Justice Holmes Teaches The First Amendment
Originally published in The Wall Street Journal. The more certain you are, the more you should resist the temptation to silence those who disagree. If you are absolutely certain that President Trump is or is not an idiot, that climate change is or is not the most pressing problem of […]
The Writer’s Guide To Bread Baking
Most Of These Guys Are Lawyers, Right?
Recent posturing by politicians hoping to censor their political opponents with obviously unconstitutional laws against speech remind me that there is nothing new under the sun. I wrote this piece for the New York Times back when online pornography, not vaccine misinformation, was the fear. NYT Op-Ed, June 15, 1996, […]
It’s a mystery . . .
I have a short story, Sycamore Acres, in the July/August 2021 issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.
Bush Pigs: A Tale of Reverse Culture Shock
Published in the The New Yorker magazine, Richard Dooling’s Bush Pigs is a harrowing tale of reverse culture shock and a cult favorite among expats who wander abroad and are sometimes unprepared for the trauma of returning to the first world. After three years in the bush, a Peace Corps […]
Why Books Aren’t Dead Yet
I spent my undergrad years painting dorm rooms to pay my tuition and never once allowed schooling to get in the way of my education. I graduated from St. Louis University in 1976 and decided it was time to actually read all of the books that I never had time […]
Who Was Cornell Woolrich?
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Rise of the Machines
I wrote this opinion piece for the New York Times in the fall of 2008. Since then I’ve become addicted to financial crisis entertainment and parables of the second gilded age: books, movies, documentaries, Matt Taibi in The Rolling Stone, and the incomparable Gretchen Morgenson in the New York Times […]
Congress Shall Make No Law . . .
Law students spend the better part of three years beetling their brows over the study of constitutional law—a mercurial, opaque, highly theoretical system of textual exegesis, which nobody but the tenured and long-winded professor pretends to understand. And the capsheaf of con-law contwistification is First Amendment law. The First Amendment […]
Lego Antikythera Mechanism
The Antikythera Mechanism is the oldest known scientific computer, built in Greece at around 100 BCE. Lost for 2000 years, it was recovered from a shipwreck in 1901. But not until a century later was its purpose understood: an astronomical clock that determines the positions of celestial bodies with extraordinary […]