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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 filled with tuning forks. Or…
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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 our age, that abortion is…
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The Writer’s Guide To Bread Baking
How writers and 6-year-olds can bake better bread than you buy in most grocery stores and bakeries.
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It’s a mystery . . .
I have a short story, Sycamore Acres, in the July/August 2021 issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.
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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 Volunteer is evacuated from war-torn…
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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 to read while I was…
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Who Was Cornell Woolrich?
What Woolrich lacked in literary prestige he made up for in suspense. Nobody was better at it. He achieved financial success and even fame during his lifetime, but enjoyed neither, living alone or with his ailing mother in a series of decrepit New York City hotel rooms for most of his life.
Export Apple Keynote Text
Export Apple Keynote text to Evernote or Markdown using Applescript.
Mac OS X Clipboard History
I don’t push my choice of writing tools on others. Well, okay, sometimes I do, but only if I have been using something for ten years and find it indispensable, and it’s open source. That would be Jumpcut.
Plain Text For Authors & Writers
Authors and writers of all stripes can learn a lot about creating and managing words from computer programmers, beginning with an appreciation for the simple, durable efficiencies of plain text.
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
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