Friday 6/20/25 The right title is often two words long. Plenty of times it isn't, but but that doesn't change that it often is. Rarely is...

Thursday 6/19/25 About a month and a half ago, I saw this post made by a teacher about this gifted child in her class who finished his...

Thursday 6/19/25 Had another nightmare about my ex-wife last night. A lot of trauma. I was in Greenwich Village, it was pouring, needed a...

Tuesday 6/17/25 Monday was a mostly lost day. Last week--I believe it was Thursday--I awoke with pain in what I believed was my last...

Tuesday 6/17/25 American Short Fiction --a scam of an operation with multiple bigots running said scam--that we've talked about numerous...

Tuesday 6/17/25 Saturday was Bunker Hill Day in Charlestown. It was a big celebration this year to mark the 250th anniversary of the...

Monday 6/16/25 Red Sox fans are in an uproar following the announcement that the team had traded Rafael Devers to the Giants following...

Saturday 6/14/25 We've talked some about Emily Nemens in the past. She was editor at The Paris Review before current classist Emily...

Friday 6/13/25 I didn't run stairs yesterday. I'd just written so much, you know? Which isn't to say that most of the times I run stairs...

Friday 6/13/25 The Patriots have announced the day their Tom Brady statue will be revealed at Gillette. I didn't know there was a Tom...

Wednesday 6/11/25 At 5:05 here on the morning of June 11, 2025, I officially pronounced "Friendship Bracelet," which was begun December...

Tuesday 6/10/25 Let's return to New England Review and our friend Carolyn Kuebler, shall we? We've spoken several times about this...

Tuesday 6/10/25 I saw something that moved me Sunday at the cafe after I'd gone there to read. These people were at the table behind me,...

Monday 6/9/25 It's very strange that when a player is trader from a team--and you encounter this kind of thinking more with baseball and...

Monday 6/9/25 I have a number of goals regarding the stairs in the Bunker Hill Monument for the rest of the year. I don't like to do...

Sunday 6/8/25 Over time, I've become increasingly interested in the challenge of creating fiction that could be understood by a child and...

Sunday 6/8/25 A sarcastic wag might say that Brad Marchand can score playoff breakaway goals for the Florida Panthers, he just can't...

Saturday 6/7/25 If you've ever read a Justin Taylor short story, you know it's just him. It's always just him. Nothing is invented, because he is incapable of invention. Instead, it's a fictionalizing of his own life, which really just means the label that he chooses to call his fiction, all of which is indistinguishable from his other fiction. It's all Brooklyn and insider-baseball writing program references, allusions to books that only are read by literature grad students

Thursday 6/5/25 No intelligent person has ever said, "We vibed" or "I'm a whole vibe." No intelligent person has ever said "finna" or "Ima." No intelligent person has ever used the term "hot take" favorably or said "He has good takes." The "take," in this context, is the opposite of the thought process. I have seen people posting their fiction for critiques online. It is almost impossible to replicate how bad this fiction is. If I had a character in a story trying to write a

Wednesday 6/4/25 What are the odds that someone wearing a DraftKings sweatshirt--like the person I saw the other day on Hanover...

Tuesday 6/3/25 On Friday, I began work on a story called "Honest Best," which is a classic Longer on the Inside story--that is, a story...

Tuesday 6/3/25 The Red Sox committed two more errors last night in their 7-6 loss at Fenway to the Angels, which takes their AL-leading...

Monday 6/2/25 Some good and bad things on the fitness front. On the bad side: I'm not extending my runs up the Monument stairs. The...

Friday 5/30/25 A post I just saw: Writers - promise yourself you won’t use generative AI to write, it’s a contaminant, a siren’s call, a...