Sunday 7/3/22 I have been up since five in the morning yesterday. More than thirty-four hours. In this hell. And I do this as everything...

Sunday 7/3/22 We didn't have a lot of money when I was growing up, but every summer we'd still go on vacation. They weren't what you’d...

Sunday 7/3/22 I have been up all night working, and going through months of the inbox, and I am not in the mood, having seen yet again...

Saturday 7/2/22 Have you ever known someone whose most viscerally true form of interaction with you feels like it should induce a...

Friday 7/1/22 William Staley is the editor of The New York Times Magazine's Letter of Recommendation column. This column appears once a...

Thursday 6/30/22 When Roger Angell died in May, I saw social media post after social media post about how he was the best baseball writer...

Monday 6/27/22 C: I wrote another story tonight. It's about a guy who was officially dead for seven seconds after his second heart attack...

Monday 6/27/22 I was at the 7-Eleven tonight, acquiring no fat milk for my blood pressure, when this large, middle-aged man from Texas...

Monday 6/27/22 The missing note scudded up to Beethoven’s door, having taken its time, and the right amount of time, in getting there. It...

Monday 6/27/22 My dad used to say to me, "Never be ugly in your own head." Even at the time it occurred to me that you could only say...

Monday 6/27/22 I tend not to look at life the way a lot of people do. I'll always say, for instance, that you'd rather have your baby die...

Sunday 6/26/22 Was reading Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn tonight. A library in Boston saw the book back in 1885, and then said...

Sunday 6/26/22 A woman experiences a brutal divorce, and it drags on and on and on. She imagines the tail of a scorpion, long as a...

Sunday 6/26/22 Today marks 2184 days, or 312 weeks, or six years, without a drink of alcohol. Good job. There is no one who would be able...

Saturday 6/25/22 Fat guy brusquely telling his hot girlfriend, "We don't need to rehash that," then her being all meek and overly...

Saturday 6/25/22 Let's just go through this for the records as a new week begins. This past week I came up with and mostly wrote seven...

Thursday 6/24/22 I need to do a lot better than I'm doing, that's for sure. Do better with life, dealing with things. Checking what I...

Wednesday 6/22/22 Time to get outside for some exercise. It's very late morning--coming up on half past eleven. I took the longer version...

Wednesday 6/22/22 Most books work this way now, pandering to lazy ass expectations. They’re part of a niche of a niche of a niche, and...

Tuesday 6/21/22 You can put anything else, by anyone else, next to anything I do. And the takeaway, to the objective party, or even the...

Tuesday 6/21/22 I've written the shortest story of my career, but is it really very short? In terms of the word count, it is 154 words...

Tuesday 6/21/22 Returning to formal writing--which I obviously am never far away from--is like getting back into my skin again, or...

Tuesday 6/21/22 What can you even say? Mr. Flemming I read your article in the Daily Beast about Buster Keaton. I too marveled at Buster...

Monday 6/20/22 In the summer of 1983, aged seven, I entered my parent’s bedroom holding a baseball card I’d just plucked from a pack...