Recommended:  Scott Samuelson’s recent piece in The Atlantic, “Why I Teach Plato to Plumbers” (Thanks to fellow writer Matthew Graybosch for sending me the link.) The humanities do matter to real people.  Profoundly.  Samuelson writes about teaching philosophy to students experiencing personal tragedy: A mother who’d authorized for her crippled son a risky surgery that […]

I haven’t posted in a while, but the current hysteria in the New York Times about the loss of brick and mortar bookstores in Manhattan is so unintentionally comical and just plain awkward that I had to comment.  The article, “Literary City, Bookstore Desert,” by Julie Bosman, illustrates almost everything that has gone wrong with […]

But first, as to validation.  (See previous post.) I was stunned to see that there is at least one literary agent, Andrew Wylie, who gets it.  Mr. Wylie said in a recent interview for New Republic what I’ve been saying here in my quiet corner of the Internet for a long time.  That the publishing […]