Some of the following links lead to whole articles, others to previews hidden by paywalls. Write to me if there’s something you’d like to read in full.
This cluster of articles about crime fiction showcases some of the concerns on display in my recent book, and also follows some tangents from those ideas:
The Case of the Elusive Case, turnrow literary review
Reality Catches Up to Highsmith’s Hard-Boiled Fiction
The Last Testament of Ross Macdonald
Robert B. Parker, the Hard-Boiled Professor
These three originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal:
The Hero Is Hardboiled [PDF]
Gold MacDonald [PDF]
Bound for Perdition [PDF]
Here are some reviews that appear on the Barnes and Noble Review website:
This one is on the Library of America’s anthology of true crime writing, and
This one looks at the novels of Charles Ardai and his Hard Case Crime publishing line.
And here’s one on Richard Stark’s Parker novels.
And this is a review of the second, latest, and best Patricia Highsmith biography.
Finally, here’s a brief take on the television show Dexter.
This 2008 look at the work of Richard Wright also touches my interest in crime fiction:
(A longer and more scholarly version of this piece appears in an academic collection, Richard Wright: New Readings in the 21st Century.)
My interest in crime fiction surely informed my editorship of The Cambridge History of the American Novel, which showcases many of the connections between classic literature and popular genres. When that book came under attack from a conservative commentator who described it as the work of “barbarians,” I published this paraliptic defense.
This 2006 article is about a different kind of popular fiction:
And here’s an un-appreciation of the popular writer J.D. Salinger on the occasion of his death in 2010. In retrospect, my timing here was a mistake; Salinger’s admirers deserved their time. I still hold to the arguments I made, though.
Bobby Fischer got a lot of attention for his lunatic politics when he died in 2008. As a longtime chessplayer, I thought that these potshots missed the main point:
As a lagniappe, here’s a review of a revelatory book of Fischer photos that I wrote in 2011.
I wrote the first essay in this cluster right after the events of September 11th. The second is a kind of a sequel, written a few years later. Both are concerned with the corruption of language by politics.
I’ve long enjoyed the writing of Oliver Sacks, and have wondered what makes it so oddly compelling. In addition to these two articles, I wrote another one on Sacks in 2002. (It appears in a volume called Disability Studies, published by MLA Press.)
The Uncanny Symphony of Oliver Sacks (2007).
Oliver Sacks: The P.T. Barnum of the Postmodern World? (2000).
Most recently, I was able to catch up with Sacks for this interview (2010).
Much of my writing about Sacks touches in some way on the subject of disability. Here’s a related article that was also the subject of an online colloquy sponsored by the Chronicle of Higher Education, which published it in 1999. You can reach the article here:
This review of a book about the human head and this one about the mathematical search for design in the world further reflect my interest in what might be called romantic science. So does this shorter look at a book about the periodic table, and this review of a book called A Planet of Viruses.
A physics professor friend suggested in 2002 that I look into the case of a Bell Labs physicist whose results were a little too perfect. The more I saw, the more interesting the case looked, until I dropped everything and started digging as deeply and widely into it as I could. The result was an article that appeared shortly before an appointed panel formally accused the scientist of fraud:
This article was so well received (it eventually won a national science writing award) that I wrote another article about the unlikely process of writing it:
On a different note, here’s my sportswriting debut, an article about the broadcaster John Madden that appeared upon the occasion of Madden’s retirement in 2009.
As a followup to football, I branched out here into a different sport, tennis.
And with a new coedited book on baseball that appeared in time for opening day 2011, I wrote this piece on our national pastime. (Here’s a Ukranian translation of it.)
This piece remembers Pete Seeger on the occasion of his 90th birthday in 2009.
More on music: a review of Greil Marcus’s book about The Doors.
I always figured I should be interested in biographies, and would become puzzled when I couldn’t get through them. In this 2006 article I wondered why that should be so:
The Silhouette and the Secret Self: Theorizing Biography In Our Times
I have a longstanding interest and an insider’s view of the workings of academic culture, so I write occasional reports from the cultural front.
Here’s my first article for the Chronicle of Higher Education (which I’ve written for many times since). The academic job market has gotten worse, if anything, since I wrote this in 1998:
Pressures Fuel the Professionalization of Today’s Graduate Students
The job market also affects those who are already hired, with wide-ranging ramifications that I explored in this 2011 essay:
The poor prospects for academic employment are only one of many pressures on graduate students. What should teachers do when students have trouble finishing? I considered that question in a two-part series on struggling graduate students that appeared in fall, 2010:
That series has led to a regular gig as a columnist on graduate education. The column is called “The Graduate Adviser.” Here are some more entries:
The Graduate Adviser
Changing the Way We Socialize Doctoral Students (January, 2011)
They’re Mad as Hell: Why our graduate students are worried and angry, and what we can do about it (February, 2011)
Redesigning Today’s Graduate Classroom (March, 2011)
Teaching in the Postdoc Space (April, 2011)
From Dissertation to Book: Just when you thought the publication process couldn’t get any harder. (June, 2011) (This column inspired a live chat sponsored by the Manchester Guardian in the UK. The moderator collected the best bits, as they call them.)
It’s a Dissertation, not a Book (July, 2011)
Demystifying the Dissertation Proposal (September, 2011)
The Time to Degree Conundrum (October, 2011)
Graduate Student Debt Matters (November, 2011)
OK, Let’s Teach Graduate Students Differently But How? (January, 2012)
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When it’s publish or perish, exactly how should “publish” work? Here’s a 2002 report on what one professor did:
Professors decide what gets published, who gets grant money, and who gets tenure through a peer review process that allows the judge to be anonymous while the petitioner stands exposed. This has never seemed fair to me, so I wrote this column in protest in 2005:
Also on the subject of evaluation, I argue in Why Grading Is Part of My Job that professors need to evaluate their students’ work themselves and maintain final say over their grades.
In 2007 Harvard released a report that called for greater attention to teaching by its professors. But from where should that extra attention be diverted?
Academic fields need good public relations and periodic self-evaluation to stay well-nourished and sound. This column looks at the state of American studies through a landmark 2002 encyclopedia that attempts to sum it up:
I also served as a member of the Modern Language Association’s Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion. Our 2006 report is available online