Buy My Book

My anthology Noticing is coming out in paperback this week from Passage Press for $29.95. Please buy it. Also, I’m continuing my book tour with a speaking event in Los Angeles this Friday evening, before stops in Austin, New College in Sarasota, Fla., the West Virginia exurbs of Washington, D.C., and New York City. Here are my public speaking engagements (usual ticket price $45): Friday, March 29, 2024: Los Angeles Friday, April 12, 2024: Austin Tuesday, April 23, 2024: Sarasota, Fla. Friday, May 3, 2024: New York City (may be sold out) And here are Frequently Asked Questions about my ...

Brown Shirts ’n’ Skins

Last week a clip from something called “Timcast” went viral. Some round-faced, beady-eyed stoner (I think that’s “Tim”) was debating a manic Robert Downey Jr. look-alike ...

Harry, Duke of Sussex

Abnormality: The New Normal

In his recent livestreamed interview with Hungarian-Canadian “toxic trauma therapist” Dr. Gabor Maté, besides crediting the ingestion of the hallucinogen ayahuasca with ...

Fred and Adele Astaire

My Lesbian Dance Theory

During the dog days of August, there was a brief flurry of partisan excitement when Republican congresswoman Lauren Boebert denounced the White House’s student loan giveaway as, ...

Damien Hirst

The Broken Publicity Machine

“As flies to wanton boys,” says Gloucester in King Lear after his eyes have been put out by the Duke of Cornwall at the behest of the evil Goneril, “are we to the gods: they ...

Waste of Ink

There are no sheep more ovine than those who get themselves tattooed in order to individuate themselves. Judging by the statistics, such sheeplike behavior is becoming more and ...

The Fallacy of the Real Me

According to a Gallup poll, the percentage of the American population that now “identifies” as LGBTQ+ has doubled by comparison with ten years ago, and now stands at 7.1 ...

Fit to Be Fat

A curious example of the power of social trends on thought is that two years into the Covid pandemic, nobody of any influence has yet bothered to launch a campaign to persuade ...

Norman Mailer

Be Your Own Advert

To mark the centenary of the birth of Norman Mailer—which I shall not be celebrating wildly—a publisher decided to reissue a volume of his essays. An employee of the ...

Ventura, CA

Isle of L.A. Part I: The Changing Colors of the Landscape

In honor of my upcoming 53rd birthday, I’m launching a two-part (or three...haven’t decided yet) series on the changing face of my native city. I’ve never understood why ...

If It’s All the Same to You…

Nearly a century ago, in 1925 to be precise, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig wrote an article for a Berlin newspaper titled “Making the World Uniform.” It began: Despite the ...

The Pain Principle

There is a lot of misery in the world, it would be useless to deny it. The description of the world as a vale of tears surely conveys something to every one of us. And yet, all ...

Humility on a Cellular Level

Recently I have been dreaming a lot, unpleasant dreams but not nightmares. What this means, or even if it means anything at all, I don’t know. Perhaps it is a cerebral form of ...

Meghan’s Misery

Mrs. Clinton, who knows a thing or two about phoniness, praised Meghan Markle’s decision to speak of her “mental health” before tens of millions of her very closest ...


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