Other Writing

Before I worked at Time I wrote about books and technology for a few other magazines. This is a selection of my early journalism and fiction. You can find almost every article I’ve ever written online at Byliner.

“The Death of a Civil Servant,” The Believer, May 2010
When he was a young man Leonard Woolf spent seven years as a colonial administrator in Ceylon. While he was there he roomed with an early fantasy nerd, and their complicated relationship says a lot about the complicated interconnections between Modernism and fantasy.

“Good Novels Don’t Have to be Hard,” the Wall Street Journal, August 2009
An essay in the Wall Street Journal about the legacy of Modernism and the revival of plot. I’ve been called an idiot on the Internet a lot in my day, but rarely as often as I was called one for this can i buy zithromax over the counter piece. And yet I still believe I’m right. A concise version of the same argument, with reactions to a few rebuttals, is here.

“The Gay Nabokov,” Salon, May 2000
Vladimir Nabokov almost never mentioned his brother Sergei, who was gay and had a strange and colorful life of his own. After Sergei died in a Nazi concentration camp, he haunted his famous brother, and his novels.

“When Words Fail,” Lingua Franca, April 1999
Deep in the bowels of Yale’s Beinecke Library sits the Voynich manuscript, the world’s most mysterious book. Written entirely in code and filled with botanical, astrological and pornographic illustrations, it has consumed lives and ruined reputations, but nobody has deciphered it yet.