AI can’t Lie
It could be a poem. Yesterday a friend sent me a short text and a question about whether “my” writer had written it. He was asking about a writer I admire a lot —...
Category: reading
Essayism Review: Towards a Definition
Brian Dillon, Essayism, London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017 I’ll start with the conclusion so there’s no chance of wandering off and reaching a different one: the book led me to understand “essayism” to be...
Reading for Pleasure
I read somewhere recently (irresponsible, irresistible phrase!) that the proportion of us who read for pleasure is dropping, and has been for some time. The implication was that most of us, most of the...
Who Reads?
Apparently the US federal government is having difficulties recruiting agents to ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement). There are a number of reasons, but one important one is that applicants often cannot pass an “open...
The Second Sex (book review)
Reading this now, in 2025, was like visiting a site where something astonishing was built some 75 years ago, something that goes on challenging readers even as the terms of that challenge shift and...
Eros the Bittersweet: Book Review
It’s the sort of literary criticism that expands a language, in some sense “rewrites” the text or group of texts under consideration. Reading and translating ancient texts for evidence of a specific experience, namely...