happy birthday

Thomas Pynchon turns 89 today.

61.8

America's Civilian labor force participation rate continues to slide. In the twenty-first century, these 2026 lows have only been matched by the early COVID-19 years of 2020 and 2021.

What will my sister think?

"That brings me to another question that memoir writers often ask: What about the privacy of the people I write about? Should I leave out things that might hurt or offend my relatives? What will my sister think?

"Don't worry about that problem in advance."

~~ from On Writing Well by William Zinsser

Auggie's Revenge is the book for you.

from periodicals

In April, I listened to Louis Menand's "A Lesson of Vietnam: Getting in Is Easier than Getting Out" from The New Yorker, and I read "Blood in the Game" by Francine Prose—a review of novels by Lee Clay Johnson's Bloodline and Carl Hiaasen's Fever Beach. I also enjoyed a few shorter pieces from recent print issues of The Christian Science Monitor.

Nobody is going to do it for you.

"Writers have to jump-start themselves at the moment of performance, no less than actors and dancers and painters and musicians. There are so writers who sweep us along so strongly in the current of their energy—Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, Toni Morrison, William F. Buckley, Jr., Hunter Thompson, David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers—that we assume that when they go to work the words just flow. Nobody thinks of the effort they made every morning to turn on the switch.

"You also have to turn on the switch. Nobody is going to do it for you."

~~ from On Writing Well by William Zinsser