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For about a decade, more than half of my freelancing gigs were in automotive journalism. I still keep a hand in, but I do more editing and authoring these days. Automotive journalism involves a lot more travel and fancy dinners…
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Happy Birthday to Me
Today, November 20, is my birthday. Not a milestone birthday, but a solidly middle-aged year, just past the likely halfway point of my natural lifespan, if my family is any measure of that. My grandmother has been lying about her…
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Miraculous Nuns of the 7th and 21st Centuries
The New York Times is reporting from towns across the country to explore “how America defines itself one place at a time.” On September 9, the dispatch came from an abbey in Gower, Missouri. The founder of the Abbey of…
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A Writer’s Vacation
In honor of this being Labor Day weekend, the last three-day weekend of summer, let’s look at “The Writer on Vacation,” a short essay by Roland Barthes contained in his collection Mythologies. In the summer of 1954, a footnote in…
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Agency of Influence
Content warning: quick mentions of suicide and depression Spoilers: The Girl Who Was Plugged In, James Tiptree, Jr., 1973 In December 2022, Channel 4 in the UK reported on the very bad factory conditions of Shein (pronounced shee-in), a fast-fashion…
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I Was Replaced by AI
For more than a decade, I wrote for How Stuff Works. I started as an automotive writer, and after a few years, the editors figured out that I could take on almost any topic they threw at me. So I…
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Mogador: A Translation Diary
When I started revising my translation Celeste Mogador’s memoir from 1848, I thought I’d try keeping a translation journal, similar maybe to the writing journals Steinbeck kept while he worked on his novels. I took a month off of editing…
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That One Time I Was Wrong
A few weeks ago, I was struggling with a paper I needed to write for my course on Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf. We’re reading his translation as well as the original in Old English, and critiques of and essays…
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Digging into Metaphors
I’ve been reading The New Life by Tom Crewe, a novel about gender and sexuality and the cultural expectations of domestic life in 1890s London—to put it in a very small and inadequate nutshell. It’s a very good book, one…
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Introducing Leo Bloom, Courtesy of His Cat
Leopold Bloom is the protagonist of Ulysses, yet he doesn’t show up until page 55. And even then, he’s not the first to speak in his own chapter. James Joyce gave that honor to Bloom’s unnamed cat. Scholars have long…