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Happy New Year! I love a new year. I’ll celebrate a fresh start any day. I don’t make resolutions or even pick a word or phrase; I just like turning a new page in my planner and looking forward. You…
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Automotive R&D for Writers
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…