2020 being what it is, I’ve become attracted to books that offer humanistic guidance and emotional support. This summer I binged my way through most of George Saunders’ published works, book after book, engulfing stories about people facing hard times and trying to do the right thing. No one writes…

It was after midnight when, reading by iPhone flashlight under the covers so as not to wake my girlfriend, I finished Jaswinder Bolina’s essay collection Of Color. I rarely stay up late to finish a book, much less to finish a book of essays on the day I bought it…

Michael Chabon’s novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is my favorite book of late. It blew me away. It blew a lot of people away when it was published, winning the Pulitzer in 2001. The book does many things well, but its greatest accomplishment is how vividly it…

You are about to read a saga: the tale of how my girlfriend got a faulty new Apple laptop replaced. I am not only the narrator of this saga. I am also its hero. The heroics began at 8:57am on Wednesday, June 6th. I was sitting in front of the…

In preparation for a recent trip to Spain, I purchased Giles Tremlett’s Ghosts of Spain. It was by all accounts the leader in its impossible category, the tell-me-everything-about-a-country-in-one-sitting kind. I am admittedly uninformed about world geography, culture, and politics. In short, I am American. …

This may come as a shock, but there are no software developers in San Francisco. They have gone the way of the honeybees and vanished. What we have instead — in spades — are engineers. If you program computers you are not a computer programmer. If you develop websites you…

Two weeks ago I traveled from San Francisco to Denver. The trip took thirty-three hours. It was my first long train ride. A friend had told me about the route and I’d taken to the idea immediately. Relaxing, seeing the sights, traveling for its own sake… What’s not to like? …

Something strange happened last weekend. My roommate and I went to a house party thrown by some new grads, and when we arrived I heard someone say, “Stephen must have invited some of his older work friends.” I am not only old. I am so old that I must also…

In 2014, theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli wrote a popular science book called Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey To Quantum Gravity in his native tongue, Italian. In the same year he wrote a much shorter book — a pamphlet, really — called Seven Brief Lessons on Physics. The…