Category Archives: Language

The Ideal Editor – Writer Relationship: A Chat Log

Joe: You can’t have an overabundance of earthquakes. One is too much.
One earthquake is an overabundance.

1:07 PM me: But they are tiny adorable earthquakes!

Joe: And earthquakes don’t abound.
I don’t think you can have an overabundance of anything that isn’t a physical thing.
Can you have a surfeit of wind?
ANSWER ME THAT MOTHERFUCKER

15. The Dick You Can’t Take Back

(Originally published in Boston’s Weekly Dig. This is a revised version.) Recently, I learned a hard lesson. A lesson about boundaries. A lesson, even, about interpersonal communications. A lesson about the dick you can’t take back. I’m an academic – a political scientist – so I spend a lot of time hanging around with professor

Why The Ayers Thing Isn’t Working

I’ve been wondering about the Ayers attack for months – I knew that the Republicans would try to make something out of nothing no matter what, especially if things started to look bleak for them. I thought this before McCain hired the Karl Rove-Lee Atwater Ice Capade Singers as his entire campaign brain, and after

11. The Naming of Things

Diana and I started talking about having children about a year and a half ago, and I knew we had moved from the realm of dreamy ponderance and into the area of serious business when the conversation about names came up. Names are secret things, full of power. When you start thinking about a future