Responding to what he calls Kathryn Schulz’s “devastation of Thoreau’s character, style, and mental health” in her latest New Yorker essay (which is also fun to read: “No feature of the natural landscape is more humble than a pond,” she writes, “but, on the evidence of Thoreau, the quality is not contagious”), Jedediah Purdy mounts a spirited defense of “a genuine American weirdo.”
Futuristically enough, we’ll all soon be able to experience New York Times stories through virtual reality.
Meanwhile, Twitter has hired a Times editor at large as editorial director of its currently-not-compelling-enough Moments section.
And Gawker hones its Spiderman sensibility: John Cook, now officially hired as executive editor of Gawker Media, where he’d been acting as interim chief after this summer’s troubles, feels bound “to operate this place in a way that is cognizant of the power it has, and uses it judiciously.”
Advice for writers: Prolific freelancer (and author of the forthcoming A Floating Chinaman) Hua Hsu reports that he rewrites his assignments constantly till the last minute, often at night. “I’ve tried to alter my approach over the years,” he tells Full Stop, “but the only seemingly useful advice I’ve ever gotten about becoming a highly efficient, daytime writer is to have a child.”
Likewise, Jill Bialosky, novelist, poet, and executive editor at W. W. Norton, finds it “incredibly sustaining . . . to carry on a full-time job and also be a writer. My books build over time. I sometimes work on two or three projects at once, different forms, and this takes the pressure off each project.” It’s almost as if writing gets easier the less time you have to actually do it.
Tonight the bookish carnival that is Lit Crawl NYC will take over Housing Works Bookstore Cafe. There’ll be games of Exquisite Corpse and Nerd Jeopardy (the latter run by BOMB magazine), and music will be provided by the Farrar, Straus and Giroux house band—yes, they have one, and it features Sarah Crichton, publisher of Sarah Crichton Books, on lead vocals.
