They did another podcast with me, this time about my piece in The World in 2009, which is The Economist’s annual thought-leader issue.
We did this on Skype. She was in London, I was in California. My voice sounds strangely metallic and a bit choppy.
The topic, though, has nothing to do with my book. Instead, we’re [...]
Posts Tagged as ‘The Economist’
November 24, 2008
The web’s paparazzi culture
November 16, 2008
All those gushing book reviews
Joe Queenan in the New York Times has an amusing but stirring piece on ridiculously over-the-top book reviews–in short, most reviews:
The least-discussed subject in the world of belles-lettres: book reviews that any author worth his salt knows are unjustifiably enthusiastic. …
the vast majority of book reviews are favorable, even though the vast majority of books [...]
November 6, 2008
The “death” of blogging
The title is not meant literally, guys. It comes wrapped up in British irony. But I did write this piece in the current issue of The Economist about the topic.
I don’t usually use this book blog to point to my (day-job) articles. But I did get a few responses after the deadline from interesting people [...]
October 30, 2008
Backlash moment
I’ve been flying a lot this week, on a route that GoGo now covers (see map). Each time at the gate, a male-female pair of hip, young marketers (the woman in each case being smarter, hipper, attractive and Indian) offered me and the other lop-sided laptop-bag-toting types in the boarding queue a promotion to get [...]
October 24, 2008
Meaningless quotes by non-entities
Good things happen whenever I clean out my old emails. Here is one from our editor at The Economist, John Micklethwait, regarding the use and misuse of quotations in writing:
At our meeting on Friday I read out part of a letter … by Alan Parker, who used to work for us in the 1970s, and [...]
October 12, 2008
The home stretch of writing
A big moment of sorts last week: I finished the first and rough draft of the book.
That doesn’t mean I’m done. But it does mean that I’ve started the second round.
What happened over the past year is roughly this: The basic idea proved better than I could have hoped. And the book almost wrote itself, [...]
October 2, 2008
The first secret to good writing
I’m just cleaning out some of my old stuff and came across this, which is now two-and-a-half years old but worth re-reading for a moment. In it the author, Clive Crook, writes about why, in his opinion, The Economist is such “a splendid, and partly inadvertent, success,” as he puts it. He gives a few [...]
September 13, 2008
Finding my third voice
My first follow-up to my recent brainstorm on the pros and cons of blogging would be to list one clear benefit: It has already helped me to find my “voice”.
What is voice? I’m not talking about anything to do with my vocal cords. I’m talking about that subtle quality of tone that a writer has [...]
September 11, 2008
It’s the cliché, stupid
Here at The Economist, we correspondents have just received an order from above:
… a formal ban on “It’s the XXXX, stupid” … I think the phrase has been overdone, especially in election stories.
Can we also try, wherever possible, to avoid using “top”, as in “top officials say” or “America’s top companies”: “leading” is much better.
This [...]
September 8, 2008
The schizophrenic blogger
That’s me, at least for the time being. Which is to say, I’m in two minds about blogging about my book, depending on whom I’ve asked for advice last.
The “pros”:
On one side, there is an army of tech-savvy, media-savvy, modern, sophisticated, worldly people who say to me: Blog! Bloooog! For book authors, obscurity is the [...]
August 30, 2008
George Orwell, Blogger
Perhaps it was too obvious until now. What, you mean .. publish the diaries of the great writers, thinkers and statesmen of the past? Just like that? For all to see?
And now it is obvious. They’re publishing George Orwell’s diaries, one entry at a time, as if he were a blogger today. Genius!
For a blogger, [...]
August 17, 2008
On irony
Having a sense of irony can be an isolating and lonely experience if you find yourself living in America. I should know.
While contemplating a post on irony, I pinged a former colleague of mine, Gideon Rachman (who is now a columnist and blogger at the Financial Times).
That is because Gideon, as a Brit in the [...]
August 8, 2008
The treacherous First Person
I’ve been meaning to share a tidbit of a conversation I recently had with my colleague at The Economist, Tom Standage, while we were having lunch at Zuni in San Francisco. Both of us are writing books, both of which are not traditional “histories” but have a strong element of history, and indeed assume a [...]
