David Moldawer

First: I’m giving a lecture to a class at NYU about innovation in publishing in a few weeks. What should I talk about—whether we still need dust jackets in an age of robot vacuums? I’m lost. Help. Second: anyone coming to town for the 800-CEO-READ Business Book

Back in high school, I took a summer job at an insurance company based right off Times Square. It paid eleven dollars an hour and there was air conditioning—one of my better jobs overall. Mostly, I’d sit in the back room with the IT guy. Now and then,

Your environment profoundly affects your writing. You don’t pay enough attention to it. What do you read? What do you listen to? Where do you sit when you write? What’s in your field of vision? What forms the substrate of your work? It matters. I’ve curtailed my

When I was a young editor at St. Martin’s Press, I was invited to a meeting with Richard Saul Wurman, the founder of TED. Since I managed the Let’s Go series at the time, Wurman’s new travel guide seemed like a fit for me, so I was

This essay [https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/the-traits-of-a-proficient-programmer] , excerpted from a book on programming, applies just as much to writing as it does to code. The author, Gregory Brown, draws a useful line between competence and proficiency: > Competence means having enough experience and knowledge to get stuff done; proficiency

Men wear suits. Many women wear suits. Working from home, I  wear pajamas exclusively, but the point stands: suits. Suits  are uncomfortable, expensive, and boring. They’re designed to samify people, iron out pesky differences. Broad shoulders all around. Suits work so well because they comfort wearer and wearee. They

Writing is scary. Does the fear fade with experience? I don’t know. I’m only a few years back into writing as a full-time profession. It was scary the first time around. It’s even scarier now. Ask me in a decade—I’ll be the Renfield-looking guy arguing

I’ll start this by saying that coming up with stuff is hard. By “stuff,” I mean: ideas, assertions, advice, findings, etc. The juicy bits that get called out in bullet-points at the end of a chapter or summarized in those business book summaries for “busy and successful executives.” (Actual

If we’re friends on Goodreads—friend me, I’d like to see what you’re reading [https://www.goodreads.com/davidmoldawer]—you may know that I’m (slowly) wading through Robert Henri’s The Art Spirit. Don’t interpret my glacial pace with this one the wrong way. The

> When you do something, you should do it with your whole body and mind; you should be concentrated on what you do. You should do it completely, like a good bonfire. You should not be a smoky fire. You should burn yourself completely. If you do not burn yourself