A work ethic doesn’t come out of nowhere. In high school, the band teacher casually asked those of us in the clarinet section if anyone wanted to tackle the E♭ clarinet for a couple of pieces that year. There was a moment of silence. The E♭ clarinet is a

The offices at the gleaming Random House Tower on Broadway and West 56th Street stand empty. In 2020, book publishing has returned to being the cottage industry [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putting-out_system] it once was. Outside of the printing operation, everyone involved in the process of making books—

(I use “literally” twice in this newsletter. Can you tell which one is correct? Answer at the end.) There are two hard parts to writing stuff: the starting and the finishing. (Also, there’s a fiddly and often extended bit in-between, but I prefer to think of that as either

In a radical departure for this newsletter, I’m going to get a little nerdy. Prepare yourself. Years ago, before my son was born, I played video games. The new baby put an end to that as surely as he robbed me of my home office [https://mavengame.com/2020/

Busy few weeks. Has it been a month? I’m checking—yes, it’s been a month. Ugh. In the interim, we finished our move (to sunny Montclair, “The Park Slope of New Jersey”) and I completed a staggering amount of client work. (This is no exaggeration. I have been,

You want advice? I’ll give you some advice. Get out there and upgrade those Zoom pants. (Assuming you’re wearing pants at all.) Let’s not kid ourselves: all our standards are sagging under the weight of months of lockdown. Time to shore them up! You’ll feel better

Happy Independence Day to my fellow Americans! For every other passenger on Spaceship Earth: The United States is currently experiencing technical difficulties. Please stand by for our regularly scheduled home of the free and land of the brave. I don’t know about you, but there are times I wish

Editing’s a thankless job. Turns out it always has been. According to the historian Anthony Grafton in this piece at Lapham’s Quarterly [https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/correctors], book editors—who began as “correctors”—have been underpaid and under-appreciated ever since Gutenberg: > One of the most striking

I was delighted to see that Marc Maron finally interviewed Jerry Seinfeld for his podcast [https://open.spotify.com/episode/6FEiNkrGmKgfm5E9oQinsc?si=vVQ9pBeoR4qVjrwYSAwX_Q] . Like the other exemplars I regularly feature—Philip Glass, David Lynch, David Bowie, etc.—Seinfeld is a consummate producer. Disciplined, rigorous, relentless, I think he’d

> There is something to be learned from a rainstorm. When meeting with a sudden shower, you try not to get wet and run quickly along the road. But doing such things as passing under the eaves of houses, you still get wet. When you are resolved from the beginning,