At 55 years of age, I dove off a career cliff. I left Alaska, where I had worked in journalism, broadcasting, and politics my entire life—and where I had a reputation and knew everyone—and I went to New York, where the reverse was true. My success here six years later began with a single piece …
An online inflation calculator declares that a dollar in George Washington’s pocket was equivalent to $34 today. That’s nonsense. The value of money can’t be converted between different historical eras. The same is true of moral standards. They’re meaningful only within the cultural context of their period. I’ll discuss the money comparison first, because it’s …
It’s a uniquely satisfying feeling, opening a box that delivers a new book you have written. I had that pleasure last week, and in the days since I’ve kept Our Story in Many Voices on the dining room sideboard, where I’ve been peeking at random pages as I walk by. I’m particularly proud of this …
I never had a better boss than Tom Gibboney, the publisher at a weekly in an Alaskan fishing village where I covered little league baseball, the boat harbor, and eccentric personalities. He taught me a deep lesson: Write honestly, but be a good person. In 1986, I had just graduated from Princeton with a degree …
One of my witty writer friends responded to my newsletter about style by suggesting I write next time about mixed metaphors. And he gave an example from my own piece. Oof! But when I thought about it, I realized his example could demonstrate when mixing a metaphor is OK. It’s a deeper topic than any …
English prose styles change through time like musical or artistic styles, but within the period of a dominant style people often don’t see it as changeable—they think the current style is simply correct. I believe a period’s favored writing style can reveal something about how people thought. And that’s true for today’s ‘correct’ prose, too. …
Our world would be better if we honored those applying their genius to humbly help others and paid less attention to the boastful and self-important ones. So here goes. Gretchen Bersch is smart enough to have done anything with her career, but she dedicated most of it to the least prestigious backwater of academia: helping …
Sometimes a coach can offer a single insight that makes all the difference. I discovered this recently on the squash court, and it is also true as a writing coach. That one perceptive observation, one idea, breaks the barrier to improvement. But you still have to pay for the whole hour. For my readers out …
My last piece attracted a lot of attention because it was about physical courage and worthy sacrifice. Now we need moral courage to criticize the government, as legal and social media power are turned against those who oppose the president. Many dissenters feel hopeless and fatalistic or don’t know how or when to act. But …
What is a good man? That question always makes me think of a story I wrote as a newspaper reporter in Alaska in December 1990. My wife and I had just decided to start a family. Here’s the first paragraph: “Carl Stalker died battling a seven-foot polar bear with a pocket knife Saturday, but he didn’t lose …
