A note to the wary: no top ten list, no recap of 2012, no prognostication is contained herein. Which ought to make it very unlike a lot of stuff cluttering up the Web today, as we dust off the holidays and get back to work. And with luck, you have work to do. Look around Continue Reading

"Oh!" a friend exclaimed when I told her that The Word was dead. "I'm so glad that's the name of a magazine. Because it's almost true." That, in fact, may be the only part of the story that's good news. Although I almost never saw it, because it was barely distributed outside the U.K., and Continue Reading

The May issue of Saveur magazine had an extensive article about a cuisine I'd always been interested in: Senegalese. I've been to exactly one Senegalese restaurant, in Paris, years ago, having lunch with a friend of a friend, and we had the usual: wolof rice (a rice-and-turkey concoction) and a fish stuffed with lemon and Continue Reading

The past decade has been a rough one for me (and for a lot of other writers, of course), as work dried up, magazines and newspapers died, and the publishing business started going off the rails. Fighting off eviction, termination of telephone and electrical service, and trying to find enough to eat are all too Continue Reading