Canonize: Creating a Personal Canon Template
I love the idea of the “personal canon”: an encapsulation, in list form, of those things that have most shaped you. A sort of annotated bibliography of influences.…
Blog
Antilibraries Kickstarter “Work in Progress” Update, July 2017
Here’s the second in a series of “work in progress” updates for the Antilibraries “Codex Libri” project I launched via Kickstarter earlier this year. (Note: I’m publishing this…
Book Walks, or, The Life Changing Magic of Ambulatory Reading
I’d like to offer some meditations on a simple practice that I think not enough people do, probably for fear of being hit by a car. The book…
Antilibraries Kickstarter “Work in Progress” Update, May 2017
I always enjoy when Kickstarter creators post detailed updates that shine a spotlight on the inner workings of their projects and creative processes. In that tradition, here’s the…
My Gift to You: A Bounty of Billion-Dollar Business Ideas
One night not so very long ago, my self-imposed daily writing word count goal loomed. But I was feeling like a sleepy dumb rhinoceros, and didn’t know what…
My Many Libraries
One of the best books I’ve read in the past few years is Alberto Manguel’s “The Library at Night”. Manguel writes about the idea of a library from…
Intersection of Fiction and History
Fiction and reality often intersect in interesting, surprising ways. Actual events merge with the imagined; invented stories draw on and feed back into history. In many ways they’re…
10 Favorite Things
I recently made a list of ten of my favorite things, to share with the awesome Uncommon in Common community. This was fun, so I figured, why not…
Surfing the Contrails of the CODEX Hackathon
I recently attended my first ever hackathon — and the effects have lingered in surprising ways. CODEX, hosted this winter at the MIT Media Lab, has a unique literary bent:…
My 52 Books of 2015
Here are all the books I read in 2015. At the end, I’ve included some comments, reflection, and analysis. NB: the first # after each book is my…
Kickstarter’s Great Nonprofit Innovation
Yesterday I was excited to see the announcement of a joint initiative between Kickstarter and The White House: a special Kickstarter campaign intended to raise funds to aid…
Giving and Taking Shape
On the incarnations of a side project and evolution of an idea: how I’ve conceived, reconceived and re-reconceived “Antilibraries”. This is the ongoing story of a project I’m…