Language Arts
I Write Like… is a site that analyzes and compares your writing to that of a famous writer (I’m kinda like DFW)
Kevin Kelly’s Best Magazine Articles Ever
Rupert Murdoch, Neel Shah and the Short Pants
Last month, my friend Neel Shah left his job at the New York Post’s “Page Six” and moved to LA to write for a network sitcom. Neel’s new gig marked not only the end of his time in New York, but the end of a year-long fascination with the management style of his boss’ boss’ boss, Rupert Murdoch. Let me explain.
Last July, on a Friday afternoon, then News Corp executive Jeremy Philips and I received the following email from Neel, which was preceded by the caveat “Please do not forward, as I’d like to keep my job.”
Neel continued…
Jeff Bezos Commencement Speech at Princeton
Whatever Happened To The Burgie Beer UFO of Melrose Ave.?
In the 1980s, my favorite part of Los Angeles was Melrose Avenue, between Fairfax and La Brea. The stores were like mini pop culture museums: Wacko sold dime-store curiosities and terrific art books, La Luz de Jesus gallery was one of the first lowbrow art galleries, The Last Wound Up sold wind-up toys, Wanna Buy A Watch had cool old wristwatches, Golden Apple Comics was in its prime, Maya had cool Asian jewelry, Flip and Aardvark were crowded with racks of vintage clothes.
On Saturday’s and Sundays, Melrose was thronged with pedestrians, and it was great fun to meet and greet people. Melrose was a rare public social scene for Los Angeles.
One of my favorite stores was Off The Wall, which sold amazing commercial display items. The Burgie Beer UFO in front of the store was a welcoming sight, and I thought of the little guy inside the flying saucer as the mascot of Melrose.
Like all cool scenes, Melrose Avenue eventually started to suck. As crass stores selling junky clothes and chain outlets started moving in, the orginal stores like Wacko, Soap Plant, and La Luz de Jesus moved out. By the early 1990s, Melrose was nearly unrecognizable. I stopped going. There’s never been a place in LA as good as Melrose Avenue.
Over the years, I occasionally wondered what had happened to the Burgie UFO.
Goodbye to All This: on Leaving True/Slant
“No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money,” Dr. Johnson famously observed.
By the great wit’s reckoning, then, Your Author is deadwood from the neck up, since the cultural capital I’ve amassed through True/Slant, rubbing elbows with writers like Susannah Breslin and Matt Taibbi and learning from smart editors like Coates Bateman and Michael Roston, was easily the lion’s share of what made writing for the site so rewarding. That, and the rare opportunity to hook my writing desk up to an arena-strength P.A. system and rattle the Web with a 3,000-word post on whatever wild surmise or obscure obsession crossed my mind, commercial considerations be damned. Truth to tell, True/Slant’s monthly wage—like the fees most publications pay in an economy where downsized, overeducated hacks are in no short supply—is a token honorarium, compared to the glory days of freelance writing.
Obviously, those days are gone, maybe forever. Journalism and book publishing—reliable roads out of financial perdition for generations of writers, Dr. Johnson among them—are big, smoking, financial holes. Writers who’ve spent decades honing their craft, deepening their knowledge of their beats, and burnishing their brands are out on the pavement, cobbling together minimum-wage incomes from the slaughterhouse sweepings of freelance journalism, adjunct teaching, maybe even advertising copywriting (if selling their deathless prose, by the yard, to Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce doesn’t violate some Adbusters-approved code of conduct). More and more Web publications pay nothing but street cred, schwag, and name recognition on a nano scale—crack rock for dilettantes, but a death knell for anyone who dreams of earning a living in the scribbling trade.