My most recent article for Mental Floss is 19 Rare Recordings of Famous Authors. Click to hear recordings of Hemingway (he’s drunk!), F Scott Fitzgerald, Jack Kerouac, Flannery O’Connor, Virginia Woolf, and many more.
[Via] Did you check out my latest in Mental Floss? It’s called 10 Things You May Not Know About ‘Little Women.’ Here’s my favorite fact: 2. Little Women took only ten weeks to write. Alcott began the book in May…
My articles for Mental Floss this month were about birds! Check it out: 10 Weird and Wonderful Bird Nests Annnnnnd: 9 Bizarre Bird Mating Rituals
Writer’s Digest posted an article I wrote that originally appeared in the magazine: 5 Writing Lessons Inspired by Famous Writers. A sample: I was 16 when I visited the cabin where Mark Twain wrote “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras…
I have a new article with Mental Floss: 10 Surprising Facts About Archie Comics. Remember that time Archie was a superhero called Captain Pureheart? Remember the Archie Andrews radio show? Remember that time Archie was used to piss off The…
I have a new article up at Mental Floss called 9 Controversial Experiments In Rewilding. Excerpt: Strange as it is to imagine, at one point lions roamed Europe, horses galloped over Spain, and jaguars prowled parts of the United States.…
AdviceToWriters interviewed me about being a writer. How nice! Here’s a sample of the interview: What’s your advice to new writers? Learn to love discipline. Set up a schedule for yourself—a word count to hit, an amount of time at…
[Courtesy] My latest article at Mental Floss is pretty cool. The Smithsonian has been scanning artifacts and putting 3D models online that you can print out on your printer. Print out a Wooly Mammoth skeleton or Abraham Lincoln’s face! Read…
It’s unsettling that California has decided to skip winter. The governor declared a major drought emergency. Accuweather says no rain until February 23. (And apparently there will be “abundant sunshine” on February 14th.) It’s scary, but the sunshine is also…
Here’s part of an essay by Junot Diaz about the difficulty he had writing The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008. It’s pretty astounding what he went through. This essay originally appeared in…