In the most-recent New York Times Book Review came an attack on the memoir. Well, technically it was an attack on the memoir written by anyone outside the circle of the “memoir-eligible.” It goes: "There was a time when you had to earn the right to draft a memoir," and then proceeds to savage three recent memoirs. The author, Neil Genzlinger, yearned for a now-distant day, when “unremarkable lives went unremarked upon, the way God intended." READ MORE

Given that Andrew Sullivan was out sick all last week (asthma and bronchitis) and that Glenn Greenwald was just released from the hospital after contracting dengue fever, we thought we’d ask around and see how some other prominent bloggers are doing in this age of cyber-disease. READ MORE

"The age of evaluation, of the Olympian critic as cultural arbiter, is over," wrote Stephen Burn recently in the New York Times Book Review. The sun may be setting on the “Olympian” stature the critic formerly enjoyed, while the age of everyman-as-critic is on the rise. Academic critics may not be in such danger—God did, after all, create tenure. So what of the future of the journalist-critic, the op-ed columnist and the professional cultural commentator? READ MORE