Miscellany

Personal Essays on Medium

• A Thousand Days of Walking

• John Lewis: The Books In His Knapsack

• Jerry Garcia’s Very Good Book Advice

• Remembering d. boon

• Remembering Seamus Heaney

A Kindle Book: Mishegoss and Malarkey

I was curious about Amazon’s self-publishing tools, so I published a book as a fun project. I rewrote material I’d first developed for a podcast and wrote the book as a trivia challenge.

A Essay at Poynter

Back when Twitter was worthwhile, I tweeted about something and an editor at Poynter got in touch and asked if I could quickly write an article on the subject. I wrote an essay on what became the movie “The Paper.”

Odds and Ends

• The Legend of the Mothman

• Enormous Public Funerals of the 19th Century

• The Rise and Fall of Phrenology

• Gilded Age Decadence

Way Back to Amazon

I was hired as one of the first freelance editors at Amazon, writing content for the site when the home page was essentially a magazine about books and authors. I interviewed authors, reviewed books, and wrote newsletters of recommended books. I was the company’s first nonfiction editor and its first history editor.

As the company evolved I transitioned to writing about video, publishing hundreds of reviews and articles. My scope was absurdly broad. I assume visitors to the site never realized the same critic who reviewed the classic documentary “The Sorrow and the Pity” also weighed in on the chair-swinging mayhem of “Extreme Championship Wrestling.”