Interview with Jerome Burg, at the meeting place of books and the web Thanks to Betsy Partridge, who told me about Google Lit Trips www.googlelittrips.org/, and put me in touch with its founder and creator. If you are an author, school librarian, teacher, parent, editor, or publisher you should know about this ever-growing site – [...]

Pat Connolly – Former Olympian and Coach to World and Olympic Record Holder Evelyn Ashford — on How to Determine if An Athlete Is Female? In 1990 I had the good fortune of working with Pat on Coaching Evelyn, a YA nonfiction book about the relationship between athelete and coach. I thought Pat would be the [...]

So We Live In the World of User-Created Content, Right, With Books Fading as a Relic of the Past? NO! Did you all see this article about Wikipedia in the New York Times: "Wikipedia to Add Layer of Editing to Some Articles" tinyurl.com/nmos99 While the article mentions some of the famous Wiki gaffes — the false conspiracy [...]

The Things You Learn When You Meet People Who Work On Wall Street Our host in Fire Island has a strong math background and works for a bank — so he is "up" on the latest developments in stock trading. He told me about Flash Trading — which is nicely explained in this Wall Street [...]

Ghosts of Fire Island Neighbors of ours whose child is a good friend of our older son invited us out to their home in Fire Island — for me as much a trip into the past as the present. I have come here at many times in my life, from when I was perhaps 6, [...]

I Was at YIVO Yesterday — An Archive of Jewish History Here in New York I was there to do some research on plays my father designed for the Yiddish art Theater in the mid 1920s and I was thrilled to find performance photos. I’d seen images of his sets before, but never with real [...]

Is America Rome? In the current edition of the TLS there is a review of two new book about the fall of the Roman Empire (here is a related review, tinyurl.com/c8wetd). The review I read as well as the link I’ve provided make clear that historians are newly interested in Rome and its fate because [...]

We Went Out for Ethiopian Food Last Night and had a great meal at a local place we’d been to once before. The owner also serves the meals and so as we gushed over the food we got talking. I asked where he was from and it turned he himself is from Nigeria, an Ibo, [...]

"Aronson challenged my original categorization of nonfiction as being a book about truth to being a book about a true story told from the author’s perspective." Perfect. That line begin the second paragraph of one of the papers written by the teachers I recently taught at Oakland University. It was so gratifying to read — and [...]

The World Beyond Textbooks and What It Means To Us Did you all read this article in the New York Times? http://tinyurl.com/l27u8p . Schools are experimenting with moving past the textbook to digital materials. In some cases this is an economic choice, using open source materials instead of texts due to the shortfalls in state education [...]