The Gazette’s shorter form: observations, commentary, and pieces that don’t require the length or structure of a full essay but are still worth putting down in writing.
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Writing for an Audience and Writing for Yourself Are Not Two Things
Someone asked me recently who I write for. It was a normal question at a normal dinner, and I gave the answer that writers are supposed to give, which is some version of “myself, first.” This is the correct answer. It is also, I think, mostly a lie—not because writers are dishonest, but because the…
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On Owning 167 Books I Haven’t Read
There are one hundred and sixty-seven books in my apartment. I counted them on a Wednesday afternoon in August because I wanted to know the number, the way you sometimes want to know how far you are from the town you grew up in—the distance tells you something, even if you have no plans to…