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I’ve just finished “Eva Moves the Furniture,” by Margot Livesey. Consistent with my aim of picking the brains of writers I admire, I wanted to look more closely at Livesey’s undramatic, seemingly artless prose. I’ll start by quoting a passage to show what I mean. In this piece Eva is recounting her aunt Lily’s memory of a frightening event that happened when Eva was a baby. Eva introduces the vignette as an adult, in the story’s present time: “That spring I caught bronchi

The writer Kathryn Schulz has a terrific book review in the Feb. 16-23 issue of The New Yorker , about a biography of the poet Alfred Tennyson. The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science, and the Crisis of Belief, by Richard Holmes, sets the poet’s life against the backdrop of the mid-Victorian explosion of new scientific discoveries—fossils, deep time, other galaxies, mass extinctions, the mutability of species—and how these overturned settled ideas of a static nature, a

In the New York Times yesterday was a survey asking readers to compare two passages of writing in each of five genres (literary fiction, fantasy, science writing, historical fiction, and poetry). One passage was written by a human author; the other generated by Claude, Anthropic’s A.I. large-language model. The question asked was, Which one sounds better to you? But I knew the real task was to see if I could distinguish between “real” writing and “fake” A.I. text. Easy-

My knee, which has been acting up ever since we went back to Portland for Sammy's birthday, seems to be calming down. Ups and downs still give me trouble--I've missed our All Saints group's regular Monday hikes