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April 23, 2025 • Michael Erard

Why cultural journalism?

I’m a creature of cultural journalism. I read it; I write it; I buy it; I read aloud juicy bits to my kids. And so I want it to live. By “cultural journalism” I mean slower-burn, long read commentary about current events, some of centered on books, though not necessarily, even though most of the titles contain “review” and “books,” such as the august stalwarts like New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books and the newcomer European Review of Books. Yet I’m also thinking of EuObserver, Eurozine, Global Voices, and the Texas Observer, where I was a contributing writer from 1998 to 2004 or so. (I’ve also had a piece in the ERB.) There are many others.
  • lessons in writing

My ouevre, my briarpatch

This is something I wrote in the middle Obama years and recently pulled from the vault. Back then, the cloud wasn't a thing, so backing up to the cloud wasn't as easy as it is now. You don't hear many people mourning lost data in crashed hard drives like we used to.
  • March 26, 2025
  • Michael Erard
  • lessons in writing

Bye Bye I Love You and Frank Kermode's Sense of an Ending

On my recent trip to the US, I brought a copy of Frank Kermode’s majestic The Sense of an Ending in my suitcase, over-optimistically planning to write about models of the end of the self, the end of the world, and how they relate to Bye Bye I Love You.
  • March 23, 2025
  • Michael Erard
  • language at the end of life

A few thoughts on recruiting American scientists for Europe

There’s been some discussion online about how European countries should recruit frustrated and/or fired American scientists who were federal employees or who worked in American universities. I have some thoughts about this at a systems level. Tl;dr:
  • March 15, 2025
  • Michael Erard
  • higher education

"How people really communicate at the end of life"

This article first appeared online in the Atlantic on January 16, 2018 and quickly became one of the most read articles in the magazine for a week, surpassing even an argument for why Donald Trump should be impeached. Eventually it would gather over a million online views. Since it hides now behind a paywall on the Atlantic's website, I'm putting it up here.
  • January 17, 2025
  • Michael Erard
  • language at the end of life

Youth Group (for Craig Finn)

In the youth group were the two twins, petite, full-lipped, with short frosted hair, who came from trouble and were probably headed toward bigger trouble if Jesus didn't stop them short first, one of whom wrote me lingering, perfumed letters all summer, but she wasn't the one I liked.
  • January 14, 2025
  • Michael Erard
  • lessons in writing

America as a Place to Leave

George Blaustein, an editor of the European Review of Books and a professor of American Studies in Amsterdam, wrote an essay in The Dial about teaching American Studies in Europe. It’s a very good piece about the widening and now narrowing of “American Studies” and America as a place (and a story) that ends with this line:
  • November 22, 2024
  • Michael Erard
  • migrant life

Ten Rules for Rules for Writers (+ a bonus rule)

Ten rules for rules for writers … Note: This essay was inspired some time ago by an online discussion about jargon and seniority, as well as by discussions about academic writing in which I found myself qualifying my recommendations by acknowledging that power and authority deformed them.
  • October 2, 2024
  • Michael Erard
  • lessons in writing

At the Liberation Concert

I haven’t mentioned this before, but there’s a large WWII American cemetery about 6 kilometers from where we live, the only one in the Netherlands. Because it’s 80 years since liberation, the annual concert at the cemetery was especially big, and my 8 year old son and I went. It was a pleasant evening of music, stories, and appropriate honoring of the dead.
  • September 13, 2024
  • Michael Erard
  • Lessons about grief and death

Why "predicate" is better than "point"

Bye Bye I Love You has organized my life for the last five years. I’ve been explaining that it was the predicate for my life. It structured other decisions. After my family, it was my priority. If something didn’t serve the book, it was jettisoned. So maybe I should explain what I mean by “the predicate.” Which is also a pleasure to say.
  • June 21, 2024
  • Michael Erard
  • lessons in writing

Scene in an American Train Station, mid 1990s

I wrote this in the early 2000s, based on some notes I took in the 1990s, when I would ride the train from Boston to Haverhill. The station is obviously North Station, but before the renovations. I haven't been there in decades. The renovations have probably been renovated. Anyway, you can clearly tell that I wrote this under the sway of Joseph Mitchell and Malcolm Lowry, stylistically anyway.
  • June 13, 2024
  • Michael Erard
  • lessons in writing

Endings (a column)

[This was my last column for the Observant, the newspaper at Maastricht University, where I've written four pieces a year for four years] Endings … That idea that came to me in 2017–the idea that more should be known about language at the end of life, and that language at the beginning of life might shed light on it–became several pieces of journalism and academic articles…
  • May 30, 2024
  • Michael Erard
  • lessons in writing
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Michael Erard

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