One of my favorite Web sites is Arts & Letters Daily, a round-up of interesting articles from across the Web. This week the site brought two articles to my attention that I found noteworthy for a variety of reasons, and the more I thought about them, the more they seemed to fit together in some [...]

I just read today that the LongPen, a virtual signing tool for writers and celebrities, will have a trial run in major bookstores in Toronto, New York, and London this fall. Famed Canadian author Margaret Atwood came up with the idea for the LongPen, which comprises a video screen and digital writing tablet on the [...]

In her article The Top 10 Ways to Market to Introverts, self-described “IntrovertZCoach” Nancy R. Fenn describes 10 common introvert attributes that influence how introverts respond to advertising and marketing pitches. Among the traits she highlights is one that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, that “Introverts love to read.” About this characteristic she [...]

In her book, Party of One: The Loner’s Manifesto, author Anneli Rufus attempts to reclaim the word “loner” from the negative associations it often carries. Frequently used by the media to describe serial killers and sociopaths who are said to have “kept to themselves,” the term “loner,” Rufus asserts, more aptly corresponds to the much [...]

One of the writers I greatly admire (despite his seeming low opinion of women), the 16th century French essayist Michel de Montaigne, had a lot to say about the subject of friendship. His famous essay Of friendship describes the unique relationship he had with Étienne de la Boétie, a fellow writer he met while both [...]