After giving a talk on administrative law at American University Washington College of Law on April 24, Justice [Antonin] Scalia took a few questions. One was from a student who wanted to know what she had to do to become "outrageously successful" without "connections and elite degrees."

"By and...

This was a terrible, horrible, historically bad week for literary publishing. Random House restructured and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt laid off legendary literary editors and up-and-coming literary editors alike, and Simon & Schuster... well, we don't need a full recap, but suffice it to say it was bad. Real bad....

Legendary publisher Robert Giroux died late last week, and his passing made me think of his last trip to Kenyon College. It was November 1998, when the college held a symposium on its alumnus Robert Lowell. As a Kenyon Review Student Associate and a junior at the college at the...

Late in the first episode of the Showtime series Californication--the only show on television that actually glorifies the writing life, if for all the wrong reasons-- the writing-blocked novelist played by David Duchovny is having a blow-out fight with his ex, played by Natasha McElhone. Toward the end of their...