I'm not a rushed traveler. I don't need to check things off a list to say that I've "done" them or "done" a city.

I'm more what the French call a flâneur, someone who likes to wander and stroll and enjoy himself at leisure. I like museums in moderation, scenic...

Frank Bruni recently wrote a fascinating New York Times column about politicians desperate for attention. One of them was former Congressman Anthony Weiner, now infamous for tweeting pictures of his privates to someone other than his wife, and then denying it.

Weiner explained his reckless behavior by saying he craved...

Peggy Noonan has just attacked President Obama in the Wall Street Journal.

Among other things, she complained about "that imperturbable drone... the sense that he is trying to teach us, like an Ivy League instructor taken aback by the backwardness of his students. And there's the unconscious...

Dan Chaon was recently taken to task in Salon for suggesting that young writers read literary fiction. Why? Because it's "terrible." I've already had my say about that blanket condemnation here.

But Chaon wasn't recommending that young writers read only literary fiction. His advice was actually...

I hear this complaint a lot, and it's just been repeated on Salon.com.

Is it true?

I guess it depends on what you're reading. I just finished Laura Kasischke's poetic, engrossing novel The Raising, set on an elite college campus. Her characters are vivid, her style poetic,...

An African-American friend just shared that a church-going Facebook friend of hers was critical of her public stance in favor of marriage equality. My friend argued back in terms of the history of discrimination against their people, and that's a powerful comparison.

I did something similar at a talk I...

Blog tours are all the rage right now for indie and traditionally-published authors. My advice: think it through, and then talk to other people who've done them, and think it through again.

I'd heard mixed reports about them, and decided to try one myself. Now I wish I hadn't wasted...

So, even though I'd heard about the ending of Downton Abbey's Season 3 and knew what was coming, I found the fatal car accident at the end gratuitous, pointless, and lazy on the part of the writers. Please, another semi-orphaned baby? Well, maybe the grieving parents will find solace and...

Not long ago, I ran into a friend at a local restaurant who was excited to tell me that her husband had sold a first novel to a major publisher, along with foreign rights to many countries. My friend was thrilled.

I congratulated her, sent her husband my best wishes,...

Wharton just had her 151st birthday, and I feel like she's been part of my life for decades. In my senior year of college, I read the Pulitzer-winning biography of her by R.W.B. Lewis and was fascinated by her relentless drive to succeed as an author and to perfect her...

I'm teaching a crime fiction class at Michigan State University as a guest author of a mystery series, and one of the things we've been discussing is how you don't always root for the good guys.

I'm not talking about cheering on the psychopaths and serial killers. But...

Ok, let's get this straight.

On her deathbed, Lavinia wrote a letter to her father? And in effect this letter blessed Matthew, her intended who loved somebody else and humiliated her?

And then dying, magnanimous, saintly Lavinia entrusted this letter to a maid making up the fire in her...

1) Each time the scene shifts to Bates in prison, you hope for an Oz-style riot.

2) Whenever Matthew protests he can't inherit money from his ex-fiancee's father because it would be "wrong," you imagine Lady Mary braining him with a vase.

3) Maggie Smith has stopped being amusing, and...

It's a common occurrence: We love an author, we've read all her books, we can't wait to hear her read at a local book store. And when we go, the reading's anywhere from a letdown to a total dud.

What goes wrong?

Most authors I talk to, whether they're newbies...

When I was the crime fiction reviewer for the Detroit Free Press, I noticed something strange in the reviewing world. My colleagues would rave about a mystery or thriller, but ignore the fact that it was badly written. I suspect that's what's going to happen with Dick Wolf's debut thriller...

Mike Huckabee seems to think America's latest school massacre is the fault of a godless culture: "We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools," Huckabee said on Fox News. "Should we be so surprised that schools would become...

With the Supreme Court scheduled to hear two same-sex marriage cases, I'm wondering, like everyone else, what their decisions will be. I'm also wondering what I'll call the guy I've been with for 28 years, and the question has bedeviled me for as long as we've been together.

In my long years as a book reviewer for the Detroit Free Press, the Washington Post and other newspapers and magazines, every now and then I felt I'd slipped into an alternate universe. The whole world seemed to praise a new novel in terms so rapturous you'd think nobody had...

Okay, I wasn't entirely honest when I reported last week on the gifts that Obama gave me.

Fact is, I was overwhelmed by his munificence, and the thank you note signed by the whole First Family. See, I had the very first Obama sign in my mid-Michigan neighborhood...

Okay, Romney is taking a lot of flak right now for saying that Obama won because he gave gifts to people including African-Americans, Hispanics, women, and young people.

But they're not the only ones who enjoyed Obama's generosity.

You think the billion dollars they spent on the...