I start my TV critic job on Monday, and some of my friends have asked me how I’m going to manage the deluge. It’s a lot of watching. It’ll be a while before I figure out how to manage my time and draw sharp lines around my pop-culture compartments: The TV shows that I watch…

Recent circumstances (the death of director John Hughes today at age 59) have swayed me to re-post the story about JAKE RYAN for The Washington Post in 2004, one of the stories I’ve received the most mail on, ever. UPDATE: You can now read it on washingtonpost.com, which has revived it and reposted it. See…

Well, if you’re anywhere near St. Louis, or plan to be, please go visit Nikki at Pudd’nHead Books in Webster Groves, Mo. She sent the nicest e-mail after she read the beginning of Tinsel and blogged about it, too. Let me just say that if you ever think an author would tire of hearing this…

My friend Charles read Tinsel a couple weeks ago, while on a trip to his place out in Alaska. (Charles gets around. I get nowhere these days — I’m so busy that I just had to cancel the briefest four-day visit to Albuquerque in a couple of weeks, which is a bummer. On that note,…