Andy Unedited
Exploring Books, Life, and Writing
It’s not too early to think about that graduation speech you are going to give next May. David Brooks has some ideas about what you should not say. Early in The Second Mountain, David Brooks delivers a devastating critique of the hyper-individualism one usually hears in commencement speeches: Be yourself. The future is limitless. Look …
Talent is overrated. Hard work is undervalued. (Writers, take note.) That’s the message psychology researcher Angela Duckworth argues throughout her book Grit, a message she illuminates with varied stories and interviews. The combination of passion and perseverance (her definition of grit) is a much greater predictor of success than any innate ability. High school students …
This week marks the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Kitty Genovese on March 13, 1964. So here I rerun my post from two years ago on this landmark episode in American culture.
Years ago Steve Stuckey, a colleague in InterVarsity, told me a story about Campus by the Sea on Catalina Island, off the coast of Southern California. Rattlesnakes have been on the island for time out of mind. In the mid-1930s, some enterprising folk brought in wild pigs to keep the snake population under control. The …
When I first entered publishing, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, the folks at InterVarsity Press had a slogan for a reading program they were promoting: “Fifteen Minutes a Day Is Fifteen Books a Year.” The idea was that if you could give on average fifteen minutes a day to reading, over the course of …
I am off for July. So I’m running some favorite Andy Unedited blasts from the past. This was originally posted October 9, 2007. The story was a legend in my family when I was growing up. Once my mom went to have lunch with my dad, who worked as an executive at a company in …
I am off for July. So I’m running some favorite Andy Unedited blasts from the past. This was originally posted May 29, 2008. When it comes to the digital future of publishing, we as publishers can be our own worst enemies. Everyone seems to agree that electronic books will be a significant part of the …
I am off for July. So I’m running some favorite Andy Unedited blasts from the past. This was originally posted January 14, 2009. A woman in Indianapolis wanted to interview me. Well, it wasn’t actually even as grand as that. She wanted her kids to interview me.
I am off for July. So I’m running some favorite Andy Unedited blasts from the past. This was originally posted May 12, 2008. The key personnel gathered. “Listen,” said the publisher. “A publisher went out to publish. And as he published, some books fell on deaf ears. And the remaindering houses came and snatched up …
[Here Andy offers another dispatch from Germany.] Sights. The first impression you get of the Frankfurt Book Fair is its sheer size. It spreads out over six buildings, each of which could easily hold four football fields. Many of the exhibit halls have three or four levels as well. The vastness of the space filled …