The decline and fall of the Washington Star.

The Washington Star was D.C.’s newspaper of record for 129 years until it folded in 1981. In that period it won ten Pulitzers, and its staff included Michael Isikoff, Fred Barnes, Maureen Dowd, and Howard Kurtz. Check out Edwin Yoder’s Autumn 1993 VQR article about his time as the Star‘s editorial page editor in the …

One-to-one SQL join from among the many?

I have two tables in MySQL. One of them (let’s say, for the purpose of simplicity) is a listing of books. The other is a listing of reviews of those books along with a 1-5 ranking. Each book may have 0 or more reviews. It’s your standard one-to-many relationship. However, I want to have a …

VQR: Six National Magazine Awards nominations.

Virginia Quarterly Review, my employer, has big news on the blog today: Wow! Everyone in our office has been trying not to hyperventilate. The finalists for the 2006 National Magazine Awards (the magazine world’s equivalent to the Pulitzers or the National Book Awards) were announced today and VQR garnered six nominations! Pretty unheard of for …

“The Old Man and the Sea,” a distinctly minor work.

I’m working on rather a large project for Virginia Quarterly Review that entails looking through many of the issues produced in the publication’s eighty-year history. I must admit that I sometimes become distracted by the contents of the articles themselves, which often are not just interesting on their own, but doubly so in the context …

VQR blog.

At The Virginia Quarterly Review, we’ve just launched my first publicly-visible contribution to the venerable publication’s internet presence: The Virginia Quarterly Review Blog. There are very few literature blogs out there, with the best (IMHO) being Bookslut, followed by GalleyCat and then a bunch of others. (I haven’t yet adjusted to MobyLives‘ new podcasting format.) …