Neal Pollack
By Neal Pollack
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Culture 10 Rules For Novelists From The Greatest Living American Writer
If you are writing a novel, remember that all your competition has already died, except for Joyce Carol Oates, who is undead. Your enemies are watching you via a porthole from hell, and they are envious. The reader is your enemy, for they are idiots who sometimes watch TV. The only acceptable TV is “The…
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Culture Gary Shteyngart On Asthmatic Readers, Greyhound Rides And The Scariest Jews He’s Ever Met
Gary Shtyengart’s new book, “Lake Success,” his first novel in seven years, follows Barry Cohen, a hedge-fund trader under investigation from the SEC, as he bails on his marriage and his autistic toddler son in favor of a Greyhound bus ride in search of the “real America.” It’s a midlife crisis road-trip novel set in…
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Culture Is Michael Chabon’s New Book Really A Book?
Pops: Fatherhood In Pieces By Michael Chabon HarperCollins, 144 pages, $19.99 “You can write great books,” a writer, a “great man,” once told Michael Chabon at a party on the Truckee River, “or you can have kids. It’s up to you.” That’s an interesting sentiment, though I found myself wondering who this “great man” was….
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Culture EXCLUSIVE FOR 4/20: The Ten Commandments Of Weed
Editor’s Note: To note the cannabis celebration of 4/20, we have invited prominent marijuana journalist Neal Pollack to offer his commandments with regard to the titular substance along with his textual commentaries. “Now Moses was leading the flock of Jethro his father-in-law, because Jethro was practicing self-care and taking some ‘me time,’ and Moses led…
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Culture Why We Need a Million Jew March
My fellow Jews! Our existence in America has never been in greater peril. Anti-Semitic clouds gather over the land like never before. Whether or not you are fervently Zionist, skeptically Zionist, Zi-curious, believe in a two-state solution, a seven-percent solution, a saline solution, anything but a final solution, really, you must protest the neo-Nazi menace!…
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Culture The Emails of Natalie Portman, Jonathan Safran Foer — and Neal Pollack
“When The Times suggested this piece, and it became clear we weren’t going to be in the same place for long enough to allow for a traditional profile… I was happy to think of the lost correspondence being somehow replenished with, or redeemed by, a new exchange.” (email from Jonathan Safran Foer to Natalie Portman,…
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Culture My Name Is Bill Kristol — and How I Became a Renegade Jew
I’m a Renegade Jew. It didn’t start out that way. I was just an ordinary Jew, putting in my Jewish time, observing the Jewish calendar, mostly blowing off my Jewish responsibilities except for lip service to the faith on Yom Kippur and Passover. But I still did what I thought was right, for Judaism and…
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Culture How Richard Linklater’s ‘Everybody Wants Some’ Celebrates Bullying
Because I live in Austin, it’s hard to have perspective on a Richard Linklater movie. Linklater occupies a position in the cultural hierarchy here only slightly behind Willie Nelson. Every time he releases a film, it gets celebrated like a civic holiday. So when I say something like, “I enjoyed “Boyhood” pretty well but I…
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