I’ve always loved “The Lives They Lived,” the year-end issue of The New York Times Magazine profiling famous and not-so-famous people who made an impact on the world and died during the previous 12 months. No, let me correct that. I should say that I’ve loved the issue until now. This difference is not attributable…
On the “This American Life” website, Ira Glass wrote a short but heartfelt blog post about David Rakoff, who died last week. He also posted a couple of favorite videos, including one featuring Rakoff at the show’s cinema event last May. In what would be Rakoff’s last performance onstage, he addressed his illness, life without…
“Since you contacted me, I’ve been thinking a lot more about Bialik,” David Rakoff told me when I interviewed him two years ago for a piece I was writing for The Jerusalem Report. He was referring to Bialik Hebrew Day School, the Labor Zionist day school in Toronto we both attended as children. It was…
I can think of three popular ideas about what God actually looks like: the bearded man wearing a white robe who sits on a cloud deciding when to make earthquakes and who sometimes shows up in a burning bush; George Burns in “Oh God!” and, long before he actually played God in “Bruce Almighty,” many…
“It’s nice enough to be able to make a living as a writer, so awards are absolutely gravy,” David Rakoff told The Arty Semite after winning the 2011 Thurber Prize for American Humor on October 3 for his third collection of essays, “Half Empty.” “It’s lovely,” he said in a phone conversation this morning. “But…
From the looks of the Brooklyn Book Festival, you’d guess we were a far better read country than we are. But then, this borough is skewed: The one letter that prevents its name from being Booklyn is either adventitious or bashert. Brooklyn’s bookish populace loves dropping that “r,” and even as rain spat on their…
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