D. A. Hosek

Just another writer

  • 069.5 OLD The Secret Museum

    As a child, one of the treats of the year was members’ night at the Field Museum. We’d get to go to the top floor of the museum where the researchers worked and see the stuff that wasn’t on display, that was being actively used in research. More than anything else, what remains in my…

  • 031.02 MAT The Concise Guide to Sounding Smart at Parties

    Here’s a rule: If you’re going to put together a humorous collection of facts, it should be (a) humorous and (b) not contain unintentional mistakes. Matalon and Woolsey manage to miss the mark on many fronts, with factual errors that were unintended (e.g., saying that Bohemia became part of modern-day Austria) and having humor which…

  • The Big Countdown

    In this year’s edition of my countdown to death, I drop from 90 years to 84 years. My biggest source of additional life expectancy would be diet and exercise. Losing six years of life is a bit sobering. I knew this last year, but it’s even more important now, especially that I have progeny to…

  • We got more or less diverse poets (depending on how you look at it)

    In the aftermath of some of the discussion about diversity in publishing, I thought I’d check how this year’s Best American Poetry stacked up against last year’s for diversity. There were 73 poets in the 2014 anthology compared to 76 in the 2013. In 2014, 31.5% of the poets had appeared in the three previous…

  • 022 MAN: The Library at Night

    A series of meditations on libraries, public and private, personal and universal. Manguel’s writing meanders on occasion, but even in meandering it has a light poetic tone. As an Argentine living in France, he could reasonably be expected to write in any language but English, but as near as I can tell, this is the…

  • 011.62 ROL: Read to Me

    I knew that there would be decades in the Dewey Decimal System like this one. Where the books are nearly all dry reference materials forbidding linear reading. I hope that when I reach dictionaries, it will not be restricted to dictionaries in its span of the shelf. 01x is bibliographies and most of the books…

  • 001 FRE: Wrong: Why Experts Keep Failing Us and How to Know When not to Trust Them

    There’s an almost nihilistic undercurrent in David H. Freeman’s book, the idea that experts are often wrong (perhaps more often than not), and there’s really no good way to tell which is the case. Certainly the contradictory nature of expertise is obvious to anyone who has done a deep dive into anything beyond the hard…

  • The Dewey Decimal Project

    The Dewey Decimal System consisted, in part, of Miss Caroline waving cards at us on which were printed ‘the’, ‘cat’, ‘rat’, ‘man’, and ‘you’. No comment seemed to be expected of us, and the class received these impressionistic reve­lations in silence. I was bored, so I began a letter to Dill. Miss Caroline caught me…

  • Final Residency—Final day

    It’s a day of lasts for me. My last seminar, Rick Moody and Susan Minot discussing John Cheever (although I have to say that I’m finding a lot of Cheever to be a bit of a mixed bag, with more duds than successes to my mind, but I did rather enjoy the convoluted storytelling of…