Frederik Pohl's Blog, page 25

If you live in Brooklyn, or go there now and then, please be advised that there's going to be a giant Book Festival there on September 18th.
And the organizers are going to be distributing some 40,000 bookmarks all around town containing my picture and some biographical notes to explain why I am a true son [...]

 
"Against other things it is possible to obtain security, but when it comes to death we human beings all live in an unwalled city."
—Epicurus

That least likely of billionaires, Warren Buffett, wrote in an Op Ed piece in the New York Times, "My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress. It's time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice."
And then he added that of his many super-rich friends most [...]

Don't the right-wing politicians ever run out of just plain lies? Like the other day Donald Trump babbled that President Obama "takes more vacations than any human being I've ever seen," specifically including former President George W. Bush.. But the fact is that at the same point in their presidencies Obama has [...]

 

The former Hyatt Lincolnwood. (Flickr photo by E L O.)
"The Purple Hyatt," once home to Chicago's Capricons and other fan gatherings, may soon be just a lavender memory. Legal and financial maneuverings have spared the building's life until now, but the village of Lincolnwood has had the legal right to tear it down [...]

 
"The world is a fine place, and worth the fighting for."
—Ernest Hemingway


 

Al Norton's principal editorial function was to read all the incoming pro submissions, and what few the three of us had considered possibilities from the slush pile, to pick out the ones he liked well enough to buy. Copy editing, proofreading, writing house ads and departments he left to us.
We also picked [...]

I was not employed by Popular Publications for five or six months, during which time I didn't look for another job. I decided to go for full-time writing instead, but when that period was over — when I got a telegram from Al Norton, asking me to come back as his assistant, at close [...]

 
"The presence of pain is more keenly felt than the absence of agony."
—Hendrik Hertzberg

So many people were happy when I posted my piece on what it was like to work for a pulp house in the early '40s that I decided to do the same for every publisher I worked for. That's a fair-sized list of over a span of four decades — five if you count [...]