From Booklist: 

Wisenheimer: A Childhood Subject to Debate. 

Oppenheimer, Mark (Author) 

Apr 2010. 256 p. Free Press, hardcover,  $25.00. (9781439128640). 974.4.  

In this wise, witty shout-out to geek culture, Oppenheimer relays his evolution from problem child to world-class debater. Part of what makes this memoir so special is the author’s openness about the frustration and isolation he met with as a precocious kid, especially during third and fourth grades, when he had a teacher who literally despised him. Tension at school caused him to act out and to remain friendless until he joined debate club in middle school. There he finally met other kids who, like him, loved language and lived to talk. He was so gifted at debate that he was soon participating in international tournaments—and winning them. This outlet for his verbosity not only garnered him the esteem he was so desperate to attain but also exposed him to some world-class talkers, among them the wry English, gregarious Australians, and hot-dogging Scots, who possessed a “merry nihilism.” His deft running narratives of various competitions contain the same suspense and thrills as the best sports books, while his astute analyses of teammates, coaches, and competitors read like the best kind of psychology. Read it for its sheer entertainment value or for its exuberant celebration of language—just make sure you read it. 

— Joanne Wilkinson

OK, bad pun, I know. But my Mother Jones profile of NY Times columnist Ross Douthat is now on the web here.

An article about home staging from the New York Times Magazine, in which I get to mention Entourage, the French Laundry, and Giacometti...

Here’s a recent piece for DoubleX.com, the new women’s-interest spinoff from Slate.com. It’s about whether good grammar around children matters. I have, of course, taken the predictable abuse for being a priggish doofus. Which maybe I am.

I was delighted to write my debut piece for the AGNI website, edited by the redoubtable Sven Birkerts, whose book The Gutenberg Elegies I read with great pleasure when I was just out of college. George Scialabba, whose new book I review in the piece, is a very fine critic who is getting more attention these days, although not yet as much as he deserves.

A bit more recently, I wrote my first piece for Tablet, the newly revamped version of what used to be called nextbook.org. It's edited by my friend Alana Newhouse, and I shall only say that any magazine that has hired both Seth Lipsky and Victor Navasky as columnists is big-tent in admirable way. My piece, FYI, is about Holocaust deniers and anti-Semites, people with whom I have spent not a little time lately...