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Thursday, August 30, 2007
The Best of Technology Writing 2007
I came home yesterday afternoon to a happy surprise: a box containing five pristine, shrink-wrapped copies of The Best of Technology Writing 2007, fresh off the UPS truck. This delivery and a token hundred bucks were my entire compensation for permitting the anthology's publisher, the University of Michigan Press, to include an article of mine in the collection, and I have to say I'm feeling very nicely compensated right now.
Look, it's hard to explain. I do understand that the plummy Steven Johnson quote on the book's cover ("just superb") doesn't necessarily reflect that fine tech writer's opinion about my own contribution or even, given the nature of blurbs, any honest opinion at all. I'm also pretty sure that, as is conventional with these sorts of collections, the bulk of the selections were made by some uncredited editorial functionary before it fell to the editor of record, legendary tech writer Steven Levy, to make the final cuts.
Still, just knowing that anyone in a position of editorial authority found my efforts serviceable enough to line up alongside pieces by Clive Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Jeff Howe, and the other tech-journalism luminaries assembled here is probably as close as I will ever come to the warm endorphin rush of getting tenure.
Oh, and as for that article of mine that made the cut, it's called "Dragon Slayers or Tax Evaders," and it's a report I wrote for Legal Affairs magazine about my vain attempts to get a straight answer from the IRS on the taxability of virtual assets. You can read it here if you like. Or if you prefer, you can read it in one of those pristine, shrink-wrapped copies I found on my doorstep yesterday. I'm keeping one of them for myself, but the rest are going out at my expense to the first four people who ask.
11:53 AM
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