Category: Blog
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writing & inflation
Working on a novel and I wanted to indicate that a Manhattan restaurant had a price point of medium-high boogie. I settled on $49.68 as the cost of their average entrée. But a paragraph later, I realized that inflation could soon make that figure meaningless. In a year, who knows, $49.68 might get you one […]
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what’s in a name
You may notice messages from a Matthew Frye Castillo. That’s me. I’ve been thinking a lot about my family history and the nature of White supremacy for several years. There are many personal and political reasons to change my last name, but the writer Ana Castillo nicely sums up one of my aims: “A crucial […]
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Reimagining Public Safety
Uvalde has made it horrifically clear that policing in its current form just isn’t working. “Police are violence workers,” sociologist Alex Vitale says in a powerful episode of Code Switch. “That’s what distinguishes them from other kinds of government interventions. Once we have that analysis, we should understand that policing should be the tool of […]
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“Is Nothing Sacred Anymore?”
Last night I was immobilized by mourning. Buffalo, Orange County, now Uvalde — two teachers, 17 kids. How does one respond to a country who’s deliberate inaction sanctions the murder of schoolchildren? This morning, I passed an email with the headline “Is Nothing Sacred Anymore?” I didn’t open it. I already knew the angle, the […]
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If I want to write well, I have to work hard at it. I have disciplined myself by clearing other things out of my life that would make me busy. If I was going to fail in being a writer, I didn’t want to have any excuses. My excuse was going to be that I had given myself my best shot and I wasn’t good enough. It’s kind of an imposed desperation.