I am a marginally employed person who can escape with my school teacher wife to the waters of Maine for much of the summer.

Houdini, the magician who debunked magic, could not bear to see the great rationalist [Arthur Conan] Doyle enchanted by ghosts and frauds. And so he did what any friend would: He set out to prove spiritualism false and rob his friend Doyle of the only comforting fiction that was keeping him sane. It was the least he could do.

I never stopped feeling abject terror until I got on television and went on a national ad campaign and realized, "I will be able to feed my children. I have somehow averted the destiny that awaited me, which is endless, crippling debt forever."

My hope when I wrote the first book was that I would get to do it again. But it was not entirely clear that that would happen.

This is one of the defining sorrows of books: that we cannot see one another.

It’s been a tough couple of years for condescending nerds. And if bookstores fall, Jon, America will be inundated with a wandering, snarky underclass of unemployable purveyors of useless and arcane esoterica.

I used to enjoy the anonymity of being a literary figure and occasionally a public radio figure.