Thursday, July 31, 2014

Slate Writer & Critic, Troy Patterson: An Interesting Dude

Sometimes there are people who just "know a lot," and they are the type of people who just naturally seem worth listening to. One of these people who is simply in tune with the contemporary world is Slate Magazine's Troy Patterson. Patterson writes the "Gentleman Scholar" column for Slate, and has generally been referred to as a "Writer at Large." That is a gig that many aspiring bloggers and writers would naturally say, "That's what I want to do." It's not easy, though, to do what Troy does. It takes a real eye for the zeitgeist, and an ability to distill the complicated to the accessible and find the interesting in the ordinary.

Troy's latest piece on how to be "Well Read without Reading" is just the sort of random topic that is both engaging and something most of us might ponder but rarely craft it into a piece of writing. Troy, however, has been doing that for quite a while. Working as a book and film critic for NPR, Spin, and Slate, Troy has crafted a niche market for his astute observations that can both engage and instigate.

You can follow Troy at @untitledproject.

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