This week in my David Foster Wallace seminar, we read his 2007 essay “Just Asking,” originally published in The Atlantic and now included in his collection Both Flesh and Not. (We complemented the reading with Maria Bustillos’s Awl essay, “Inside David Foster Wallace’s Private Self-Help Library,” which is published in a different form in a 2014 collection I edited, Gesturing Toward Reality: David Foster Wallace and Philosophy.)

“Just Asking” is a series of questions that begins with “Are some things still worth dying for?” And class discussion this week led me into a sort of free-association where I named a number of writers and books and issues that I told the class I would try to follow-up on here. Best I can do, from memory, is a short list, I think.*

Guantánamo Diary, by Mohamedou Ould Slahi, edited by Larry Siems. (Siems, here, tells an unrelated but fascinating story about being 19 and meeting Allen Ginsberg.)

Abu Gharib, and an essay by Peter Manseau.

Privacy and secrecy and the NSA, more by Maria Bustillos.

Reinhold Niebuhr, his book The Irony of American History, and the moment from 2007 when Times columnist David Brooks asked then-candidate Obama whether he knew Niebuhr.

And since I have some skin in the game, here are two essays I wrote this year about Guantánamo Diary: “Forced Feeding,” for Virginia Quarterly Review, and “Guantánamo Diary and the American Slave Narrative,” for the New Yorker‘s Page-Turner.

* I invited students to comment with requests that I expand this list or add their own remarks below.

Illustration: John Ritter, for VQR.