This week, Longreads published a talk I gave in early January about the particular challenges and opportunities writers face over the next four years. I called the speech “Writing Our America.” It’s about politics, and it’s also what you might call political. The speech opens with a discussion of an essay I often teach at Lang, David Foster Wallace’s “Deciderization—2007,” and […]

I’ve begun the spring semester teaching my food-writing course, Setting a Fine Table. This week we read the wonderful Jane Kramer essay “The Reporter’s Kitchen.” I’m mainly drawn to this essay for the way Kramer discusses her relationship with the subjects she writes about, how in the midst of cooking she gains perspective on what she’s learned in her […]