Today we begin a new semester, and I’ll begin this semester with a new essay from me, published earlier this month in Virginia Quarterly Review: “Good For You: What Makes a Happy Family?” Here’s a snippet to account for the picture of the Buddha above. This past summer, not long into a fairly strenuous hike in the woods of […]
Earlier this term my religion writing class discussed James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, which was an inspiration, we noted, for Ta-Nehisi Coates’s National Book Award-winning Between the World and Me, reviewed here by Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow. On December 3, the London Review of Books published a piece of dissenting opinion on the book by Thomas […]
This week in my David Foster Wallace class we’re reading his 2007 introduction to The Best American Essays, “Deciderization—2007.” Students wanted to know what the title was all about. Here’s an essay on that, featuring the top buzzword of 2006, “Decider.”
This week in my advising seminar, we discussed David Lipsky’s book Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace. Most of the class has also seen The End of the Tour, the recent movie based on the book. On Thursday, Lipsky visited class to talk with us about his experiences putting the […]
I don’t begin my food writing course until next term, but my reading this weekend—as sometimes happens, I’m nearly a month late to this—relates very well to the conversations we’ve been having in my religion class about race and justice and history. Francis Lam writes with grace and power, about a woman of grace and power, in his […]
Today in class we discussed James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, most of which was published in The New Yorker in 1962. By way of introduction, I brought to class the news of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s National Book Award win last night; I offered that Coates, who was inspired by The Fire Next Time to write Between the World and Me, seems […]
As I’ve been highlighting in class, one of the writers we’ve read this term, Jeff Sharlet, found himself in Paris last weekend, “to write a light piece about hospitality,” as he says in a new story up at Esquire. The results of his weekend were anything but light. Read his reporting, in full, written and photographed with his friend […]
Matthew Teague and Dane Faucheux This morning in my religion class we discussed Matthew Teague’s “The Aftermath.” What we don’t often discuss in class—though what, in one case, I’ve been paying close attention to in recent days—are the lives of the reporters and essayists we discuss. This is probably for the best. Most reporters, I suspect, would prefer we not […]
There are better, more informative, ways to follow the tragedy of Paris tonight and looking forward, but one of our writers this semester, Jeff Sharlet, has been tweeting his night in the city. Read his experiences here. UPDATE (Saturday morning): Sharlet has added this account on his Instagram feed.
This week in my religion class (yawn!—Shia?!) we began discussing the final essay we’ll be writing this semester, a piece of literary or cultural criticism. Here’s the list of the topics my students brought to class, with—I hope—useful links. Shia LeBoeuf’s #allmymovies conceptual art piece Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle […]
