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 […]

This week in my religion course we read John Jeremiah Sullivan’s “Upon this Rock,” about his RV trip to the Creation Festival, and Matthew Teague’s “The Aftermath,” reporting in the wake of the murder of five Amish girls, “an event with no meaning.” Both brilliant. And it had not occurred to me before this week, before talking with […]

Weeks ago, an essay by the writer George Saunders appeared on the New Yorker‘s Page-Turner: “My Writing Education: A Timeline.” Everyone I knew was reading it. Everyone I didn’t know seemed to be reading it. I waited. And waited. And now it’s my late-weekend reading. A wish for my writing students: Make it your late-weekend reading, too. […]

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 […]

Students in my religion writing class read an excerpt this week, published in Harper’s, from Marilynne Robinson’s Home. A companion piece was a 2012 essay by Paul Elie, published in The New York Times Sunday book review, “Has Fiction Lost Its Faith?” In Elie’s essay, he makes use of Flannery O’Connor’s claim from a half-century ago that “the struggle ‘to make belief believable’ [was] the […]