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 […]