Jeff Sharlet on his collection of essential dispatches, reports, confessions, and other essays on American belief
“He actually said these awful things. But the story is McCarthy’s arrangement of the colonel’s utterance of the words and of her changing perception of their meaning.”
Alan Lightman on the theory of everything, technology as mediator of human experience, and empathizing with the religious impulse
Barbara Ehrenreich on writing, social activism, and the possible existence of a mystical Other
Jennifer Percy on lyricism in nonfiction, the demons of American veterans, and circumventing expected narratives of PTSD
From “Holy Springs and Holy Water: Underestimated Sources of Illness?” published last year in the Journal of Water and Health.
Richard Rodriguez on the essay as biography of an idea, the relationship between gay men’s liberation and women’s liberation, and the writerly impulse to give away secrets
By Charlotte Brontë, from an essay written while she was a twenty-six-year-old student at the Pensionnat Heger in Brussels. The essay, dated August 5, 1842, was discovered last year in…