Sublime

In the years around 1590 the Italian city of Lucca was looking to find a new source of confidential information in Rome.27 A correspondent there recommended that they employ Giovanni Poli: he was said to be far and away the best, and that there was not a single Italian ruler who did not have him under contract. Poli was also a careful man, both sav

Barry: Right, my essay examining Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four as a thriller, which I wrote at NPR’s invitation. The blog post examined the way NPR edited the essay, and how NPR’s edits revealed that fundamentally, NPR is an establishment media player. Joe: Your editor was pissed. Barry: He was. NPR called up Random House and complained about my bl

Directly next door to the Center for River Studies sits the headquarters of Louisiana’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority. CPRA was founded in 2005, a few months after Hurricane Katrina hit, inundating New Orleans and leaving more than eighteen hundred people dead. The authority’s official mission is to implement “projects relative to th

Sam was trying to buy a seat in Congress so that Congress might finally begin to address an existential risk to humanity.

describing the job of editor. It was not, he said, as it once had been, confined mainly to correcting spelling and punctuation. Rather, it was to know what to publish, how to get it, and what to do to help it achieve the largest readership. At

Those of us who are trying to write well about the world we live in, or to teach students to write well about the world they live in, are caught in a time warp, where literature by definition still consists of forms that were certified as “literary” in the 19th century: novels and short stories and poems.