The editors of “Shapes of Native Nonfiction” talk about the craft of writing, the politics of metaphor, and resisting the exploitation of trauma.
interviews
Posted inBooks
What Is Elizabeth Rush Reading? : Books on Antarctic Adventure, Ice, Motherhood
“I sometimes wonder if this continent of ice is begging for a different kind of story to be told about it.”
Posted inStory
‘If an Animal Talks, I’m Sold’: An Interview with Ann and Jeff Vandermeer
Ann and Jeff Vandermeer discuss talking animals, the weird/fantasy divide, and the ‘rate of fey’ as an organizing principle in their new anthology of classic fantasy.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Profiles & Interviews, Science & Nature, Story
Why Bugs Deserve Our Respect
Fruit flies helped us win six Nobel prizes in medicine. Architects have been inspired by termite hills. Ecologist Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson explains why bugs are so essential to the world we live in.
Posted inBooks, Crime, History, investigations, Nonfiction, Profiles & Interviews, Story
A Manson Murder Investigation 20 Years In the Making: ‘There Are Still Secrets’
‘Everything that Manson did with his women was exactly what the CIA was trying to do with people without their knowledge, in the exact same time, at the exact same place.’
Posted inNonfiction
‘TV Has This Really Fraught Relationship with the Audience.’
Emily Nussbaum talks about why TV’s relationship with its audience has become more intimate, whether we can blame Trump on True Detective, and how a TV critic’s biggest challenge is just figuring out what to watch.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Profiles & Interviews, Science & Nature, Story, Technology
‘Nothing Kept Me Up At Night the Way the Gorgon Stare Did.’
The Gorgon Stare, a military drone-surveillance technology that can track multiple moving targets at once, is coming to a city near you.
Posted inNonfiction
‘The Underland Is a Deeply Human Realm’: Getting Down with Robert Macfarlane
“I thought the underland would be — of all the landscape forms that have drawn me to explore them — the most uninhabited. This proved wildly incorrect.”
Posted inNonfiction
‘Brokenness and Holiness Really Go Together’: Darcey Steinke on Menopause
Darcey Steinke says that most menopause memoirs “end with this come-to-Jesus moment of, ‘Then I accepted hormones.’ I’m not against it, but … I wanted to hear what it’s like for other women.”
Posted inNonfiction
‘They Happen To Be Our Neighbors Across the Span of a Century, But They’re Our Neighbors.’
One hundred summers ago, black Chicagoans were terrorized by whites during the Red Summer. Poet Eve Ewing talks about reaching out to her neighbors across time in “1919.”