Why Wendell Berry Didn’t Worry About the Future
His life as a writer and farmer was informed by a simple, clarifying idea: Forget tomorrow, and work toward what is good today.
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Kate Mount / Bridgeman Images The Future of Recycling Is Sorty McSortface
It’s really hard to sort all the junk that gets thrown in recycling bins. Do tech start-ups have the answer?
Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty. What Stories About Racial Trauma Leave Out
The poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong depicts the everyday effects of prejudice in a way readers can’t leave behind.
Doug McLean The Frank Bidart Poem That Sums Up How Artists Innovate
In writing, originality doesn’t have to mean rejecting traditional forms.
Doug McLean How Solitude Feeds the Brain
The novelist Jami Attenberg shares a poem that helped her understand her own relationship to isolation.
Doug McLean The Hemingway Scene That Shows How Humanity Works
The novelist Téa Obreht describes how a single surprising image in The Old Man and the Sea sums up the main character's identity.
Doug McLean The Problem With ‘Good’ Taste
Chuck Klosterman, the author of Raised in Captivity, believes that art criticism often has very little to do with the work itself.
Doug McLean A Moby-Dick–Inspired Memoir of Menopause
On a quest to make sense of what was happening to her body, the author Darcey Steinke sought guidance from female killer whales.
Doug McLean The Purgatory That Comes After Losing a Child
When his 2-year-old daughter died, Jayson Greene turned to writing to survive his grief, and to Dante’s Inferno for words to describe it.
Doug McLean What Some of the World’s Last Hunter-Gatherers Have to Say
An ancient saying he learned from his subjects, the Lamalerans, showed the journalist Doug Bock Clark how to tell the story of a tribe with no recorded history.
Doug McLean
