Nonfiction

“You all, who will emerge out of the flood In which we have drowned, Remember When you speak of our weaknesses Also the dark time From which you’ve escaped.” —Bertolt Brecht, “To Future Generations” Translation by Terence Renaud 1. “memento mori” The madness began in the fall of 2000, after General Ariel Sharon swaggered up…

1. “A crack in the walls that ordinarily hem us in.”[1] On September 7, 2017, minutes before midnight, I was alone in a borrowed house when something began to shift: an indeterminate sensation of motion, like lapping waves. I did what I had learned to do as a child, growing up in Kuwait: I looked…

In May 2009, a year after I graduated from college, I found myself in a mangrove swamp thirty miles east of Haikou, the capital city of China’s southernmost province, Hainan Island, standing atop a massive, concrete floodgate. With me were six reporters from a Cantonese television station, the CEO of one of China’s largest telecommunications…

I lived about fifteen years in New York and Los Angeles, and by the time I moved back to rural Ohio, I’d been gone long enough to forget all the stuff I hated: I forgot about the rules for men (there are none) and the rules for women (the men make the rules). I forgot…

In December of 1936, George Orwell, on his way to fight in the Spanish Civil War, stopped in Paris, where he had a chat with Henry Miller. It would be the two writers’ only encounter. Neither was particularly well-known or financially secure at the time. Miller had published Tropic of Cancer two years prior, but…