A Commonplace Book

All America lies at the end of the wilderness road, and our past is not a dead past but still lives in us. Our forefathers had civilization inside themselves, the wild outside. We live in the civilization they created, but within us the wilderness still lingers. What they dreamed, we ...

T.K. Whipple, Study Out the Land, (Epigram from Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove)

About

YOU HAVE TO SEE THIS: Portraits of Lawrence Weschler

YOU HAVE TO SEE THIS: Portraits of Lawrence Weschler

Recent Pieces

On Larry McMurtry, Kabbalah, and Why I Can’t Write Fiction

The New Yorker, August 26, 1985

Harry Berger, Jr., Some Thoughts on his Passing

On artist and disability activist Riva Lehrer

A contribution to Lehrer's new memoir Golem Girl

Scylla and Charybdis: On Truly Engaging Climate Change

Two recent articles

The Uncanny Tale of Shimmel Zohar

The Atlantic

CORONA A Polyphonal Braiding

April-May 2020

Convergences & Pillows

Impresario

Robert Irwin Getty Garden

Books

Audio/Visual

Humanity vs (or within) Nature: Ren with artists Opdyke, Redniss, Chalmers and Prosek

MANA Contemporary

Discussing Ethiopia and artist Elias Sime with Maaza Mengiste

Ren with Walter Murch on Waves Passing in the Night

The Hammer Museum

The Fraught Crossroads

where race and class keep intersecting across American History, and who gets to address them