Generation Y Michigan is a new site I built for Michigan Radio that we just unveiled last week. The site was envisioned as a blog for newsroom intern Lauren Silverman to explore the reasons why Michigan can’t hold or attract young adults. But because of the overwhelming positive response, we’ve decided to open the site [...]
Posts under ‘essay’
The Only Truly Serious Philosophical Problem
“Even if one does not believe in God, suicide is not legitimate.” Albert Camus clearly felt no need for an element of surprise in The Myth of Sisyphus, his long essay that won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. This statement appears in the first paragraph of the Preface, before the book even officially [...]
The Suffocating Aura of Television, 1990 to Now
David Foster Wallace was a new name when an acquaintance lent me the book A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. Inside the 1997 collection of essays and articles, a bookmark had been placed at a selection titled “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” an 80-odd-page exploration of the relationship between TV and [...]
America’s Tenured Literature
While visiting my parents’ house a couple weeks ago, I happened to find an essay in The New York Times Magazine by David Gessner. The article discusses Gessner’s transition from full-time journalist and author to creative writing professor. I devoured the essay, highlighting my favorite parts along the way. There are two main questions in [...]
