Pen International: Creative Non-Fiction

Pressure to kick coal has been strongest in China, which reduced coal demand so sharply that markets around the world had little choice but to follow suit.

You've heard about the earthquakes, the controversial claims of flammable tap water, the potential contamination of streams, lakes and drinking water aquifers, but the system that's supposed to pay for these calamities may itself be a pending disaster.

At the turn of the millenium, Michael Polsky had made a fortune building and selling companies that generated energy from fossil fuels, and he was looking for "the next big play."

Oil prices may rise or fall in the short-term, but they will return to a range of $55 to $65 in the long term because that's the price of oil from fracking shale wells, the Goldman Sachs head of research said in Chicago Wednesday.

If the petroleum industry continues to fight subsidies for nuclear power, the nuclear industry will go after petroleum-industry tax breaks, the president of the Nuclear Energy Institute said Tuesday.

The Environmental Protection Agency no longer features climate-change information on its main website, but the scrubbed pages are available from several sources..

India is poised for an explosion in room air conditioning that may require as many as 300 new electric power plants in the next 10 to 15 years, according to a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory specialist in international energy.

President Trump is unlikely to succeed in reversing climate and energy policies he has targeted by executive order, according to a Congressional Research Service legal brief released this week, at least in part because of his own language.

Renewables could provide nearly all the power in some regions less than 20 years from now, reliably, and at a cost competitive with fossil fuels, according to a report released today by the Energy Transitions Commission.

American electric companies are keeping a close watch on President Trump's unraveling of Obama Administration climate and clean-energy policies, but they do not appear to be changing course because of it.

A Self Made of Words by Carl H. Klaus Iowa, 2013 Recently a Buddhist acquaintance suggested I read Simone Weil because of her work on attention. She writes, for example, that “Absolute undivided attention is prayer,” which lends a Buddhist flavor to her Judeo-Christian theology. Attention can be aimed at anything, after all, not necessarily […]

Since Roger Ebert died I’ve been watching the tribute writers struggle to express his contribution. At The Atlantic, Christopher Orr rightly describes Ebert as a movie enthusiast, but here’s the analysis that follows: “The movies he loved, he truly loved. And the movies he hated, he truly hated.” That’s so truly true Orr can reuse it for […]

It wasn’t the great science fiction novels, “Fahrenheit 451” or “The Martian Chronicles,” that most reflected Ray Bradbury’s life, but a play he wrote—”Something Wicked This Way Comes”— “It’s a metaphor for all of life,” Bradbury said of his play, which you may know better as a 1983 movie starring Jonathan Pryce, Jason Robards and […]

[capti on id=”attachment_2694″ align=”alignright” width=”300″ caption=”By fox_kiyo via flickr”][/caption] When we published the summer issue of Contrary two days ago, we had less than $2 in the bank. We’ve been scraping by since the recession hit, but this marked the first time we had published an issue without knowing how we’d pay for it. Scary, […]

Lauren Berlant speaking on media sensationalism? I couldn’ t miss that. So I found my way to the University of Chicago’s Gleacher Center to have a listen. Only to find out I’d overlooked the comma between media and sensationalism. Lauren Berlant is an English professor at the University of Chicago, but that title can’t contain […]

Juliana Baggott wrote a smart and calm defense of the Osama bin Laden death celebration for NPR last week. Americans should be free to release their fear, she contends: their cheering shows they are paying attention, are emotionally invested, and are participating in an act of unity. She didn’t convince me, but she helped me […]

For a lifetime Mary Oliver has gently secluded herself, walked the woods, sent bottles out on the tide bearing simple messages that reconnect humanity to a beauty beyond us. Now we know why. In an interview with Maria Shriver Mary Oliver reveals she was sexually abused when very young, that with eroded trust she withdrew […]

I left the daily life of journalism at the turn of the Century, just before the daily life of journalism collapsed. That left me feeling a bit like Charlie Chaplin, who sold all his stocks in 1928. Since then I’ve maintained journalism as a practice more cyclically, and less cynically, focusing more on reporting and […]

The genius of James Fallows’ new piece in The Atlantic is that he takes some of the best values of traditional journalism—skepticism, research, fairness, eagerness to question authority and topple conventional wisdom—and he applies them to traditional journalism. He disputes the tediously common view that old journalism is better than new. Unless they are different from […]

Last week when my friend David Alm published his lament of digital publishing in these pages, I happened to be writing an introduction for a visiting writer. I recognized in my draft a soft rebuttal to David’s post, but I decided it had to complete its original mission before I could post it. This introduction […]