Pen International: Creative Non-Fiction

Chicago once broke new ground with its city-owned bike share system, but five years and 10 million rides later, bike sharing is racing toward free-floating, dockless bikes, tracked by GPS, and Chicago's not so sure.

Prodded by renewables to embrace smart technologies, utilities are discovering ways sensors, data, and connectivity can save them millions of dollars.

The demise of its nuclear-power industry weakens the United States' ability to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, a former CIA director said in Chicago Tuesday.

Shell CEO Ben van Beurden made headlines when he told an interviewer his next car would be an electric vehicle, but he stopped short of a full disclosure: van Beurden's new car is part of a company-wide conversion of the corporate fleet.

Scholars of geo-engineering report increasing interest in their work as humans seem increasingly unlikely to avert catastrophic global warming.

Increased temperatures from climate change will reduce yields of the four crops humans depend on most—wheat, rice, corn and soybeans—and the losses have already begun, according to a new mega-study by an international team of researchers.

If humans can kick fossil-fuels, they will benefit from massive efficiency increases in every sector, a Stanford professor said this week—a net savings of 42 percent of world energy use that will both derive from and ease the transition to clean energy.

Markets have proven more efficient than regulations and other policies at addressing the energy and climate challenge, a leading environmental economist said recently in Aspen.

Energy visionaries imagine a future in which developing countries provide electricity to all using mini-grids powered by clean renewables, but that might not be what the developing world wants.

Dogs and cats are responsible for a quarter of the greenhouse gas emissions caused by animal agriculture, according a study published today— a whopping 64 million tons of CO2e emitted in the production of their food. But scientists remain divided about the role our pets play in global warming.

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 […]