Pen International: Creative Non-Fiction

Solar leases cause the most difficulty when owners of solar homes go to sell, according to a Colorado real-estate agent who trains other professionals on solar home sales, but that's only one of five problems that commonly arise when solar homes go on the market.

It's a story of stunning progress and staggering challenges. Some of the first corporations to make climate commitments have found that clean energy saves them money wherever they can find it, but often they can't find it where they need it most.

There are two existential catastrophes threatening the world, former Defense Secretary William Perry said. One is quick but avoidable, while the other is slowly unfolding.

Envision Energy founder and CEO Lei Zhang likes to look at the numbers. And when he looked at the numbers behind the falling cost of renewable energy, he began to worry.

There are four themes driving energy innovation in the developing world, according to the chief operating officer of Delhi's Softbank Energy. Combined, they put tremendous pressure on renewables innovation.

Envision Energy will produce batteries that cost $100 per kilowatt hour by 2020, founder and CEO Lei Zhang said at Stanford University, predicting the price will fall to $50 only five years later and end the reign of the internal combustion engine.

You won't find any compromises in this gift guide. To make the cut, these gifts must be carbon negative—they must remove more carbon pollution than they contribute to the atmosphere.

Seven new governors have two things in common: they all pledged to move their states to 100 percent clean energy, and they all won.

Even as they questioned the human role in climate change, the Republicans who controlled Congress the last two years quietly supported climate action to save the fossil fuel industry in a warmer world—and they slipped their efforts past Trump.

Advocates for clean energy and climate action became governors, attorneys general, commissioners and more on Tuesday, but some climate hawks fell. An offshore-drilling ban passed, an onshore-ban failed, and America will not be trying out its first climate tax. The impacts begin to be felt today.

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 […]