Pen International: Creative Non-Fiction

We know what we have to do to avoid a climate catastrophe: eat a plant-rich diet, change our energy mix, electrify transport, reverse deforestation. But there are many more solutions to climate change, including some potent ones that rarely get attention.

There's something of a resurgence of public interest in climate change lately, but this time it coincides with some weariness among the experts who have been working on the problem for decades.

One appellate court judge was impressed enough Tuesday by the case brought by 21 children, some now adults, suing the U.S. government over climate change that he said it may show criminal neglect.

Corporate lobbying helped sink the Waxman-Markey clean-energy bill a decade ago, resulting in an expected $60 billion in climate costs to society, according to economists from UC Santa Barbara and the University of Chicago.

The United States is home to 21 “stranded” nuclear-waste storage sites, according to a new map from the Congressional Research Service that displays a total of 80 sites where the country's nuclear waste sits waiting for a permanent repository.

Expect job losses as electric vehicles displace the internal combustion engine, the Congressional Research Service has warned members of Congress.

Traditional sources of venture capital were never a good fit for energy startups, but these seven new kinds of investors are.

A team of Cornell University scientists set out to produce carbon-neutral fuels from algae and found what they believe is a "doable" and profitable system to not only make the transportation sector carbon negative, but reduce pressure on forests, on fresh water and on ocean fisheries.

All major United States airlines and most smaller air carriers have voluntarily committed to a climate-mitigation plan that's independent of the Paris Agreement, the Federal Aviation Administration reported last week.

Plants are busy scrubbing the atmosphere of carbon dioxide, include the excess CO2 humans have been dumping there. Some humans think plants could do that job even better.

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 […]