What is literature?

Tomi Um's illustration in The New Yorker I enjoyed Zach Helfand’s nauseating jaunt in the New Yorker  through airport lounges (“ The Lou...

Object Lessons Impressions are 500-word essayettes on the hidden lives of ordinary things, published in collaboration with the Pittsburgh R...

My work these days has primarily involved helping others on their own projects: supporting books, essays, and all sorts of public-facing thi...

For Spring 2024,  a new book :  Little Data , which I wrote with my great friend and longtime collaborator Mark Yakich .   

A minnow-pattern fly tied by my friend Glen up in Michigan. I'm showing it to one of my Loyola students, Morgan. Photo by Kyle Encar. My...

I've been busy this summer: We moved 650 miles up the Mississippi River, where I've taken a new job as Director of Public Scholarshi...

  New book coming August 2023! 

I keep thinking about this ad that circulated for months online, last year: it's for a cozy clothes line, like pajamas and sweats, but s...

I didn't set out to be so retro this year, but I have two new essays out this month in print magazines. (Just in print, not online!)  I ...

I reviewed Chris Dombrowski's moving new book The River You Touch for The FlyFish Journal . This book got me thinking again about the cu...

  Rio Grande Cichlid, Bayou St. John, MidCity New Orleans I enjoyed D.T. Max’s recent New Yorker article on lionfish and the spearfishing ...

An Alice Marwick concept that she made for my next book's cover; we didn't end up using this image, but I like it a lot. I wrote ab...

  My buddy Brian with a beautiful bluegill caught at Bayou St. John I wrote a brief review of Dylan Tomine's new book Headwaters , for T...

Han in carbonite, about the same dimensions as my iPhone SE I got off Twitter last month, and wrote a bit about why  for Inside Higher Ed . ...

The most recent Object Lessons poster Part of my job these days involves directing the new Center for Editing & Publishing at Loyola. T...

It's been an exhausting semester, by turns a slog and a whirlwind (literally, at times). On a recent visit to my kids' doctor's ...

Having fled the blackout that left our city dark in the wake of Hurricane Ida, we found ourselves in a Courtside Marriott near the Memphis a...

  Hurricane Ida reconfigured the willow tree in our backyard, titling it about 15 degrees to the left of where it used to stand. As a result...

  Hurricane Ida right before we lost power I wrote three pieces at Medium about my experience of Hurricane Ida: before , during , and after ...

Aspirational rendering of Mars base, (c) SpaceX I've been thinking a lot about the narratives and fantasies that fuel space travel, and ...

  Julien riding his bike up in Michigan   I wrote about teaching my kids to ride bicycles during quarantine, for Transformations .  I wrote ...

  This is not Mars. This is bread. I wrote about how we're already colonizing Mars , for Slate 's Future Tense series.  Here are two...

When I thought of the title for my next book , I figured that it must have been done already. It was too obvious: a contemporary pun on Pau...

Hygiene  Class starts with  Hygiene  Air... I had a good chat with travel writer Andrew Nelson about the future of flight, for a listicle he...