The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes…. —Joan Didion, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” There seems to be a deep psychotic guilt in the heart of America, a feeling that crops up at times like these when…

The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes…. —Joan Didion, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” There seems to be a deep psychotic guilt in the heart of America, a feeling that crops up at times like these when…

The most beautiful things in Ghana are green oranges: as pale and dimpled as hedge apples from an Osage Orange and oblong, as if shaped by hand. When I walk home in the evenings, I pass the girls selling green oranges at wooden tables along the road, each arranging twelve of her best on the…

Students of language learn delightful words for which no good English equivalent exists: sehnsucht (German), poshlost (Russian), or duende (Spanish); rich bottomlands of human experience—good and bad—left inexplicably fallow by Anglo-Saxons. Even when stolen wholesale into English, such words are like the Elgin marbles: mysterious though denuded of context, at once beautiful and broken. A…

I’ve probably been depressed all my life. How else does one explain the nine-year-old kid who sat on the playground bench and wrote after-the-nuclear-holocaust short stories? Nevertheless, it’s what I did. But depression doesn’t fit easily within the Christian template. “Consider it all joy,” the apostle Paul writes, “when you encounter various trials.” I struggle…

My father was dead and I did not miss him. —Joe Queenan When I say I’m writing a book about my Irish American family (the reason I’ve transitioned to occasional guest posts for Good Letters), I receive reading suggestions. First on the list is usually Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, which, alas, I found unreadable. “Why?”…

Continued from yesterday. The stories that make up the New York Times’ One in 8 Million are not video vignettes, like Lynch’s Interview Project, but mini slide shows featuring sharp, black and white photos reminiscent of famous photos of dead presidents in crisis. For example, Freda Degannes—the “Walking Miracle”—who suffers from a rare blood disease…

With this post, we welcome David Griffith to the Good Letters blogging team. Interviewing, in the journalistic sense—the art of extracting personal statements for publication…. The major interview is a carefully constructed transmitting device, a medium, a mirror. —Edward Price Bell, Major Interviewing: Its Principles and Functions, 1927 Lately I’ve been meditating on how incomplete…

There’s an envelope full of cash on Larry Gopnik’s desk. He didn’t put it there. But he can guess who did. A student in Larry’s physics class has been begging him for a good grade. This money looks like a bribe. Nevertheless, when Larry goes seeking a confession, he’s given a confounding answer…. “Accept the…

Dear Readers of Good Letters: As it is Thanksgiving Day, I thought I might take this opportunity to pop out from behind the curtain and share a few brief words with you, including a bit of news and a word of thanks. We’re now a year and a half into this literary experiment—less a blog…