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…

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…