Around 3 a.m. on a Saturday this May, I took the wheel from my friend Jordan and started driving across the Iowa plains. The sky above us was black and potent, and my windshield dappled with mist. Hidden clouds snuffed… Continue Reading
The archive is a ziggurat, always growing upwards, always closer to heaven. On top will sit the glassy-eyed medium through which the totality speaks, liberated from personality. It is erected everywhere, and every place becomes no place beneath its shadow…. Continue Reading
Who is François Mauriac? Google knows: French novelist of the last century’s first half, long-beaked Nobel laureate in a taupe bowler hat. So does Wikipedia, one click away: leftist firebrand, Catholic penitent, biographer
I am a teacher. For the past two years, I taught 11th-grade English in the Mississippi Delta, in Helena, Arkansas. What I found in the Delta was bleak yet gorgeous, largely significant yet unknown.Regardless of the art, of the music,… Continue Reading
There’s a remarkable video in which a couple of white guys, Belgians, I think, are hanging out in the rainforest waiting to make contact with a group of Papua New Guinea tribesmen. This is sometime in the late seventies. The… Continue Reading
The first time I ever heard of Terrence Malick was in a recorded lecture I downloaded off the Internet from the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus. It was 2007, but I guess the lecture was from a few years prior, right after
For a generation that prides itself on self-awareness and being hip to the complexity of cultural referents, we allow blind spots for the most intimate topics. Despite the ubiquitous personal technology, who has
I woke up the other morning with a girl’s face clouding my vision. Thoughts of her saturated my first waking moments. With every bite of cereal, her presence made itself known to my still hazy consciousness. She is
Teach for America gets criticized sometimes for its inability to create “true” teachers. Its critics claim that TFA churns out graduates interested solely in adorning their experience with a small helping of “reality” before heading to the “real world” of… Continue Reading
There’s a photograph of me sitting in the middle of a field, squinting up at the open sky, an expression of patient interest on my face. I’m about 3 years old. When I look at that photograph now, I like… Continue Reading
Let’s talk. When we say that The Bad Version is all about conversation, you might ask: What does that actually mean? Well, first and foremost, we’re talking about an open-minded approach to critical and creative writing that begins a discussion,… Continue Reading
Nearly everything written about David Foster Wallace makes me not want to read him. I don’t know if this is a common thing, though I certainly have plenty of friends who’ve been turned off of the guy.Perhapsit’s
Reading, and expecting to read, The Pale King was stressful. In the weeks leading up to its publication this past spring, I saw the book gather enormous momentum, revving the Internet into a dizzying echo chamber of