By Chuck Haga The students file in and suddenly some remember the day’s assignment: Bring in a favorite song lyric, something with magic in the way words work together. Out come the phones and they search, trying to remember … Read more
Who we are when we encounter a story can have a lot to do with how we engage with that story and what meaning we take from it. Our age, personal experience, cultural context, social morays, and even the … Read more
Some book purists may cringe at this, but one test of a great book, to me, is how many pages are dogeared by the time I finish. Those are the ones I tuck on a shelf, reluctant to take … Read more
It was while listening to a Tamil story on Spotify that the thought occurred to me: Listening to stories in vernacular Indian languages had changed my writing. Some of the influence came from the cadences of speech. Some came … Read more
“The White Lotus” scorches like burning sand on bare feet. A satire about wealthy white tourists in Hawaii and a mysterious death that springs from their visit, the HBO series poses spiky challenges to viewers and critics grappling with … Read more
Some years ago, I spent three weeks at a mountain-climbing base camp in the interior of Antarctica. The reporting trip was supposed to be a two-day in-and-out, but a dispute over airplane fuel kept a motley crew of us … Read more