Writings and rehearsals by Nathan Schneider

Author: Nathan

  • Journalism as an Encounter

    People usually don’t like what’s written about them. If you’ve ever been quoted in an article somewhere, you know that journalists mess up and mangle what you say beyond recognition. One wonders why people even bother talking to them (us) at all. Recently on The American Prospect’s website, Courtney E. Martin had a really thought-provoking…

  • Agee on the Artist At War

    Three-quarters of the way through his masterpiece Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee takes a pause in his account of a summer spent living among Depression-era, cotton-picking tenant farmers for an “Intermission,” subtitled “Conversation in the Lobby.” The overall thrust of this portion, phrased as a furious response to questions posed to writers…

  • The Quaker Birds of Costa Rica

    It began with the advice of a federal judge in 1949. If you’re not going to follow United States law and register for the draft, he told the group of Alabaman Quaker farmers before him, “get out of this country and stay out.” So they did. In 1951, along with several dozen family members and…

  • Rules of Engagement

    What is the architecture of imagination that makes the horror of war seem possible, sensible, and coherent? This week at Religion Dispatches, I review a new book that takes important steps toward an answer: Antoine Bousquet’s The Scientific Way of Warfare: Order and Chaos on the Battlefields of Modernity. Soldiers stake their lives on a…

  • Radio Silence

    “Hemingway, remarks are not literature.” —Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas Going off into the wilderness for some unknown days—unknown in length, unknown in content, unknown in consequence—I’m taking the opportunity to wrest myself from the vicious habits of blogging, into the naked, unpublishable chaos of experience, quiet as long as need be…

  • Events Today in Costa Rica

    My present travels in Costa Rica with the photographer Lucas Foglia, through a sequence of chance connections and exaggerated truths, landed us the opportunity to be in the press section at today’s meeting between (Nobel laureate) President Oscar Arias of Costa Rica and the two contenders for the presidency of neighboring Honduras. We understand our…

  • Non-zero-sum God

    Recently I had the pleasure to talk with journalist and bloggingheads.tv founder Robert Wright about his new book, The Evolution of God. Hear our conversation today at Killing the Buddha, in addition to a short essay of mine on the subject: It’s easy to focus, as many reviews have, on Wright’s theology of nonexistent god…

  • Curious, Obscene, Terrifying, and Unfathomably Mysterious

    I am going off to write about people. An ordinary proposition, it would seem, particularly for a person who makes a living writing for people and, typically, about people or the things they think about and create. For the next month, I’ll be joining my friend Lucas Foglia in Costa Rica to spend time with…

  • Transient Vapors

    When I got home, when I got the camera, when I jumped out onto the fire escape to take a picture, it looked like this. This is all that was left. But only minutes before, as I rode along Wythe Avenue from Williamsburg to Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, and then most of all just after turning…

  • Are Atheists Alright?

    Today on The Guardian’s Comment Is Free > Belief section, I’ve got a little essay reprising the story I did in April for The Boston Globe on the new science of the non-religious. There’s already a pretty lively comment thread. Take a look: Atheists have an image problem. According to a study led by University…