The world is consumed by violent fights and hostile disagreements. Sarah Schulman sees a way out of them.

The refugee and author survived, stateless, for seven years. What’s next?

Solitude, slow travel, and change

A childhood poster catalyzes complex doubts about a marriage.

What could the political effects be of a media that actually served working-class Americans?

When a writer’s husband became violent, her career threatened to vanish along with her safety.

On the old-man project.

Where will predictive text take us?

In his old life, Matthew Cox told stories to scam his way into millions of dollars. Now he’s trying to make it by selling tales that are true.

The biographer before the publication of “The Passage of Power.”

A father's death, the nature of stories.

Past and present intermingle in various meetings and revelations with an old friend.

The author faces this question as she emerges from alcoholism.

A writer prepares for the possibility of meeting a lost lover.

A movie star's press junket notes and observations.

A profile of the writer.

Following John McPhee to Florida.

“You revise your reader up, in your imagination, with every pass. You keep saying to yourself: ‘No, she’s smarter than that. Don’t dishonour her with that lazy prose or that easy notion.’ And in revising your reader up, you revise yourself up too.”

A conversation with (and memories of) an unscrupulous bar owner.

A terminally ill journalist deals with a variety of setbacks.

The real-time intersection of race, crime, reality, and entertainment.

A profile of the writer.

On the intersection of writing and daily life.

"There are the four AM’s where you let friends take you out against your better judgment and you find yourself grinding against the bodies of people you don’t know, and something you took is traveling like liquid fire through your veins, through the bird’s nest of neurons in your brain. There’s the four AM where you just met this girl and don’t want to stop talking, where even after you hang up you can’t get to sleep, everything is alive and awake, the universe is calling, the radio is playing the perfect song, you get your jacket and walk the streets and every other night walker knows you, knows that everything is connected to the novel you’re writing, and all of these people, all the cops, homeless people, partiers, drunks, loners, lovers, all of them are offering themselves to you, willing you to tell their story. There is joy in these late hours."

On fictional versions of a certain kind of man.

"I’ve known a few of these guys in my lifetime, all variations on the cad theme. There was Clifford, a tennis-playing Long Island boy who also sailed and all that junk. There was Daniel, straight from L.A., who had rigid opinions about how a woman should look, as did Ian, a barrel-chested charmer who strippers genuinely liked."

A tale of identity in LA's television scene.

"Because he’s written television for as long as Shelly has known him, Jack drags her along on these nights, to watch staged readings of other writers’ scripts in the attic above the bar—a cramped, airless room they call the “Actor’s Den.” The television Jack makes rarely finds its way into peoples’ homes, but he makes it, one way or the other—even if he only guides it along its path to destruction like a doomsday chauffeur. The bar is wood paneled and velvety like the inside of a jewelry box. The owner drinks ancient scotch out of a miniature crystal glass and pulls constantly at his handlebar mustache, a collector of old timey things. When they arrive, he tells Jack about the two screenplays he’s writing: one comedy, one horror."