Curio Blog / Nov 22, 2017

Is it too late to save the world?

Jonathan Franzen asks whether writing can make a difference in the age of Trump and climate change.

“If an essay is something essayed — something hazarded, not definitive, not authoritative; something ventured on the basis of the author’s personal experience and subjectivity — we might seem to be living in an essayistic golden age. Which party you went to on Friday night, how you were treated by a flight attendant, what your take on the political outrage of the day is: the presumption of social media is that even the tiniest subjective micronarrative is worthy not only of private notation, as in a diary, but of sharing with other people. The US president now operates on this presumption…”

We’re pleased to have been able to produce the acclaimed US author’s remarkable new essay for the Guardian in audio. You can listen to it in full here: http://bit.ly/curio-franzen