The Long Walk Home

I met Davin Malasarn in 2018 when we were both enrolled in the Bennington Writing Seminars MFA program. I was there at his graduation reading, when he shared an excerpt from a novel-in-progress about a Thai-American boy named Ben who develops a mysterious health condition. Today, that novel, The Outer Country , exists as an object in the world—one you can buy at most bookstores and that the writer...

Back in February, I attended a talk at New York Encounter, an annual cultural event in the heart of NYC. The talk was about the Catholic view on immigration law in the United States , and it featured Mario Russell, the executive director of the Center for Migration Studies, who happens to be a very kind and brilliant man. In the talk, Mario described how the failures of the American immigration sy...

Today I’m bringing you a conversation I’ve been trying to have for some time. My friend Billy Peard lives in South Tucson, Arizona, where his law practice serves some of the most vulnerable members of our society. When I met him back in 2014, his main legal focus was on the rights of workers — farm workers, especially — and the rights of immigrants. When it comes to immigration law, Billy is the m...

Happy new year. One highlight from 2025 was getting to interview Peter Ames Carlin about his new book, Tonight in Jungleland , which details the making of Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run . An edited transcript of that interview was published on my friend Kevin Koczwara’s substack, A Fan’s Notes . I love his substack, and I think you should subscribe to it. He interviews a lot of authors and every...

Sister Chris Clark of Holyoke, Massachusetts, has been a friend for years. When it comes to religious matters, religious questions, or anything spiritual, she’s one of my absolute favorite thinkers. She’s also one of my favorite human beings. Chris made her vows as a member of the Daughters of the Heart of Mary in February 2011. We met when I was just a twenty-two-year-old kid, and I had questions...

Right now, in my hometown of Holyoke, Massachusetts, there is a debate underway about the meaning of America. Or at least that’s how my friend Mimi Panitch, currently running for a seat on the Holyoke City Council, understands this moment. At issue is an order proposed by Kevin Jourdain and Linda Vacon, two long-serving members of the council, that would officially declare Holyoke not to be a sanc...

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Chief William Feehan was seventy-one years old. He was a deputy commissioner of the FDNY. And he spent the last moments of his life the way he had spent the majority of his life up to that point: trying to keep people safe. Feehan’s story serves as the centerpiece of Brian McDonald’s latest book, Five Floors Up: The Heroic Family Story of Four Generations in t...

I’m excited share the inaugural episode, featuring a conversation with an old friend, Dave Marsh. When, in January of this year, Dave Marsh left his post as chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM)—a position he held in the Biden administration—he wrote the following message on his LinkedIn: “Federal workers serve their country tirelessly without regard for their personal politic...