Making Every Word Count:
Writing in a World of Diminishing Attention Spans
D.T. Max and Kristen Iversen In a world awash in bad information, clueless opining, and ugly AI-inflected writing, literary journalism provides a unique salvation—not just through accurate facts and nuanced thinking but also via aesthetically attuned language. In a wide-ranging conversation, two of its foremost practitioners discuss what literary journalism is, what it does, and why, as never before, we can’t live without it. Presented in partnership with the Department of English, Department of Journalism, CCM's Division of Composition, Musicology and Theory, and College of Arts & Sciences. D. T. Max is a staff writer for The New Yorker and author of The Family That Couldn’t Sleep: Unravelling a Venetian Medical Mystery, the bestselling biography Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace, and Finale: Late Conversations with Stephen Sondheim. A Guggenheim Fellow, he has taught journalism at Princeton University. His writing spans literature, art, science, crime, and contemporary culture. Kristen Iversen is an award-winning author and professor at UC. A 2026 Guggenheim Fellow, she has received a Fulbright Fellowship, NEH Public Scholar Award, Leon Levy/Sloan Fellowship, and the Tesla Spirit Award. Her books include Full Body Burden : Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats, Molly Brown : Unraveling the Myth, and Shadow Boxing. Her literary biography, The Poet of Science: Nikola Tesla in the Gilded Age, is forthcoming from Crown. Our 2026–27 Center theme Counter foregrounds counterintuitive insights from the humanities and social sciences to ask: Given what the humanities and social sciences are up against, what kinds of accounting does the current moment demand? How can we ensure our knowledge and practices count? |