You’ll hear writers claim to write in order to discover something. Or just to emote. You don’t hear as much about — not with fiction, at least, and not outside scare quotes — storytelling with an agenda, with something to say. But some things need to be said — for example, the preferential algorithm life is dumb — and said in a way that doesn’t just instruct but fires the imagination.

Books end, of course, and most fiction stories, too. But real-life stories don’t. For a writer — particularly the memoirist — this poses questions about where and how a literary project begins and ends.

To talk about food — or to write about it — is to discuss nearly every part of our culture. Geography. History. Economics and politics, too. So when you talk to the author of one of the most acclaimed food histories in recent memory, yeah, you talk about nearly everything.

In the fog of his dad’s suicide, my friend Craig tried to get lost in G.K. Chesterton’s nightmare, The Man Who Was Thursday. Instead, he found his way back to reality.

On TV, only nerds worry about vocabulary and definitions. To fix the crises of truth and trust around us — which is to say, to learn to talk to one another — we all need to become word nerds.

The fun of reading, at least part of it, is the way one book you read plays in your head with other books you’ve read. Just try A Children’s Bible by Lydia Millet. (And then listen to me talk to her about it.)

You know “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” I did, too. What I didn’t know was the man — who happens to share with me a hometown — behind the Black national anthem.

Up until now, the writing of James K.A. Smith has mirrored his teaching. Ideas translated for this audience or that. But with On the Road with Saint Augustine, he’s doing something different.

No writer writes enough. That’s why these two poets initiated an aggressive, substantial project to write an original poem every day.

Introducing Writers and Writings podcast, a show about books, authors, and a little bit of everything else.