Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

When the Looking Changes

Critic and author Teju Cole thinks about photography and politics

FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: Teju Cole is the photography critic at The New York Times Magazine and the author of Blind Spot, a collection of photographs accompanied by brief pieces of writing. 

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Deconstructing a Dog

Bronwen Dickey talks with Chapter 16 about Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon

FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: Whether you’re the adoring owner of a pittie or a person who thinks pit-bull bans make perfect sense, you are likely to find some of your assumptions overturned by Bronwen Dickey’s Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon. Dickey sifts through a great deal of history, science, and popular culture to uncover the truth about the dogs and the source of our extreme ideas about them. 

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The Worthless Servant

Novelist Ann Patchett takes a ride with Charlie Strobel, Nashville advocate for the homeless

FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: Nashville’s Room in the Inn serves individuals experiencing homelessness by providing a winter shelter program, recuperative care, education and workforce development, and solutions for permanent housing. In the summer of 2012, novelist Ann Patchett made the rounds with Room in the Inn’s founder, Father Charles Strobel, and wrote an essay about the experience, which appears in Not Less Than Everything: Catholic Writers on Heroes of Conscience, From Joan of Arc to Oscar Romero, edited by Catherine Wolff.

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The Crafts of Freedom

Martin Luther King Jr.’s Mountaintop speech was more than brilliant rhetorical art; it was also the culmination of a lifetime spent in intense and extensive reading

April 2, 2015 We rightly associate Martin Luther King Jr.’s oratorical eloquence with his vocation as a Baptist minister, following his father and grandfather before him. But King also emerged from the rhetorical tradition of the liberal arts, transforming the sources with which he engaged throughout his too-brief life.

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Happiness Is a Sad Song

Dr. Ralph Stanley discusses his 63 years in music

From the Chapter 16 archive: When he was a child, he was often called “the boy with the hundred year old voice.” In his book Man of Constant Sorrow, Stanley recounts a career spanning six decades and millions of miles.

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Engaging Ontogeny—and Animal Sex

Michael Sims discusses biological and literary creativity

From the Chapter 16 archive: Where do babies come from? It may be a child’s question, but the answer is far from simple, especially if we consider the baby-making processes of the whole animal kingdom, as Michael Sims does in his companion to the National Geographic Channel’s television special of the same name, In the Womb: Animals. It features ultrasound images of fetal animals that are so detailed and vivid it’s almost hard to believe they aren’t simulations.

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