Emmett Rensin is an essayist and academic. He is the author of The Complications: On Going Insane in America (HarperOne, 2024), an essay collection about living with a severe mental illness, and the historical, cultural, and discursive madness around madness itself.
Emmett Rensin
Articles
A Better World Is Not Possible
Did the Weather Underground have a point?
The Hunger of Joseph
Recorded starvations throughout history.
An Apocalypse for Every Epoch
Emmett Rensin writes on eco-grief, the climate dirge, and one Armenian monk in a new hybrid fiction-cum-essay from LARB Quarterly no. 47, “Security.”
The Blathering Superego at the End of History
Emmett Rensin offers a psychoanalysis of managerial liberalism as superego and asks: What happens when the id of liberalism can't be controlled?
Punditry and Commitment
Emmett Rensin on the imaginative poverty of today's political punditry.
Apology: On Jonathan Chait’s Obama
Emmett Rensin reviews Jonathan Chait’s “Audacity: How Barack Obama Defied His Critics and Created a Legacy That Will Prevail.”
The Memoir’s Hostage: On Sulome Anderson’s “The Hostage’s Daughter”
Emmett Rensin wrestles with the genre of “The Hostage’s Daughter” by Sulome Anderson.
Exploitation: The Sixth Stage of Grief
Emmett Rensin on Andrew Dominik's portrait of Nick Cave in "One More Time with Feeling."
