Wesley Jenkins

Wesley Jenkins is an undergraduate at Washington University in St. Louis studying political science and American culture. He has published work previously in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Cincinnati Reds blog Redleg Nation. He is a Nemerov writing scholar at WUSTL, and a senior editor for the campus newspaper Student Life. Besides writing, he loves pancakes, baseball, and flannel, not always in that order.

Posts by Wesley Jenkins

Do Not Skip the Heavy Metal to Get to the Death

At the end of Chuck Klosterman X: A Highly Specific, Defiantly Incomplete History of the Early 21st Century (2017, Blue Rider Press), Klosterman makes the curious curatorial decision to group seven essays about heavy metal before concluding with four essays about death. I say this is curious because the essays about heavy metal are Klosterman at his […]

Sourcing and Where to Find It

The New York Times has a problem. Well actually, The New York Times has a litany of problems—cries of “fake news,” the so-proclaimed death of journalism, etc.—but all of those are external problems. The New York Times has another problem, an internal problem, a let’s-shoot-ourselves-in-the-foot-and-call-it-journalism problem. That problem is nuanced sourcing, and The New York Times has […]

The Forced Pivot

As a largely simple-minded society, we are fascinated with the idea of an individual pivot. Someone forsaking their chosen path to venture unknown down a possibly related, possibly not other path baffles us. Why did Michael Jordan pivot from basketball to baseball? Why did Arnold Schwarzenegger pivot from acting to politics? The voluntary pivot defies […]