"Mediocre writers borrow. Great writers steal." exhorts T.S. Elliot. This course connects the reading and writing processes so that they are reciprocal and reinforcing. Every week we will alternate between reading a mosaic of U.S. American short fiction and analyzing the ways in which these narratives make their point, and practical writing exercises in order to build linguistic, literary and cultural skills. During the final month, you will workshop your own narratives, fiction or non-fiction, allowing you to give and receive feedback on the process and products of your practice.

A lively debate roars in both the popular and scientific press - will we run out of food? This debate seems to beg several crucial questions: what food, for whom, produced how and where, at what cost to the world's non-human biota (among others)? We might try to answer these questions politically, or ethically, or ecologically - in this class I propose to explore the implications of our food choices and production methods as quantitatively as possible using mathematical models. Many, many studies have produced models of this kind, so we have a good set of starting points.