Recently I interviewed Gerald Stern, who wrote a book about the 1972 Buffalo Creek (West Virginia) mining disaster that has become assigned reading in many if not most law schools. The book has made several major contributions to the prosecution of larger owning entities, chief among them the principle and tactic of piercing the corporate veil. Jerry as an attorney was always a storyteller, and so writing a book seemed a natural follow-up to a case such as Buffalo Creek, where he prosecuted on behalf of hundreds of miners. His new book is Scotia Widows, about another mining case. The interview and discussion were webcast live on KWH-TV and are now available as a video recording. Go here to view the recording, and here for more about Stern and the program at the Writers House.
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
