Emmett Rensin

Emmett Rensin is an essayist and contributing editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Republic, the Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. He currently lives in Iowa City.

Articles

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?...
Emmett RensinJun 18, 2017
- Politics and Economics
Punditry and Commitment
Emmett Rensin on the imaginative poverty of today's political punditry....
Emmett RensinJan 30, 2017
- Politics and Economics
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.”...
Emmett RensinJan 18, 2017
- Politics and Economics
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....
Emmett RensinOct 22, 2016
- Memoir
Exploitation: The Sixth Stage of Grief
Emmett Rensin on Andrew Dominik's portrait of Nick Cave in "One More Time with Feeling."...
Emmett RensinSep 30, 2016
- Film
- Music
Controlling the Narrative: Harper Lee and the Stakes of Scandal
Considering the doubt that has attended the release of Harper Lee's "Go Set a Watchman," we might pause to reflect on just what is being doubted....
Emmett RensinAug 14, 2015
- Fiction
Notes on a Native Daughter: Joan Didion at 80
Because Tom Wolfe and because James Baldwin and Hunter S. Thompson and Michael Herr, but because Didion most of all, an American essay today without the sudden and revelatory personal aside is hardly an American essay at all....
Emmett RensinDec 17, 2014
- Fiction
- Memoir
After the Decision: Ferguson and the Cycle of Trauma
TO SUSTAIN A FIRE, you need not only fuel and kindling but also some dutiful custodian to routinely prod and fiddle with the pieces. Extinguishing it requires no less added effort. The useless smoldering of an unattended flame, impotent as it ...
Emmett RensinNov 26, 2014
After the Train Leaves Town: A Report from Ferguson
What happens to a town racked by racial violence when the media and the public move on?...
Emmett RensinSep 9, 2014
A Liturgy of Absolution
Rick Perlstein’s "The Invisible Bridge"...
Emmett RensinAug 5, 2014
- Politics and Economics
On the Kinds of Love We Fall Into: Polyamory in Theory and Practice
The lesson of the TV shows and movies, of the myths and magazines, is that fidelity isn’t only a part of love — in some sense, it is love, the only real kind, anyway....
Emmett RensinFeb 14, 2014
Philip Seymour Hoffman: The End of Quitting
On the old story that we tell whenever someone dies this way....
Emmett RensinFeb 8, 2014