Jenna Schnuer

Popular Science: Will supply chain issues affect the books you want? Depends on what you’re reading.

The supply chain issues that came for toilet paper early on in the Covid-19 pandemic are slamming another beloved paper product: printed books—and just in time for the holiday shopping season. The culprits: paper shortages, hiring challenges, and transportation issues.

As more titles sink into the supply chain tar, the problems could get stickier. What do you do with a Halloween book that won’t be ready for store shelves until, as The Washington Post reports, November 2? A haunting problem. And when the cargo ships floating offshore finally get to dock, how will they move the books out? The trucking industry remains an understaffed mess.  

Read the piece.

American Way: Light It UpDecember 2013

Let’s get beyond “storytelling” as a buzzword. Marketers toss it around with abandon these days. Fine. Yawn. Whatever. This story isn’t about that. It’s about the essence of storytelling. The person-to-person connections that well-told stories build. The things that happen in your brain when you’re on either side of a storytelling.

“Stories are our ultimate democracy, in the sense that everyone has them. Everyone has a deep need to tell them and to listen to them. They define us. They go across borders, boundaries, gender and their age — no matter what it happens to be,” says Colum McCann, author of novels including TransAtlantic and Let the Great World Spin. 

Read the full story on the American Way site. 

National Geographic Books: Four Seasons of Travel

National Geographic's big travel book for 2013 gives readers a season by season breakout of 400 fascinating travel experiences around the world. I contributed pieces about bear viewing in Alaska (with a focus on Anan Creek in Southeast Alaska), watching the Iditarod in downtown Anchorage, listening in on the Tin Pan South Songwriters Conference in Nashville, taking on NYC during the winter holiday season, and more.

One+: The InterdisciplinarianMarch 2012

It’s practically a requirement to raise an eyebrow at a person who calls herself an innovator. Innovator. It’s such a grand word. Isn’t that something we get to brand a person, not something she gets to call herself? Yet, every once in a while, somebody gets a pass. Or more than a pass. Every once in a while you come across a person who really should have “innovator” bedazzled on all of her shirts and printed on her license plates.

Take, for instance, Cathy Davidson. After a few minutes of eyeballs a-jumping through her bio—co-founder of the 7,000-member Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC), former Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke from 1998-2006, current English professor at Duke; after scrolling through the list of books she’s written or edited, which cover territory from understanding Japanese culture to the rise of the American novel to brain science; after finding out about her role in the creation of programs at Duke, including the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience and the program in Information Science + Information Studies (ISIS); and, even more so, after hearing the sheer excitement in her voice when she discusses the Internet, education, her newfound love of young adult fiction and her ability to tie ideas together and make them accessible—well, innovator sounds downright humble.

Read the profile.

American Way: Know ThisMay 1, 2011

Break out of your reading rut with five books that will teach you things you didn’t think you needed to know about, but you’ll be grateful that you do. 

Read the piece.

American Way: Fun with HistoryApril 1, 2011

Sarah Vowell has a distinctive take on what makes for an entertaining read. From the New England Puritans to the spots where U.S. presidents were assassinated, Vowell has spun the good, the bad and the odd of American history into enlightening and hilarious literary gold. Now, in Unfamiliar Fishes (Riverhead Books, $26), the author dishes on the United States' annexation of Hawaii in 1898.

Read the piece.

American Way: Pony ExpressJanuary 1, 2011

Ten years after author Stanley Gordon West self-published his novel Blind Your Ponies, the book gets called up to the big show.

Nearly 30 years ago, Stanley Gordon West was living and working as a camp director in southwestern Montana, an area that had become a hotbed for Hollywood scribes and others of that ilk. Inspired by the creative energy, he decided to try writing a book. “I jumped in, got out an old manual typewriter and started pounding out a novel,” he says.

 

One+: Ideas ManJanuary 2011

Patience and Fortitude, the pink Tennessee marble lions that laze about outside the main branch of the New York Public Library, were not impressed. Behind them, the library's façade glowed purple with lights that signaled nifty event going on inside. The clipboard-carrying women checking attendees in were all wearing fashion-forward high heels. There were lots of air kisses.

"This isn't for the innovation panel, is it?" I asked one of the clipboardistas.

Read the profile of author Steven Berlin Johnson.

National Geographic Traveler's Intelligent Travel Blog: The Atlas of Remote IslandsOctober 6, 2010

The first five times (or so) that I paged through the Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot On and Never Will, I fell deeply in love with the book. But I also didn't see it for what it really is. The problem wasn't that of the early stages of romance between people: I wasn't blinded to the book's faults but, instead, I underestimated the extent of its charms. Though the elegantly-lettered first words of the preface caught my eye, "Paradise is an island. So is hell," I skipped over the text and went straight to the maps.

Read the piece.

One+: Let's TalkSeptember 2010

Conversational crickets be gone. Author Daniel Menaker's got chatter on the brain. In A Good Talk: The Story and Skill of Conversation, Menaker writes that conversation—especially of the aimless, non-agenda'd variety—can help people find common ground. And that can be a pretty darn helpful tool for getting people to move past their differences and get the most out of a meeting.

"In any really good conversation, what will come out is an honest—even if it's indirect—confession of uncertainty of some kind," he says. "To make a real contact with someone, you need to admit your vulnerabilities or your concerns."

Read the piece in One+.