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Lawrence Weschler

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There's a peculiar kind of writer who refuses to choose between the world's horrors and its delights—who insists on shuttling between political tragedies and cultural comedies as if they were two wings of the same building. Lawrence Weschler is that writer, and for more than four decades he has been producing some of the most distinctive nonfiction in American letters, work that defies easy categorization while remaining utterly readable.

Consider the range: one book might investigate how newly democratic nations reckon with torturers who served previous regimes, while the next explores an artist who creates meticulous drawings of currency that blur the line between representation and reality. Weschler finds the wonder in the terrible and the moral weight in the whimsical. It's a rare gift.

The New Yorker Years

From 1981 to 2002, Weschler served as a staff writer at The New Yorker—a position that once represented the pinnacle of American magazine journalism. The magazine, founded in 1925, has always prided itself on long-form writing that takes its time, that trusts readers to follow complex arguments and narratives across many pages. Weschler thrived in this environment.

His work there earned him two George Polk Awards, which are among the most prestigious honors in American journalism. The first came in 1988 for Cultural Reporting; the second in 1992 for Magazine Reporting. The Polk Awards, administered by Long Island University, have been given annually since 1949 to honor reporters who pursue stories with resourcefulness and courage. That Weschler won in both cultural and general reporting categories speaks to his versatility.

He also received the Lannan Literary Award in 1998. The Lannan Foundation, based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, supports writers whose work is of exceptional quality and cultural significance. Their awards often go to writers who exist somewhat outside the mainstream—experimental novelists, poets who work in neglected traditions, nonfiction writers who push at the boundaries of form.

Political Passions

Born in 1952 in Van Nuys, California—a neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley that would later become synonymous with suburban sprawl and the entertainment industry—Weschler came of age during the Vietnam War and the social upheavals of the 1960s. He graduated from Cowell College at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1974. Cowell was the first residential college at that young campus, founded in 1965 with an emphasis on interdisciplinary humanities education.

His political consciousness would find expression in books that confronted some of the darkest chapters of twentieth-century history. The Passion of Poland, published in 1984, chronicled the Solidarity movement—the independent trade union that emerged in Poland in 1980 and challenged Communist rule. Solidarity, led by an electrician named Lech Wałęsa, represented the first successful challenge to Soviet-style governance from within the Eastern Bloc. Weschler's book captured the hope, the repression that followed when martial law was declared in 1981, and the ongoing struggle for freedom.

A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers appeared in 1990, just as the Cold War was ending and numerous countries were transitioning from authoritarian to democratic governance. The book grapples with a question that would obsess political philosophers and human rights activists for decades: What do you do with the torturers? When a dictatorship falls, its former enforcers don't disappear. They live among their victims. Some hold positions of authority. How does a society move forward?

This question has no easy answer. Some countries, like Argentina, have pursued prosecutions. Others, like South Africa, established truth and reconciliation commissions that prioritized acknowledgment over punishment. Still others, like Spain after Franco, adopted an unofficial policy of collective amnesia. Weschler's book doesn't prescribe solutions so much as illuminate the agonizing moral complexity of each approach.

The Cabinet of Wonder

If Weschler had only written about political oppression, he would be remembered as a serious journalist. But his other body of work—what he calls his "Passions and Wonders" series—reveals a mind equally captivated by beauty, strangeness, and the mischief that artists make.

Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, published in 1995, might be his most beloved book. It concerns the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, founded by David Wilson in 1988. This institution is difficult to describe because its very nature resists description. Is it a museum? A work of conceptual art? An elaborate joke? A sincere tribute to wonder?

The museum's displays include exhibits on obscure scientific theories, forgotten inventors, and natural phenomena that may or may not exist. Some exhibits are factual. Some are fabricated. Some blend truth and fiction so seamlessly that visitors leave uncertain about the nature of knowledge itself. The title references the "cabinets of curiosity" that wealthy Europeans assembled during the Renaissance and Baroque periods—collections of natural specimens, antiquities, and oddities that preceded the modern museum.

The book was shortlisted for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It didn't win either, but such recognition placed Weschler among the most honored nonfiction writers of his generation.

Artists and Seeing

Several of Weschler's most enduring works focus on individual artists. Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, first published in 1982 and significantly expanded in 2008, chronicles the career of Robert Irwin, a Los Angeles artist associated with the Light and Space movement.

The title comes from a statement by the French poet Paul Valéry and captures something essential about Irwin's project. Most of the time, we don't really see things—we recognize them. We see a chair and immediately categorize it: chair, brown, wooden, ordinary. But Irwin has spent his career trying to strip away those categories, to create experiences of pure perception unclouded by naming and knowledge.

His work progressed from paintings to installations to architectural interventions. At the Getty Center in Los Angeles, he designed a central garden that is itself a work of art, playing with light, water, and vegetation to create shifting perceptual experiences throughout the day and across seasons.

Weschler also developed a long relationship with the British artist David Hockney, resulting in David Hockney's Cameraworks in 1984 and True to Life: Twenty-Five Years of Conversations with David Hockney in 2008. Hockney, born in 1937 in Bradford, England, became one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. His work ranges from the sunny swimming pool paintings that made him famous in the 1960s to photographic collages to explorations of how we perceive space and depth.

What unites Irwin and Hockney, despite their very different aesthetics, is an obsession with perception itself—with how we see, why we see the way we do, and whether we might learn to see differently.

Boggs and the Nature of Value

Boggs: A Comedy of Values, published in 1999, tells the story of J.S.G. Boggs, an artist who drew meticulous reproductions of paper currency. Not counterfeits exactly—he only drew one side, he signed them, and he made no attempt to pass them off as real. Instead, he would take his drawings to restaurants and shops and attempt to pay for goods and services with them.

Sometimes merchants accepted. Sometimes they didn't. Either way, Boggs had created a situation that forced everyone involved to think about what money actually is. Is a twenty-dollar bill valuable because of the paper and ink it contains? Obviously not—the materials are worth fractions of a cent. Is it valuable because the government says so? Because we all agree to pretend it is? Because we trust that others will accept it from us in turn?

Boggs's project was essentially philosophical, using art to pose questions about value, representation, and social agreement. Not surprisingly, the United States Secret Service—which is responsible for investigating counterfeiting—took an interest in his activities. The tension between Boggs's artistic intentions and the government's understandable concerns about currency integrity forms much of the book's drama.

Convergences

Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences, published in 2006, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. The title alludes to a Flannery O'Connor story, "Everything That Rises Must Converge," which itself references the thought of the French Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

The book is structured around visual pairings—images that resemble each other despite having no apparent connection. A photograph of a mushroom cloud looks remarkably like a photograph of a tree. A Renaissance painting echoes a contemporary news photograph. What does it mean when unrelated images converge in form? Is there something deep in human perception that draws us to certain shapes and compositions? Or are these coincidences onto which we project meaning?

Weschler doesn't answer these questions so much as pose them with elegance and wit. The book invites readers to become more attentive to visual experience, to notice the patterns that organize our seeing whether we intend them or not.

The Teacher and Institution Builder

Beyond his writing, Weschler has shaped American cultural life through teaching and institution building. He has taught at Princeton University, Columbia University, the University of California at Santa Cruz (his alma mater), Bard College, Vassar College, Sarah Lawrence College, and New York University, where he currently serves as distinguished writer in residence at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

From 2001 to 2013, he directed the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU, a fellowship program that brings together scholars, artists, and writers for conversation and collaboration. The institute, founded in 1976, has hosted some of the most important intellectual figures of the past half-century.

He has also served as artistic director of the Chicago Humanities Festival, which presents public programs exploring the humanities, and has curated events for New York Live Ideas, a collaboration with the dancer and choreographer Bill T. Jones. These positions reflect a commitment to bringing intellectual life out of the academy and into public spaces.

Family and Music

One of Weschler's ongoing projects connects to his family history. He serves as director of the Ernst Toch Society, dedicated to preserving and promoting the music of his grandfather, Ernst Toch.

Toch was a significant figure in twentieth-century classical music. Born in Vienna in 1887, he was largely self-taught as a composer and became associated with the musical avant-garde of the Weimar Republic—the democratic German government that existed between 1919 and 1933. When the Nazis came to power, Toch fled Europe. He eventually settled in Los Angeles, where he composed film scores and taught at UCLA.

Like many Weimar émigrés, Toch's reputation diminished in his adopted country even as his European work was suppressed by the Nazi regime. The society Weschler directs works to revive interest in his grandfather's compositions, which include symphonies, chamber music, and an opera.

Wonder Cabinets, Then and Now

In recent years, Weschler has continued exploring his characteristic themes through new formats. From 2013 to 2014, he wrote a monthly column called "Pillow of Air" for The Believer, a literary magazine known for its long essays and eccentric visual design. The column was subtitled "Ambles through the worlds of the visual."

In October 2021, he launched a newsletter on Substack called Wondercabinet, which he describes as a "Fortnightly Compendium of the Miscellaneous Diverse." The title returns to the cabinet of curiosity motif that animated his book on the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Produced in collaboration with the editor and cartoonist David Stanford, the newsletter continues Weschler's lifelong project of finding wonder in unexpected places and helping readers see the world with fresh eyes.

The move to Substack is telling. The platform, founded in 2017, allows writers to publish directly to subscribers, bypassing traditional magazine and newspaper gatekeepers. For a writer like Weschler, who spent decades at The New Yorker when it was the unquestioned pinnacle of American magazine journalism, the shift represents an adaptation to a transformed media landscape. But the sensibility remains consistent: curiosity, precision, and an abiding faith that paying close attention to anything—political prisoners or paper currency, light artists or Los Angeles museums—will yield insights worth sharing.

A Certain Kind of Attention

What finally distinguishes Weschler's work is not his subjects, which range widely, but his attention. He looks closely. He listens carefully. He returns to artists and ideas over decades, following their development as a biographer might follow a life.

His 2019 book And How Are You, Dr. Sacks? exemplifies this approach. The neurologist Oliver Sacks, who died in 2015, became famous for his case studies of patients with unusual neurological conditions—the man who mistook his wife for a hat, the colorblind painter, the surgeon with Tourette syndrome. Weschler's biographical memoir draws on a friendship that spanned decades to create an intimate portrait of a singular mind.

Throughout his career, Weschler has demonstrated that creative nonfiction—writing that brings literary craft to factual subjects—can illuminate both the world's darkness and its wonder. The torturer and the artist, the political prisoner and the museum curator, the forged currency and the genuine insight: all fall within his purview. He reminds us that the opposite of wonder is not seriousness but rather the failure to look closely enough at what is actually there.