“A whole civilization will die tonight.” This upsetting nugget was delivered to me during a bit of early-morning social media scrolling, and it may have appeared in your feed, too. It wasn’t the first thing I saw that day—but it was right after making my kid breakfast. I wince whenever I check my phone now. I’ve come to expect something terrible. Simultaneously, I can’t stop checking the news or doomscrolling on social media.
I obsessively checked the news during the early weeks of the United States’ imposed conflict with Iran and, after days of changing rationales (regime change! eliminating Iran’s nuclear fuel! destroying its air force!), I saw the news of a supposed ceasefire just as my eighteen-month-old dozed off next to me on his bed. I sighed and took my first unencumbered breath of the day. When everything happens so quickly, you have exactly enough time to catastrophize one thing and imagine the worst possible consequences before something else falls in your lap. It wears down your capacity to resist, which is the point, I think, of the current administration’s approach to governance. Perversely, even your support network winds up accidentally turning against you. Friends and colleagues texting you about the latest outrageous news might come from a place of support, but it adds to the unrelenting tide of negativity. It’s easy, in these circumstances, for a writer to just shut down. But what if nonfiction writing is the cure to the ongoing political and societal assault on truth?
By now, we all know the very obvious ways in which truth is being buried. The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) was gutted in 2025, and the most recently suggested budget from the White House has the NEH slated for elimination in 2027; major media outlets have been transformed into apologetic mouthpieces that sanitize the president’s statements, making it easy to miss exactly how incoherent they are; higher education is under siege; millions of Americans now live in news deserts; generative AI swallows our work and regurgitates it without understanding; internet users rely on Google AI summaries and never learn where the information comes from. Increasingly, it’s coming from Facebook posts, not reliable and fact-checked sources. And if you want to write about any of the current events? Well, freelance rates are peanuts.
As nonfiction writers experiencing this moment of global polycrisis, we must ground ourselves in our process to overcome the very real challenges to finding meaning in our work.
The process of writing is a familiar ritual, and it’s comforting to ground oneself in the familiar. For me, that typically involves sitting somewhere quiet, usually with a cup of coffee. For better and for worse, my process involves pulling together a lot of academic sources, which also means losing myself in books and articles as I write. That’s an effective distraction all on its own, and it helps to go back to the printed word again and again. Even an e-book gets me away from the sea of opened tabs that will bring chaos right back into my life.
Academic training taught me to never make a point without evidence to back it up: archival sources, articles, monographs, interviews—whatever I can get my hands on that I still know to be reliable and verifiable. Deep research can be part of the cure. There is something to be said for looking for ideas outside of our immediate circle to understand and help assuage the current political chaos. I’m sitting on a draft right now, for example, about the Federal Writers Project (FWP) from the New Deal era. I aim to explain what programs like the FWP were supposed to accomplish and why the FWP could be a model for our current moment. I started with the scholars I was familiar with. That got me to top-down responses from Roosevelt and people in his cabinet, but they tended to be very practical justifications. In the words of Harry Hopkins describing the plight of writers, “Hell, they’ve got to eat just like other people.” Those books led me toward more specific histories like Scott Borchert’s Republic of Detours, which had a lot of the color that I was looking for: anecdotes about John Cheever or Zora Neale Hurston, or material from the guides themselves.
The act of writing means not having to passively accept the narrative being fed to us from an algorithm.
That still wasn’t quite as deep as I wanted to go, and reviewing those bibliographies led me to work in folklore (a discipline I’ve always been fascinated by, but as a historian rarely interacted with). The people who ran the FWP saw themselves as folklorists, and they saw writing guidebooks and capturing parts of America’s history as an antidote to rising fascism in Europe. From their perspective, creating a more inclusive history of the United States showed that diversity was a strength, not a weakness. That was it—that was the insight I needed for my draft, plus a bit of comfort that the work of documenting through writing and sharing is, in its own way, resistance. It’s the opposite of what the current administration and the broader misinformation ecosystem want to push on us. Instead of making things up or using AI to stretch, torture, and occasionally hallucinate evidence, nonfiction writers sit with evidence, history, and truth and we continue to engage in observable reality. To do so is an act of defiance. It can help us think or become motivated to resist, or maybe it simply wards off despair. I live in reality, of course; my words by themselves aren’t going to start a revolution or force the administration to switch gears. For me, sitting with the truth is enough of a resistance to keep me moving forward.
Even more than the act of gathering information, it’s the act of argumentation that’s helping to stitch me back up every day. To find and make a thesis, to ensure that it makes sense weighed against all of the evidence that I can amass, I have to move slowly. I have to think. Even on a tight deadline, I have more than a few minutes to turn ideas over in my head. At the end of the process, there’s an editor who will sit with me and work through what I’ve written to make sure that it makes sense, that I haven’t gone too deeply into one thing or left something else unsaid. That, too, is an incredible act of community-building, because so much of our descent into authoritarianism comes from efforts to atomize us and isolate us from each other. Misinformation and propaganda have the ultimate goal of siloing each of us, but coming together in a writer-editor relationship is the opposite of that. We encourage each other, we develop ideas together, and we smash the loneliness.
The same can be said of building a relationship with readers. For a long time, the point of writing, for me, was to be read, hoping that maybe a reader’s first exposure to an idea or topic would come from what I’d written, or that my writing would make a confusing thing clearer. Publishing and posting and resharing puts my work in conversation with others who are perhaps thinking and writing similarly—or not. When a piece goes live and people begin interacting with it, the conversation cuts through some of the sense of isolation created by the chaos. Frequently, the seeds of the next piece are sown in a conversation that unfolds in the comments or by private messaging. It’s not just me slinging whatever I want into the void and hoping somebody reads it—we get to build ideas with one another.
Everybody’s talking about a literacy crisis. It seems that people no longer read—and ominously, with the decline in literacy comes the suggestion that our brains’ ability to parse the written word can decay, taking with it our ability to organize thoughts. Literary scholar Matt Seybold, drawing on Maryann Wolf’s Reader, Come Home, and the work of other scholars of literary citizenship, recently argued in “Neuroplasticity as a Praxis” that reading is essential to developing the neurological pathways that make collective governance and democracy possible. Those pathways have to be maintained. As Seybold notes, there are authoritarian elements in society that actively oppose literacy. When we write nonfiction, we’re part of a broader defense against authoritarianism. It’s not just the facts, though those matter too: the processing of what we write matters.
I’ll say it plainly: Writing helps the writer’s brain and is just as important as reading. The benefits have been well-studied. Writing has been used in therapeutic processes to confront trauma; one way to deal with difficult emotions is to write them down first. Writing strengthens our memory, which is doubly important not only as we age but at a time when deception is becoming a baked-in feature of public life. Writing anchors us and gives us agency, even if it’s only to make sense out of the world around us. The act of writing means not having to passively accept the narrative being fed to us from an algorithm.
I sleep better at night when I’m working on a piece of writing. Perhaps you might chalk that up to me distracting myself, but I don’t see it that way. Writing is a way to focus on one problem, and reduce the noise of a busy and fragmented life. It brings clarity that the rest of our media ecosystem seems to lack: It’s a discipline that keeps me in check and inoculates me against the feeling of being overwhelmed. On a good day, writing brings community.
–Zeb Larson is a writer and historian based in Columbus, Ohio. He received a PhD in History from The Ohio State University in 2019, where he studied the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. Today, he works as a software engineer by day and as a freelance writer, historian, and curriculum developer whenever he has the time. He writes about activism, history, food, and music and is available to speak or even just chat on a whole host of different topics.
