Saturday’s 2 o’clock session, “The Art of the Essay: Crafting Complex Ideas Engagingly,” with Anne Fadiman, Adam Hochschild and Richard Rodriguez was outwardly low-key but full of passion. As a book ...

The first essay anybody writes is for school. Same here. But the only examples I remember are the ones I wrote at the end, in my A-level exams. One compared Hitler to Stalin. Another, Martin Luther ...