Essay Essays

On October 7th, 2023, Jews in Israel were attacked in the largest pogrom since the Holocaust. It was a day felt by Jews everywhere who came together to process and speak out in ways some never had before. In this collection, 75 contributors speak to Jewish joy, celebration, laughter, food, trauma, loss, love, and family, and the common threads that course through the Jewish people: resilience and humor.

When Abbi Jacobson announced to friends and acquaintances that she planned to drive across the country alone, she was met with lots of questions and opinions: Why wasn't she going with friends? Wouldn't it be incredibly lonely? The North route is better! Was it safe for a woman? The Southern route is the way to go! You should bring mace! And a common one... why? But Abbi had always found comfort in solitude and needed space to step back and hit the reset button. As she spent time in each city on her way to Los Angeles, she mulled over the big questions: What do I really want?

Over the last decade, author and activist Astra Taylor has helped shift the national conversation on topics including technology, inequality, indebtedness, and democracy. The essays collected here reveal the range and depth of her thinking, with Taylor tackling the rising popularity of socialism, the problem of automation, the politics of listening, the possibility of rights for the natural and nonhuman world, the future of the university, the temporal challenge of climate catastrophe, and more.

This posthumously published collection offers a unique, puzzle-like portrait of one of the postwar era's most inventive and mercurial writers. In letters and journals, occasional pieces and interviews, Italo Calvino recalls growing up in seaside Italy and fighting in the antifascist resistance during World War II, traces the course of his literary career, and reflects on his many travels, including a journey through the United States in 1959 and 1960.

Today’s gay youth have dozens of queer peer heroes, both fictional and real, but former gay teenager Grace Perry did not have that luxury. Instead, she had to search for queerness in the (largely straight) teen cultural phenomena the aughts had to offer: in Lindsay Lohan’s fall from grace, Gossip Girl, Katy Perry’s “I Kissed A Girl”, country-era Taylor Swift, and Seth Cohen jumping on a coffee cart. And, for better or worse, these touch points shaped her adult identity. She came out on the other side like many millennials did: in her words, gay as hell.

For the first time, all in one place, the award-winning books A Trip to the Hardware Store & Other Calamities and I'm Not Talking About You, Of Course plus seven bonus essays. What a collection! If this doesn't make you smile, then you're not even trying.

We aren’t born into a self. It is created without our consent, built out of our childhoods, our circumstances, and chance. But in the busyness of adult life, we rarely have time to think clearly about the questions that matter most. Writing with the passion and clarity that made his debut, To Shake the Sleeping Self, a national best seller, Jedidiah Jenkins brings together new and old writings to explore the eight themes all of us face as we find our way in life: ego, family, home, friendship, love, work, death, the soul.

Is our democracy corroding? In this original, eloquent essay, Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens explore the ethics and politics of public debate—and the threat it now faces. In a healthy society we need the capacity to disagree. Yet Aly and Stephens note a growing tendency to disdain and dismiss opponents, to treat them with contempt. This toxic partisanship has been imported from the United States, where it has been a temptation for both left and right.

Peter Singer is often described as the world's most influential philosopher. Now, in Ethics in the Real World, Singer shows that he is also a master at dissecting important current events in a few hundred words. In this book of brief essays, he applies his controversial ways of thinking to issues like climate change, extreme poverty, animals, abortion, euthanasia, human genetic selection, sports doping, the sale of kidneys, the ethics of high-priced art, and ways of increasing happiness.

Our region is experiencing a momentous transition. The US-led order is fading, and China has become ever more powerful. Today the question we face is not whether we fancy living in an Asia in which power is shared between the United States and China. It is how we feel about living in an Asia in which America no longer plays any significant strategic role. In this controversial and gripping essay, Hugh White looks at what has happened to the US globally.

Ideas Have ConsequencesThese essays are inspired by and related to the theological thriller novel, Cruel Logic: The Philosopher Killer.≤/p The essays explore the crisis of Western Civilization vs. the woke Left, Christian apologetics and Christian deconstruction, the origins of wokeness and its war on reality, ethics and the moral argument for the existence of God. Chapters include: Could You Defend Your Beliefs If Your Life Depended On It? The Tragedy of Evangelical Christian Deconstruction America’s Cultural Revolution of Woke Violence The Problem of Evil and the Existence of God A ...

The writing of Death of a President, William Manchester's award-winning account of President Kennedy's assassination, is the topic of the title essay in this collection, as it was a controversy like few others, pitting one of the most prominent historians of the day against Jackie Kennedy, the most famous and private widow in the world. The essay provides an insider's account of the struggle to see the book published.

Walking in My Joy is a collection of electric stories by the one and only, super hilarious Jenifer Lewis. Her commentary on what’s happening in the world today, told through her outrageous real-life adventures, will have you laughing out loud, while her insightful messages touch your soul. A self-described “traveling fool and nature freak,” Jenifer takes listeners with her all over the world, from Cape Town to Bali; Washington, DC, to the Serengeti; Mongolia to St. Petersburg; and Argentina to Antarctica to demonstrate how she walks in her joy by seeking pleasure in everyday encounters.

Beneath the self-assured and serious faces we wear, every human life is full of longing, guesswork, and confusion—a scramble to do the best we can and make everything up as we go along. In these wide-ranging essays, Jon Mooallem chronicles the beauty of our blundering and the inescapability of our imperfections.

Discussions of the First Amendment often focus on specific freedoms that the text cites, including religion, press, and assembly. But philosopher Tara Smith’s new book usefully reminds us that those particular freedoms—and many more that Smith and the other contributors examine—are united by a crucial principle: intellectual freedom. The book demonstrates that the free mind is indispensable for a free society. —Nadine Strossen Tara Smith’s masterful celebration of intellectual freedom is both subtle and forceful. She unhesitatingly carves out a place for herself as a warrior for ...

"A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in Love and Friendship, a collection of essays on relationships. "Before him, I may think aloud. I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them."

Throughout history, artists and philosophers have cultivated the deep self and seen value in solitude and reflection. But today, through social media, wall-to-wall marketing, reality television and the agitation of modern life, everything feels illuminated, made transparent. We feel bereft without our phones and their cameras and the feeling of instant connectivity. It gets hard to pick up a book, harder still to stay with it. In this eloquent and profound essay, renowned critic Sebastian Smee brings to the surface the idea of inner life.

What really makes love last? Does love ever work the way we say it does in movies and books and Facebook posts? Or does obsessing over those love stories hurt our real-life relationships? When her parents divorced after a 28 year marriage and her own 10-year relationship ended, those were the questions that Mandy Len Catron wanted to answer.

The best evidence in favor of an afterlife are the multiple, independent investigation approaches all pointing, in different ways, to postmortem survival. This essay includes nine categories of inquiry. Dr Mishlove examines the evidence from these nine distinct domains pointing to survival of consciousness. While each individual domain of evidence is strong, when united as a whole, they are virtually invincible.

This analysis of Blaeser's essay on memory, which appears in the Collections textbook (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), is a guide for teachers on the rhetoric and craft of Blaeser's prose. The analysis is followed by questions for discussion, as well as links to extend the lesson. All proceeds that the author earns through this publication are donated to a student scholarship or charity.