Love, Money, Sex and Death in the 21st Century by Louis Shalako
A mind-blowing series of essays concerning ten ethical and moral dilemmas facing modern science as well as the rest of humanity. The 21st Century is sure going to be interesting.
In 2022, there were just 42,000 nuns in America and the majority were elderly. For The Baffler, Lauren Fadiman spent some time with Benedictine sisters and explored the history and decline of religious life. "There was a time when the convent was the closest a woman could get to both the Lord and women’s lib," she writes. "The vow of chastity lifted the burdens of early marriage, bad sex, and potentially lethal childbirth; the habit released women from the obligations of beauty; and the requisite knowledge of Latin and a wide range of religious texts required that nuns be well-educated."
"Around year 2000 BCE, the Sumerian language, in which the poems are written, died out as a native language, becoming instead a language of scholarship and religious rituals, much like Latin in Europe and Sanskrit in India. And so, it had to be taught in schools, and the copying of Sumerian poems—including those attributed to Enheduana—was a key part of the school curriculum in ancient Babylonian cities like Nippur and Ur."
Things That Can and Cannot Be Said: Essays and Conversations by Arundhati Roy & John Cusack, 2024
An activist and an actor reflect on Edward Snowden and the surveillance state in this collection that “reads like a whistleblower’s travel diary” (Disorient). In late 2014, Arundhati Roy, John Cusack, and Daniel Ellsberg traveled to Moscow to meet with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Hilary Mantel’s posthumous ‘A memoir of my former self’ is of course of great interest to fans of her fiction, but every one of the disparate, beautifully written pieces in this book is worth reading on its own merits.
FIERY, UNSETTLING, INCISIVE collection of essays delves deep into history and cultural critique as well as the author’s life for a rigorous exploration of power and control, from racism and colonialism to misogyny and sexual violence. A MINUS
In this magnificent and often surprising collection of essays Barthes explores the myths of mass culture. Taking subjects as diverse as wrestling, films, plastic and cars, Barthes elegantly deciphers the symbols and signs embedded deep in familiar aspects of modern life, unmasking the hidden ideologies and meanings which implicitly affect our thought and behaviour.
Numbers and the World Essays on Math and Beyond by David Mumford
The three longest essays touch upon the foundations of mathematics, upon quantum mechanics and Schrödinger's cat phenomena, and upon whether robots will ever have consciousness.
Classic Krakauer Essays on Wilderness and Risk by Jon Krakauer
Spanning an extraordinary range of subjects and locations, these articles take us from a horrifying avalanche on Mt. Everest to a volcano poised to obliterate a big chunk of greater Seattle at any moment; from a wilderness teen-therapy program run by apparent sadists to an otherwordly cave in New Mexico, studied by NASA to better understand Mars...
Hi everyone. I'm going to share a new #introduction.
I'm a #nonbinary (they/them) movement journalist in my 40s, currently based in Central #Texas. From 2022 until today's layoffs, I was Digital Editor at the @TexasObserver. I've been a writer, journalist, editor since at least 2011, when I got my start on the primordial political blog Firedoglake. My involvement with the Occupy Wall Street movement helped make me a journo and I've always worn my bias on my sleeve. (1/?)
In November of 2022, I launched @TexasObserver dot social, helping the Observer become one of the first publications to run its own server on the #fediverse. We quickly amassed well over 15,000 followers as a result of our engaged presence here.
Fighting Against Western Imperialism by Andre Vltchek compiles ten modified essays that were written during just a few months of the onslaught of the Western imperialism all over the world.
Travel back to the year 1926 and into the rush of experiences that made people feel they were living on the edge of time. Touch a world where speed seemed the very essence of life.
"It strikes me, and may strike you, as a bit crazy to come out as #transgender in an essay like this. I’m publicly revealing myself to be a member of a marginalized community in the midst of a moral panic targeting our very existence."
This collection of eleven essays originally appeared in France thirty years ago and created a literary whirlwind on the Left Bank. Cioran writes incisively about Western civilizations, the writer, the novel, mystics, apostles, and philosophers.
The Never Ending Life is an exploration of the twist between the brutal realities of life along with the fictitious happy ever afters that we all long for. A real story about all the different ingredients that when mixed together create the unique blend which is what we call...life. Each chapter in this book is one that we go through at the different stages and stops in our journey.
Impossible, Possible, and Improbable
Science Stranger Than Fiction
A scintillating collection of short essays that really does cover 'life, the Universe, and everything'.
From the mysteries of the subatomic world to the curious property of water that makes our planet inhabitable, master of popular science John Gribbin delves into the astonishing facts that underlie our existence.
A collection of the best science and nature articles written in 2021, selected by guest editor renowned marine biologist Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and series editor Jaime Green. Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, renowned marine biologist and co-founder of the All We Can Save climate initiative, compiles the best science and nature writing of the year.
Even if I'm never able to explain more than the very basic idea of Hélène Cixous's Double Oblivion of the Ourang-Outang, I will still offer all thanks to the literary gods for having brought it my way. What an incredible work, which I finished last night, and will go ahead and classify at least partially as #poetry, even as it probably also falls under #philosophy, #theory, #criticism, #essays, and so much more. All hail the unclassifiables!
Featured story: "The conservative campaign to harass the libs out of academia has already sent a chill through #Texas’ world-class public universities, making professors and administrators so fearful of setting off the lunatics in charge at the Capitol that they censor themselves—in scholarship or in their communications with students and the public."
Affective Worldmaking: Narrative Counterpublics of Gender and Sexuality edited by S. Schultermandl, J. Aresin, S. Pages Whybrew, and D. Simic (nonfiction)
An unexplained chronic illness left author Richa Kaul Padte with the burning need to win her doctors' approval — to be their favorite. In this essay for Hazlitt, she unpicks and unpacks this feeling, and sheds light on the frustrations of living with "the confluence of my intersecting symptoms and how they shape my life. The unsolvable injustice of my illness."
‘Bantering with Bandits’: Annie Zaidi’s searing truths about Indian preoccupations and peculiarities
This book of essays by @anniezaidi creates a space where the personal and the political fuse to paint an often uncomfortable picture of our sociopolitical reality.
"Taken together, the essays reveal the dynamics of what the editors call an "imperial commons," a lively, empire-wide print culture. They show that neither empire nor book were stable, self-evident constructs. Each helped to legitimize the other."