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Essay on the world of the 21st Century for Students

September 30, 2019 by Sandeep

500+ Words Essay on the world of the 21st Century

We may be only approximately only two decades into the twenty first century, but the world has already changed immeasurably. Changes occur daily, yet taken into view yearly these changes become extremely noticeable.

The people of today’s society are changing every day, and therefore so is the world. Of course, there is much to celebrate, and also much to mourn in this new world. It is a time of freedom and technological developments.

To define 21 st century learning we first need to accept that many of the traditional methods of teaching are no longer relevant in our high tech, super-connected fast paced society. The recent rapid pace of change has been such that we can no longer look back and even imagine how life was before this style of living.

We have seen advancements all over, in almost every field: be it technology, space, employment opportunities, society, etc. people have grown more accepting to all sections of society, although there is a long way to go still. But on the other hand, we have had terrible regressions, wars and bans coming our ways.

What is the 21 st Century?

To begin with, let us understand what the 21 st century is. The 21 st century is the current period consisting of a hundred years of the Anna Domini (AD) era, or the Common Era (CE), in accordance to the Gregorian calendar.

It is the first century of the third millennium. The third millennium refers to the 3rd thousand year period, made up of several smaller centuries. The twenty first century began on January 1, 2001 and will end on December 31, 2100.

The Gregorian calendar attempts to divide history into roughly two periods: before Christ (BC), which starts at 1 and increases backwards, and the years after his birth, which are AD, which stands for Anna Domini, the Latin translation of “the year of the Lord.”

The 21 st Century is a century for love, a century for devotion, a century for technology, and a century for revolution. In spite of the few abrupt quarrels or even massacres, none of which can be undermined, the people continue to show us that their hearts are filled with love.

It is also a century filled with unifying protests, which bring out the companionship between individuals, communities and even countries together. Women stand together, religions stand together, citizens of countries stand together, in times of any crisis.

The 21 st century stands for peace on an international scale. It stands for people attempting to break down barriers that cut them off from others. Will they succeed? That is for the future to know and for us to find out.

Technological Advancements

“The Century of technology” has been the nickname given to the twenty first century. We are among the first to live in the digital age. Technology has made significant changes in how and what work is done.

Fewer people are required to generate the same manufactured output thanks to technology, allowing (or forcing) people to shift to urban centres and find other kinds of work. Technology has allowed human workers to be unshackled from the office, giving them a much greater freedom.

In the year 2000, the concept of Bluetooth emerged. Bluetooth is a wireless technology standard for exchanging data between mobile devices or fixed computers over a short distance. Bluetooth brought the concept of exchanging data in a streamlined wireless way to the masses, creating personal area networks with mobile devices.

Then again, in 2004, the unveiling of Facebook by Mark Zuckerberg took the world by a storm. Linking the world with communication is becoming a powerful theme through these top spot holders in terms of technological advancements, and perhaps none have pushed the envelope quite like Facebook has.

Facebook was the pioneer of social media in general, bringing the capability to the average person and changing the world forever. Now social media is essential for business, a primary channel for news consumption and it is used in an influential way globally. After Facebook, the new social media outlets included a very wide range: Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, and so on.

Of course, all of these new-fangled apps came after the smartphone revolution in 2007, when Steve Jobs and Apple launched the first iPhone, the world’s most powerful personal device. From 2007 to 2019, there have been countless models unveiled.

The most recent one is the iPhone XR. In the meantime, there have been several other brands and operating systems, the most popular of them being the Samsung, Nokia, Xiaomi, Lenovo and Galaxy.

Another feat of telecommunication in the 21 st century and a giant among technological advances is the Skype application software, which not only made verbal communication possible via computers, but also, perhaps most importantly, ushered in the era of video chat. Now we also have Duo, WhatsApp Calling, Facetime and several other interfaces.

Last, but not the least is the artificial intelligence that has prospered as of late. We now have Alexa, Siri, Google and Cortana tending to all our questions and needs, waiting on us every minute. Isn’t life in the twenty first century simply great?

Space Exploration

Space exploration had, of course, began in the 20th Century itself, with the launch of Sputnik 1 by the Soviet Union. However, in the 21st century, it has been taken much further, by the whole world in general as well as specifically in India. The first event of great importance is the loss of Pluto as a planet in our solar system on September 13, 2006.

The International Astronomical Union (IAU) downgraded the status of Pluto to that of “dwarf planet.” This means that from now on only the rocky worlds of the inner Solar System and the gas giants of the outer system will be designated as planets.

The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), based in Bangalore, had also launched Chandrayaan 1, India’s first ever lunar probe, in 2008. In the near future, that is to say by July 2019, Chandrayaan 2 will also be sent to space as the second lunar exploration mission.

The mission is planned to be launched to the Moon by a Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle Mark III. It includes a lunar orbiter, lander and rover, all developed indigenously.

In 2012, the Curiosity Rover was launched by the United States onto Mars. It had even managed to take a selfie there. The rover is still operational, and as of May 20, 2019, Curiosity has been on Mars for 2478 since landing on August 6, 2012.

In the next ten years, India has planned to launch seven other space exploration missions.

The most awaited and exciting prospective is probably Aditya 1, set to be launched in 2021, which will be India’s first solar exploration mission. It is designed to study the solar corona (outer layers of the Sun) which is quite similar to NASA’s Parker Solar Probe. Another one of the seven includes a satellite to Venus.

Developments in Society

The developments in society have been too numerous and widespread to talk about all of them. However, we could mention four important highlights. The first one occurred in 2014, when Malala Yousafazi became the youngest ever recipient of a Nobel Prize Award. Malala is a Pakistani activist, fighting for the rights of girls to education.

Everyone knows her story. She was shot in the head by a Taliban arms man, for going to school. But she battled against death itself and won. She now continues to encourage other girls too to fight for their right of education. She is an inspiration to everyone.

The second highlight occurred in 2015, which was the legalisation of same sex marriage across fifty states of the United States of America. It was long battle for rights by the lgbtq community , and they have finally been awarded some of those rights. However, the battle has not ended yet.

They continue to face some of the same bullying and hardships as before. On another note, in India, article 377 of the Constitution decriminalised homosexuality, in 2018. It took us a very long time, but people have finally become more accepting towards others, irrespective of their personal choices.

The third highlight was in 2016, when the United Kingdoms decided to leave the European Union. This lead to the creation of Brexit. As things stand, the United Kingdoms is due to leave the European Union at 23:00 GMT on 31 October 2019. If the UK and European Union ratify the withdrawal agreement before then, the UK will leave on the first day of the following month.

The last highlight is not an occurrence as such, but simply the next generation. In the 21st century, millennials and generation Z have come to rise and prominence in the world. They follow a ‘nihilistic’ lifestyle, and more often than not, they believe in existentialism.

Changes in Areas of Employment

The concept of working has changed in the 21st century. There are now, two main types of employees: the work from home employees, and the office worker.

21 st century workers want to work for themselves instead of for someone else. This drive towards entrepreneurship is making a success of business plays and hence, leads into the steady increase in hours per week being dedicated to work. There are now much longer work hours put in, and a much later retirement.

The quality of life has drastically reduced. In the past, limited technology meant that what we did was more directly tied into a wage-per-item concept of work. What you made or did determined your wage in a direct way.

Manufacturing, agriculture, and the office commute were the mainstays. But no more. Changes in technology, a shift in the culture, and financial challenges have shifted both the kind of work we do and the way we do it.

The 21 st Century came in with a bang, and continued to crop up with different surprises: both good and bad. We have managed to do the impossible, and live through things unimagined. And no one knows what will lie in wait for us in the future, which we are rattling towards in full speed.

Yet, I know for sure, if we stand together, all as inhabitants of the same Earth, we shall stand strong and united, ready to take on anything that comes our way. Predictions are simply assumptions. They have the same probability of failing as they have of actually occurring, and hence, it is worthless to talk of them.

But we can promise ourselves this much: the developments we have come to live with will always be less in comparison to the developments we will uncover in the future. As students, we instruct our teachers how to use the mouse and keyboard to open up PowerPoint presentations.

Well, in the future, there is going to be no lack of students explaining to their teachers how to work holocausts. Times change, generations change. How are you going to change?

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What Are the Biggest Problems Facing Us in the 21st Century?

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By Bill Gates

• Sept. 4, 2018

21 LESSONS FOR THE 21ST CENTURY By Yuval Noah Harari 372 pp. Spiegel & Grau. $28.

The human mind wants to worry. This is not necessarily a bad thing — after all, if a bear is stalking you, worrying about it may well save your life. Although most of us don’t need to lose too much sleep over bears these days, modern life does present plenty of other reasons for concern: terrorism, climate change, the rise of A.I., encroachments on our privacy, even the apparent decline of international cooperation.

In his fascinating new book, “21 Lessons for the 21st Century,” the historian Yuval Noah Harari creates a useful framework for confronting these fears. While his previous best sellers, “Sapiens” and “Homo Deus,” covered the past and future respectively, his new book is all about the present. The trick for putting an end to our anxieties, he suggests, is not to stop worrying. It’s to know which things to worry about, and how much to worry about them. As he writes in his introduction: “What are today’s greatest challenges and most important changes? What should we pay attention to? What should we teach our kids?”

These are admittedly big questions, and this is a sweeping book. There are chapters on work, war, nationalism, religion, immigration, education and 15 other weighty matters. But its title is a misnomer. Although you will find a few concrete lessons scattered throughout, Harari mostly resists handy prescriptions. He’s more interested in defining the terms of the discussion and giving you historical and philosophical perspective.

He deploys, for example, a clever thought experiment to underscore how far humans have come in creating a global civilization. Imagine, he says, trying to organize an Olympic Games in 1016. It’s clearly impossible. Asians, Africans and Europeans don’t know that the Americas exist. The Chinese Song Empire doesn’t think any other political entity in the world is even close to being its equal. No one even has a flag to fly or anthem to play at the awards ceremony.

The point is that today’s competition among nations — whether on an athletic field or the trading floor — “actually represents an astonishing global agreement.” And that global agreement makes it easier to cooperate as well as compete. Keep this in mind the next time you start to doubt whether we can solve a global problem like climate change. Our global cooperation may have taken a couple of steps back in the past two years, but before that we took a thousand steps forward.

So why does it seem as if the world is in decline? Largely because we are much less willing to tolerate misfortune and misery. Even though the amount of violence in the world has greatly decreased, we focus on the number of people who die each year in wars because our outrage at injustice has grown. As it should.

Here’s another worry that Harari deals with: In an increasingly complex world, how can any of us have enough information to make educated decisions? It’s tempting to turn to experts, but how do you know they’re not just following the herd? “The problem of groupthink and individual ignorance besets not just ordinary voters and customers,” he writes, “but also presidents and C.E.O.s.” That rang true to me from my experience at both Microsoft and the Gates Foundation. I have to be careful not to fool myself into thinking things are better — or worse — than they actually are.

What does Harari think we should do about all this? Sprinkled throughout is some practical advice, including a three-prong strategy for fighting terrorism and a few tips for dealing with fake news. But his big idea boils down to this: Meditate. Of course he isn’t suggesting that the world’s problems will vanish if enough of us start sitting in the lotus position and chanting om . But he does insist that life in the 21st century demands mindfulness — getting to know ourselves better and seeing how we contribute to suffering in our own lives. This is easy to mock, but as someone who’s taking a course on mindfulness and meditation, I found it compelling.

As much as I admire Harari and enjoyed “21 Lessons,” I didn’t agree with everything in the book. I was glad to see the chapter on inequality, but I’m skeptical about his prediction that in the 21st century “data will eclipse both land and machinery as the most important asset” separating rich people from everyone else. Land will always be hugely important, especially as the global population nears 10 billion. Meanwhile, data on key human endeavors — how to grow food or produce energy, for example — will become even more widely available. Simply having information won’t offer a competitive edge; knowing what to do with it will.

Similarly, I wanted to see more nuance in Harari’s discussion of data and privacy. He rightly notes that more information is being gathered on individuals than ever before. But he doesn’t distinguish among the types of data being collected — the kind of shoes you like to buy versus which diseases you’re genetically predisposed to — or who is gathering it, or how they’re using it. Your shopping history and your medical history aren’t collected by the same people, protected by the same safeguards or used for the same purposes. Recognizing this distinction would have made his discussion more enlightening.

I was also dissatisfied with the chapter on community. Harari argues that social media including Facebook have contributed to political polarization by allowing users to cocoon themselves, interacting only with those who share their views. It’s a fair point, but he undersells the benefits of connecting family and friends around the world. He also creates a straw man by asking whether Facebook alone can solve the problem of polarization. On its own, of course it can’t — but that’s not surprising, considering how deep the problem cuts. Governments, civil society and the private sector all have a role to play, and I wish Harari had said more about them.

But Harari is such a stimulating writer that even when I disagreed, I wanted to keep reading and thinking. All three of his books wrestle with some version of the same question: What will give our lives meaning in the decades and centuries ahead? So far, human history has been driven by a desire to live longer, healthier, happier lives. If science is eventually able to give that dream to most people, and large numbers of people no longer need to work in order to feed and clothe everyone, what reason will we have to get up in the morning?

It’s no criticism to say that Harari hasn’t produced a satisfying answer yet. Neither has anyone else. So I hope he turns more fully to this question in the future. In the meantime, he has teed up a crucial global conversation about how to take on the problems of the 21st century.

Bill Gates is the co-founder of Microsoft and co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

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How has technology changed - and changed us - in the past 20 years?

Remember this? Image:  REUTERS/Stephen Hird

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Stay up to date:, technological transformation.

• Since the dotcom bubble burst back in 2000, technology has radically transformed our societies and our daily lives.
• From smartphones to social media and healthcare, here's a brief history of the 21st century's technological revolution.

Just over 20 years ago, the dotcom bubble burst , causing the stocks of many tech firms to tumble. Some companies, like Amazon, quickly recovered their value – but many others were left in ruins. In the two decades since this crash, technology has advanced in many ways.

Many more people are online today than they were at the start of the millennium. Looking at broadband access, in 2000, just half of Americans had broadband access at home. Today, that number sits at more than 90% .

This broadband expansion was certainly not just an American phenomenon. Similar growth can be seen on a global scale; while less than 7% of the world was online in 2000, today over half the global population has access to the internet.

Similar trends can be seen in cellphone use. At the start of the 2000s, there were 740 million cell phone subscriptions worldwide. Two decades later, that number has surpassed 8 billion, meaning there are now more cellphones in the world than people

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At the same time, technology was also becoming more personal and portable. Apple sold its first iPod in 2001, and six years later it introduced the iPhone, which ushered in a new era of personal technology. These changes led to a world in which technology touches nearly everything we do.

Technology has changed major sectors over the past 20 years, including media, climate action and healthcare. The World Economic Forum’s Technology Pioneers , which just celebrated its 20th anniversary, gives us insight how emerging tech leaders have influenced and responded to these changes.

Media and media consumption

The past 20 years have greatly shaped how and where we consume media. In the early 2000s, many tech firms were still focused on expanding communication for work through advanced bandwidth for video streaming and other media consumption that is common today.

Others followed the path of expanding media options beyond traditional outlets. Early Tech Pioneers such as PlanetOut did this by providing an outlet and alternative media source for LGBTQIA communities as more people got online.

Following on from these first new media options, new communities and alternative media came the massive growth of social media. In 2004 , fewer than 1 million people were on Myspace; Facebook had not even launched. By 2018, Facebook had more 2.26 billion users with other sites also growing to hundreds of millions of users.

While these new online communities and communication channels have offered great spaces for alternative voices, their increased use has also brought issues of increased disinformation and polarization.

Today, many tech start-ups are focused on preserving these online media spaces while also mitigating the disinformation which can come with them. Recently, some Tech Pioneers have also approached this issue, including TruePic – which focuses on photo identification – and Two Hat , which is developing AI-powered content moderation for social media.

Climate change and green tech

Many scientists today are looking to technology to lead us towards a carbon-neutral world. Though renewed attention is being given to climate change today, these efforts to find a solution through technology is not new. In 2001, green tech offered a new investment opportunity for tech investors after the crash, leading to a boom of investing in renewable energy start-ups including Bloom Energy , a Technology Pioneer in 2010.

In the past two decades, tech start-ups have only expanded their climate focus. Many today are focuses on initiatives far beyond clean energy to slow the impact of climate change.

Different start-ups, including Carbon Engineering and Climeworks from this year’s Technology Pioneers, have started to roll out carbon capture technology. These technologies remove CO2 from the air directly, enabling scientists to alleviate some of the damage from fossil fuels which have already been burned.

Another expanding area for young tech firms today is food systems innovation. Many firms, like Aleph Farms and Air Protein, are creating innovative meat and dairy alternatives that are much greener than their traditional counterparts.

Biotech and healthcare

The early 2000s also saw the culmination of a biotech boom that had started in the mid-1990s. Many firms focused on advancing biotechnologies through enhanced tech research.

An early Technology Pioneer, Actelion Pharmaceuticals was one of these companies. Actelion’s tech researched the single layer of cells separating every blood vessel from the blood stream. Like many other biotech firms at the time, their focus was on precise disease and treatment research.

While many tech firms today still focus on disease and treatment research, many others have been focusing on healthcare delivery. Telehealth has been on the rise in recent years , with many young tech expanding virtual healthcare options. New technologies such as virtual visits, chatbots are being used to delivery healthcare to individuals, especially during Covid-19.

Many companies are also focusing their healthcare tech on patients, rather than doctors. For example Ada, a symptom checker app, used to be designed for doctor’s use but has now shifted its language and interface to prioritize giving patients information on their symptoms. Other companies, like 7 cups, are focused are offering mental healthcare support directly to their users without through their app instead of going through existing offices.

The past two decades have seen healthcare tech get much more personal and use tech for care delivery, not just advancing medical research.

The World Economic Forum was the first to draw the world’s attention to the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the current period of unprecedented change driven by rapid technological advances. Policies, norms and regulations have not been able to keep up with the pace of innovation, creating a growing need to fill this gap.

The Forum established the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution Network in 2017 to ensure that new and emerging technologies will help—not harm—humanity in the future. Headquartered in San Francisco, the network launched centres in China, India and Japan in 2018 and is rapidly establishing locally-run Affiliate Centres in many countries around the world.

The global network is working closely with partners from government, business, academia and civil society to co-design and pilot agile frameworks for governing new and emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI) , autonomous vehicles , blockchain , data policy , digital trade , drones , internet of things (IoT) , precision medicine and environmental innovations .

Learn more about the groundbreaking work that the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution Network is doing to prepare us for the future.

Want to help us shape the Fourth Industrial Revolution? Contact us to find out how you can become a member or partner.

In the early 2000s, many companies were at the start of their recovery from the bursting dotcom bubble. Since then, we’ve seen a large expansion in the way tech innovators approach areas such as new media, climate change, healthcare delivery and more.

At the same time, we have also seen tech companies rise to the occasion of trying to combat issues which arose from the first group such as internet content moderation, expanding climate change solutions.

The Technology Pioneers' 2020 cohort marks the 20th anniversary of this community - and looking at the latest awardees can give us a snapshot of where the next two decades of tech may be heading.

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License and Republishing

World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License, and in accordance with our Terms of Use.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.

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21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari review – a guru for our times?

The author of global bestseller Sapiens is back, with a self-help guide for a bewildering age – and its sweeping statements are peppered with truly mind-expanding observations

Yuval Noah Harari’s career is a publishing fairytale. An obscure Israeli academic writes a Hebrew-language history of humanity. Translated into English in 2014, the book sells more than a million copies. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg includes it in his book club in 2015. Ridley Scott wants to turn it into a TV series. Barack Obama says it gave him perspective on “the core things that have allowed us to build this extraordinary civilization that we take for granted”. Its sales spike when it is mentioned on Love Island .

That book was Sapiens , which is bold, breezy and engaging, romping its way from the discovery of fire to the creation of cyborgs in less than 500 pages. The future-gazing follow-up, Homo Deus , was also a global bestseller, and now Harari has turned his attention to the present with 21 Lessons for the 21st Century . It covers everything from war – Harari’s academic specialism – to meditation, his favourite leisure activity. (He does two hours a day, and a month-long retreat every year.) The collection of pieces aims to take stock of where humanity has reached, and where it might be going. Ultra-topical concerns such as “fake news” and the rise of authoritarians such as Donald Trump are set in the context of centuries of our biological and social evolution. As Obama said, this approach certainly gives the reader perspective. Ivan the Terrible was probably more, well, terrible than Trump. Cheer up! Until you remember climate change, at least – because, to his credit, Harari is one of the few futurists to factor ecological collapse into his predictions.

All the classic Harari themes are here. Life in 15th-century China was pretty slow, but now the pace of change feels unstoppable. Religion can be bad, but has its uses. Nationalism can be bad, but has its uses. Factory farming is very, very bad. Liberalism is good, but under threat. Hunter-gathering is a more exciting lifestyle choice than farming, or working in a factory. Technological advances bring Big Ethical Questions. And, of course, there is Harari’s main question, which is here spelled out in a chapter heading. “How do you live in an age of bewilderment, when the old stories have collapsed, and no new story has yet emerged to replace them?” He contends that collective myths, such as money and laws, have allowed us to build huge, complicated societies far beyond what our biological limitations might suggest is possible. But in the secular west, religion is fading from public life. And in our globalised world, the idea of a coherent nation-state is threatened. What do we have left to believe in?

One of the answers, although the author does not provide it, is gurus, of which we have created a new class, each individually tailored to our needs. Some anxious middle-class women have Gwyneth Paltrow , who promises enlightenment through yoni steaming and dietary restrictions. Angry, disaffected young men have Jordan Peterson, whose banal advice about tidying your room is camouflaged with Jungian blah and sulky oppositionalism. And people who shone at school and don’t understand why that hasn’t made them happy have Harari. His books use evolutionary psychology as self-help: the world is a scary, fast-changing place, so it’s no surprise our savannah-trained ape brains struggle to navigate through it. We simply haven’t evolved to cope with automated checkouts and emailing after 7pm.

21 Lessons for the 21st Century is, as the title suggests, a loose collection of themed essays, many of which build on articles for the New York Times, Bloomberg and elsewhere. That has strange results. A chapter arguing that “Judaism played only a modest role in the annals of our species” seems random until you realise it started life as a piece for the liberal Israeli paper Haaretz. However, the format plays to Harari’s big selling point: the ambition and breadth of his work, smashing together unexpected ideas into dazzling observations. “Why do we fear terrorism more than sugar?” Harari asks at one point. (Answer: terrorism is not delicious on porridge.) “Property is a prerequisite for long-term inequality.” (Told you he was nostalgic for the era of berry collection.) “Homo Sapiens is a post-truth species, whose power depends on creating and believing fictions.” (OK, but you did this riff in Sapiens .) Microsoft “is an intricate legal fiction”. (And this one, except then it was Peugeot.)

The best reason not to throw this book out of the window is that, occasionally, Harari writes a paragraph that is genuinely mind-expanding. In the chapter on religion he notes: “Japan was the first power to develop and use precision-guided missiles.” Cue a hundred military historians dropping their marmalade. Say what? But it’s a feint: “We know these missiles as the kamikaze.” The willingness of Japanese pilots to die made their military hardware more effective, and “was the product of the death-defying spirit of sacrifice cultivated by State Shintō”. Humans are endlessly creative, goes the lesson, and sometimes we solve problems by changing the question rather than answering it. Beat that, AI.

There are plenty of provocations – why climate change might benefit the Russian economy, how humans could evolve into different species – but the globetrotting, history-straddling scope of Harari’s approach has an obvious drawback, which is that some of the observations here feel recycled. His sweeping statements, breathtaking though they are, can also feel untethered from the intellectual traditions from which they come. References to previous thinkers and writers on the subjects he covers are largely tucked away in endnotes.

Here’s an example. In the chapter on work, Harari suggests that technology could reduce the availability of paid labour for humans, creating millions of “spare” people. In response, we could “widen the range of human activities that are considered to be ‘jobs’”, Harari writes. “Maybe we need to turn a switch in our minds and realise that taking care of a child is arguably the most important and challenging job in the world.” Unpaid caring labour is undervalued in capitalist systems? No one tell the feminist movement, it’ll blow their minds.

It’s an unkind comparison, but I am compelled to return to Jordan Peterson. The two men are almost mirror-images: Harari is a vegan, while Peterson says that a beef-only diet is the best treatment for his depression. Both can sound like prophets. Harari advises that if you want to “know the truth about the universe ... the best place to start is by observing suffering and exploring what it is”, while Peterson tells readers: “Suffering is real, and the artful infliction of suffering on another, for its own sake, is wrong. That became the cornerstone of my belief.”

And both men are treated as general all-purpose Clever People, rather than as academics with a particular specialism. They inhabit the high-altitude world of speaking tours and TED talks, repackaging their books into bite-sized chunks. They also fuse high and low culture, to show they are brainy but also with it, sharing a surprising interest in the 1994 Disney classic The Lion King . Peterson once gave a lecture where he praised Mufasa’s dominant, manly posture: “He’s a very regal-looking person … lion,” he told students. Meanwhile, Harari sees the film as a retelling of the Hindu text the Bhagavad Gita , with its themes of revenge and the circle of life. This kind of pop-culture criticism often relies on implying that no one else (ie, people without PhDs) has contemplated the existence of subtext before. Harari is hardly the first person to spot that the 2015 film Ex Machina was about gender, not just AI. “Many movies about artificial intelligence are so divorced from scientific reality that one suspects they are just allegories of completely different concerns,” he writes.

Ultimately, the smudges and slips of Sapiens are forgivable, because it’s a rollicking good read and I suspect it acts as a gateway drug to more academic accounts of human history. However, this book sees Harari enter that class of gurus who are assumed to be experts on everything. The 22nd lesson of this book is obvious: no single member of the tribe Homo Sapiens can know everything. If this new age needs new stories, then we have to let more people tell them.

21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari (Jonathan Cape, £18.99) is the Guardian Bookshop’s Book of the Month. To order a copy for £13.99, saving £5, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.

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How to Thrive in the 21st Century

• Posted November 22, 2016
• By Heather Beasley Doyle

When Fernando Reimers , a professor of international education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), talks and writes about what he wants children around the world to learn, the conversation runs deep and reaches far. Individual success, he says, increasingly depends upon students’ interpersonal dexterity, creativity, and ability to innovate. And our collective success — our ability to navigate complexities and to build and sustain a peaceful world — also hinges on these kinds of skills. Together, these skills form the basis of an emerging set of core competencies that will influence education policy and practice around the world.

In Teaching and Learning for the Twenty-First Century , Reimers and his co-editor, HGSE lecturer Connie K. Chung , explore how school systems in six countries are defining and supporting these global competencies. Their aim is to develop a shared framework for promoting the skills students will need in order to thrive as global citizens in a sustainable world in the decades ahead.

“Young people are in a context where they’re saturated and inundated with issues from around the world,” says Chung. Between new technologies, multiplying media, and layers of intercontinental connection, “global citizenship education is a ‘must have’ and not a ‘nice to have’ — for everyone,” says Chung.

Reimers and Chung used the National Research Council’s 2012 report, Education for Life and Work: Developing Transferable Knowledge and Skills in the 21st Century , as a jumping off point for their investigation of policies and curricula that are best positioned to nurture global citizens. That report (read the research brief here) identifies three broad domains of competence: cognitive, intrapersonal, and interpersonal. “This is not just talking about knowledge,” says Chung. Rather, it includes such strengths as intercultural literacy, self-discipline, and flexibility in social and work domains.

The Cognitive Competencies

As Chung suggests, the 21st-century global citizen’s cognitive skill set includes traditional, testable basics such as math and literacy, but extends beyond that to encompass a particularly strong emphasis on the world in which we live. “Current events highlight some of the fears around otherness,” she says. The key to informed citizenship is getting to know other cultures — and valuing them.

In addition to rounding out kids’ knowledge base to include a nuanced understanding of world geography and cultures , schools must teach them the skills to use this knowledge as active and engaged citizens.

That means being able to:

• Communicate effectively and listen actively
• Use evidence and assess information
• Speak at least one language beyond one’s native tongue
• Think critically and analyze local and global issues, challenges, and opportunities
• Reason logically and interpret clearly
• Become and remain digitally literate, including the ability to “weigh and judge the validity of the content that’s in front of you,” Chung says.

In some ways, digital literacy is a linchpin of the other competencies. “Technology gives us humans the possibility to collaborate in ways that are unprecedented, to think and produce things no one could produce individually,” Reimers says.

The Interpersonal Competencies

Empathy is a cornerstone 21st-century global competency. We’re all familiar with empathy between individuals: someone’s hurt, and another person deeply understands the pain. But Reimers and Chung envision the concept on a global scale. Empathy resides in the ability to consider the complexity of issues , Chung says — in an interconnected worldview that recognizes that “what we do impacts someone else.”

Anchored in tolerance and respect for other people, interpersonal intelligence breaks down into several overlapping skills, including:

• Collaboration
• Teamwork and cooperation
• Leadership and responsibility
• Assertive communication
• Social influence

As Reimers says, “We need to make sure that we can get along, and that we can see our differences as an opportunity, as a source of strength.” Both regionally and nationally, students need the skills to transcend the limits of fragmentation, “where people can only relate to those who they perceive to be like them.”

The Intrapersonal Competencies

A particular blend of honed personal characteristics underpins the cognitive and intrapersonal competencies. Reimers points to an ethical orientation and strong work and mind habits, including self-regulation and intellectual openness , as traits that 21st-century educators must nurture in their students.

The world is less predictable than it used to be: “People know that half of the jobs that are going to be around 10 years from now have not been invented,” Reimers says. That means teaching young people in such a way that makes them flexible and adaptable . It means enabling them to think of themselves as creators and inventors who feel comfortable taking the initiative and persevering — the skills necessary for starting one’s own business, for example.

Instilling in students the value of thinking beyond the short term will give them the best chance to tackle some of the world’s most daunting challenges, including climate change. For example, educators in Singapore were challenged to imagine their country not five, 10, or 15 years down the road, but 30 years in the future, Chung says. Encouraging students to think on that kind of a time scale helps them to grasp the reverberations of their actions and decisions.

Values, Attitudes, and Moving to Pedagogy

In Teaching and Learning for the Twenty-First Century  (which has been published in Chinese, Portuguese, and Spanish editions as well), Reimers, Chung, and global colleagues interviewed education researchers and stakeholders in Chile (in a chapter by Cristián Bellei and Liliana Morawietz), China (by Yan Wang), India (by Aditya Natraj, Monal Jayaram, Jahnavi Contractor, and Payal Agrawal), Mexico (by Sergio Cárdenas), Singapore (by Oon-Seng Tan and Ee-Ling Low), and the United States (by Chung and Reimers). They explored curriculum frameworks, seeking to understand how values and attitudes unique to each country and region were informing policy goals and ultimately shaping students’ learning opportunities.

Drawing on that survey of 21st-century competencies and the frameworks for their support, Reimers, Chung, and their digitally connected global network of educators are now teasing out a pedagogy for educators everywhere. Reimers and Chung co-authored (with Vidur Chopra, Julia Higdon, and E.B. O’Donnell) another new book, Empowering Global Citizens, which lays out a K–12 curriculum for global citizenship education called The World Course. Its aim is to position students and communities to thrive amid globalization — to lead, to steward, and to safeguard this complex world in the current century and beyond.

Additional Resources

• The Think Tank on Global Education , a professional education program with Fernando Reimers that invites teachers to experiment with a new curriulum on empowering global citizens
• The Global Education Innovation Initiative , a multi-country exploration of education for the 21st century, led by Reimers
• The introduction [PDF] of Teaching and Learning in the 21st Century , which describes the rationale for the book’s comparative study
• Fifteen Letters on Education in Singapore , in which U.S. educators visit Singapore to learn how that country’s education innovations have fueled a prosperous knowledge economy — and what lessons may apply. (Available as a f ree Kindle book .)
• Reflections on turning students into global citizens
• Creating a Course for the World  (a Harvard EdCast exploring the new global curriculum)

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Home — Essay Samples — History — Contemporary History — 21St Century

Essays on 21st Century

Choosing 21st century essay topics.

As we navigate through the 21st century, the world around us is constantly evolving, and this evolution comes with a plethora of complex issues and topics that are ripe for exploration and discussion. When it comes to selecting an essay topic for your academic assignments, it's important to choose a subject that is not only relevant but also engaging and thought-provoking. In this article, we will delve into the importance of choosing a 21st-century essay topic, provide advice on how to select a topic, and offer a detailed list of recommended essay topics across various categories.

The Importance of the Topic

Choosing a relevant and impactful essay topic is crucial for several reasons. Firstly, it allows you to engage with current events and trends, fostering a deeper understanding of the world around us and its complexities. Secondly, a well-chosen topic can spark meaningful discussions and debates, both within academic circles and in society at large. Additionally, selecting a 21st-century essay topic can help you develop critical thinking and analytical skills, as you navigate through the complexities of contemporary issues.

Advice on Choosing a Topic

When it comes to selecting an essay topic, it's important to consider your interests, as well as the relevance and significance of the subject matter. Start by brainstorming a list of topics that intrigue you and align with your academic goals. Consider the potential impact of the topic and its relevance to modern society. Research the latest developments and debates surrounding the topic to ensure that you have access to current and credible sources. Lastly, make sure the topic is broad enough to provide you with ample research material, but also specific enough to allow for in-depth exploration.

Recommended Essay Topics

Social issues.

• The impact of social media on mental health
• Income inequality in the 21st century
• The rise of fake news and its implications
• The role of activism in contemporary society

Technology and Innovation

• The ethical implications of artificial intelligence
• The future of renewable energy sources
• Privacy and data protection in the digital age
• The impact of technology on the job market

Environmental Concerns

• The effects of climate change on global communities
• Sustainable practices for a greener future
• The role of activism in environmental conservation
• The intersection of environmentalism and social justice

Global Politics

• International responses to humanitarian crises
• Nationalism and its impact on global diplomacy
• The role of the United Nations in the 21st century
• The rise of populism and its implications for global governance

Cultural Identity

• The impact of globalization on cultural diversity
• The portrayal of gender and race in contemporary media
• The intersection of technology and cultural heritage
• The role of art and literature in shaping cultural identities

These are just a few examples of the myriad of topics that you can explore for your 21st-century essay. Remember to choose a topic that resonates with you and aligns with your academic interests. By delving into the complexities of contemporary issues, you can develop a deeper understanding of the world around us and contribute to meaningful discussions and debates.

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Comparison of Online Dating and Traditional Dating

Comic books in the 21st century, a lesson to never give up in "the odyssey", a poem by homer, organizational structure and management: alibaba and the 21st century, challenges faced by native americans in 21str century, trump and the rise of 21st century fascism, princess diana’s memoir, a study on the impact of corporate accountability, understanding the craze behind esports, the changing role of accountants in the 21st century, sylvia plath’s presentation of feelings and standards on women as described in her book, the bell jar, analysis on communication as a factor in relationships, understanding the representation of black females sexual desirability in the u.s, how lucky i am to be born in this century.

The beginning of the 21st century was the rise of a global warming, global economy and Third World consumerism, increased private enterprise and terrorist attacks. Many great and many bad things happened in the current century. Many natural and man-made disasters made their impact on the world.

In the 21st century the effects of social development have affected different countries and different social groups differently. Although social development upgraded life standards of population.

The main challenges in the 21st century are: climate change, plastic pollution in the oceans, natural hazards, air pollution, hunger and increased inequalities.

Technology in the 21st century has enabled to humans to make strides that our ancestors could only dream of. People in the 21st century live in a technology and media-suffused environment.

The world population was about 6.1 billion at the start of the 21st century and reached 7.8 billion by March 2020.

Economically and politically, the United States and Western Europe were dominant at the beginning of the century. By the 2010s, China became an emerging global superpower and the world's largest economy. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are increasing in popularity worldwide.

The 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers, Hurricane Katrina, Same-Sex Marriage Legalisation, Haiti Earthquake, The Arab Spring, Brexit

Relevant topics

• Jack The Ripper
• 19Th Century
• Green Revolution
• Cuban Missile Crisis
• Moon Landing
• Mother Teresa

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The 10 Best Essay Collections of the Decade

Ever tried. ever failed. no matter..

Friends, it’s true: the end of the decade approaches. It’s been a difficult, anxiety-provoking, morally compromised decade, but at least it’s been populated by some damn fine literature. We’ll take our silver linings where we can.

So, as is our hallowed duty as a literary and culture website—though with full awareness of the potentially fruitless and endlessly contestable nature of the task—in the coming weeks, we’ll be taking a look at the best and most important (these being not always the same) books of the decade that was. We will do this, of course, by means of a variety of lists. We began with the best debut novels , the best short story collections , the best poetry collections , and the best memoirs of the decade , and we have now reached the fifth list in our series: the best essay collections published in English between 2010 and 2019.

The following books were chosen after much debate (and several rounds of voting) by the Literary Hub staff. Tears were spilled, feelings were hurt, books were re-read. And as you’ll shortly see, we had a hard time choosing just ten—so we’ve also included a list of dissenting opinions, and an even longer list of also-rans. As ever, free to add any of your own favorites that we’ve missed in the comments below.

The Top Ten

Oliver sacks, the mind’s eye (2010).

Toward the end of his life, maybe suspecting or sensing that it was coming to a close, Dr. Oliver Sacks tended to focus his efforts on sweeping intellectual projects like On the Move (a memoir), The River of Consciousness (a hybrid intellectual history), and Hallucinations (a book-length meditation on, what else, hallucinations). But in 2010, he gave us one more classic in the style that first made him famous, a form he revolutionized and brought into the contemporary literary canon: the medical case study as essay. In The Mind’s Eye , Sacks focuses on vision, expanding the notion to embrace not only how we see the world, but also how we map that world onto our brains when our eyes are closed and we’re communing with the deeper recesses of consciousness. Relaying histories of patients and public figures, as well as his own history of ocular cancer (the condition that would eventually spread and contribute to his death), Sacks uses vision as a lens through which to see all of what makes us human, what binds us together, and what keeps us painfully apart. The essays that make up this collection are quintessential Sacks: sensitive, searching, with an expertise that conveys scientific information and experimentation in terms we can not only comprehend, but which also expand how we see life carrying on around us. The case studies of “Stereo Sue,” of the concert pianist Lillian Kalir, and of Howard, the mystery novelist who can no longer read, are highlights of the collection, but each essay is a kind of gem, mined and polished by one of the great storytellers of our era.  –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead (2011)

The American essay was having a moment at the beginning of the decade, and Pulphead was smack in the middle. Without any hard data, I can tell you that this collection of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s magazine features—published primarily in GQ , but also in The Paris Review , and Harper’s —was the only full book of essays most of my literary friends had read since Slouching Towards Bethlehem , and probably one of the only full books of essays they had even heard of.

Well, we all picked a good one. Every essay in Pulphead is brilliant and entertaining, and illuminates some small corner of the American experience—even if it’s just one house, with Sullivan and an aging writer inside (“Mr. Lytle” is in fact a standout in a collection with no filler; fittingly, it won a National Magazine Award and a Pushcart Prize). But what are they about? Oh, Axl Rose, Christian Rock festivals, living around the filming of One Tree Hill , the Tea Party movement, Michael Jackson, Bunny Wailer, the influence of animals, and by god, the Miz (of Real World/Road Rules Challenge fame).

But as Dan Kois has pointed out , what connects these essays, apart from their general tone and excellence, is “their author’s essential curiosity about the world, his eye for the perfect detail, and his great good humor in revealing both his subjects’ and his own foibles.” They are also extremely well written, drawing much from fictional techniques and sentence craft, their literary pleasures so acute and remarkable that James Wood began his review of the collection in The New Yorker with a quiz: “Are the following sentences the beginnings of essays or of short stories?” (It was not a hard quiz, considering the context.)

It’s hard not to feel, reading this collection, like someone reached into your brain, took out the half-baked stuff you talk about with your friends, researched it, lived it, and represented it to you smarter and better and more thoroughly than you ever could. So read it in awe if you must, but read it.  –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives (2013)

Such is the sentence-level virtuosity of Aleksandar Hemon—the Bosnian-American writer, essayist, and critic—that throughout his career he has frequently been compared to the granddaddy of borrowed language prose stylists: Vladimir Nabokov. While it is, of course, objectively remarkable that anyone could write so beautifully in a language they learned in their twenties, what I admire most about Hemon’s work is the way in which he infuses every essay and story and novel with both a deep humanity and a controlled (but never subdued) fury. He can also be damn funny. Hemon grew up in Sarajevo and left in 1992 to study in Chicago, where he almost immediately found himself stranded, forced to watch from afar as his beloved home city was subjected to a relentless four-year bombardment, the longest siege of a capital in the history of modern warfare. This extraordinary memoir-in-essays is many things: it’s a love letter to both the family that raised him and the family he built in exile; it’s a rich, joyous, and complex portrait of a place the 90s made synonymous with war and devastation; and it’s an elegy for the wrenching loss of precious things. There’s an essay about coming of age in Sarajevo and another about why he can’t bring himself to leave Chicago. There are stories about relationships forged and maintained on the soccer pitch or over the chessboard, and stories about neighbors and mentors turned monstrous by ethnic prejudice. As a chorus they sing with insight, wry humor, and unimaginable sorrow. I am not exaggerating when I say that the collection’s devastating final piece, “The Aquarium”—which details his infant daughter’s brain tumor and the agonizing months which led up to her death—remains the most painful essay I have ever read.  –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

Of every essay in my relentlessly earmarked copy of Braiding Sweetgrass , Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s gorgeously rendered argument for why and how we should keep going, there’s one that especially hits home: her account of professor-turned-forester Franz Dolp. When Dolp, several decades ago, revisited the farm that he had once shared with his ex-wife, he found a scene of destruction: The farm’s new owners had razed the land where he had tried to build a life. “I sat among the stumps and the swirling red dust and I cried,” he wrote in his journal.

So many in my generation (and younger) feel this kind of helplessness–and considerable rage–at finding ourselves newly adult in a world where those in power seem determined to abandon or destroy everything that human bodies have always needed to survive: air, water, land. Asking any single book to speak to this helplessness feels unfair, somehow; yet, Braiding Sweetgrass does, by weaving descriptions of indigenous tradition with the environmental sciences in order to show what survival has looked like over the course of many millennia. Kimmerer’s essays describe her personal experience as a Potawotami woman, plant ecologist, and teacher alongside stories of the many ways that humans have lived in relationship to other species. Whether describing Dolp’s work–he left the stumps for a life of forest restoration on the Oregon coast–or the work of others in maple sugar harvesting, creating black ash baskets, or planting a Three Sisters garden of corn, beans, and squash, she brings hope. “In ripe ears and swelling fruit, they counsel us that all gifts are multiplied in relationship,” she writes of the Three Sisters, which all sustain one another as they grow. “This is how the world keeps going.”  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Hilton Als, White Girls (2013)

In a world where we are so often reduced to one essential self, Hilton Als’ breathtaking book of critical essays, White Girls , which meditates on the ways he and other subjects read, project and absorb parts of white femininity, is a radically liberating book. It’s one of the only works of critical thinking that doesn’t ask the reader, its author or anyone he writes about to stoop before the doorframe of complete legibility before entering. Something he also permitted the subjects and readers of his first book, the glorious book-length essay, The Women , a series of riffs and psychological portraits of Dorothy Dean, Owen Dodson, and the author’s own mother, among others. One of the shifts of that book, uncommon at the time, was how it acknowledges the way we inhabit bodies made up of variously gendered influences. To read White Girls now is to experience the utter freedom of this gift and to marvel at Als’ tremendous versatility and intelligence.

He is easily the most diversely talented American critic alive. He can write into genres like pop music and film where being part of an audience is a fantasy happening in the dark. He’s also wired enough to know how the art world builds reputations on the nod of rich white patrons, a significant collision in a time when Jean-Michel Basquiat is America’s most expensive modern artist. Als’ swerving and always moving grip on performance means he’s especially good on describing the effect of art which is volatile and unstable and built on the mingling of made-up concepts and the hard fact of their effect on behavior, such as race. Writing on Flannery O’Connor for instance he alone puts a finger on her “uneasy and unavoidable union between black and white, the sacred and the profane, the shit and the stars.” From Eminem to Richard Pryor, André Leon Talley to Michael Jackson, Als enters the life and work of numerous artists here who turn the fascinations of race and with whiteness into fury and song and describes the complexity of their beauty like his life depended upon it. There are also brief memoirs here that will stop your heart. This is an essential work to understanding American culture.  –John Freeman, Executive Editor

Eula Biss, On Immunity (2014)

We move through the world as if we can protect ourselves from its myriad dangers, exercising what little agency we have in an effort to keep at bay those fears that gather at the edges of any given life: of loss, illness, disaster, death. It is these fears—amplified by the birth of her first child—that Eula Biss confronts in her essential 2014 essay collection, On Immunity . As any great essayist does, Biss moves outward in concentric circles from her own very private view of the world to reveal wider truths, discovering as she does a culture consumed by anxiety at the pervasive toxicity of contemporary life. As Biss interrogates this culture—of privilege, of whiteness—she interrogates herself, questioning the flimsy ways in which we arm ourselves with science or superstition against the impurities of daily existence.

Five years on from its publication, it is dismaying that On Immunity feels as urgent (and necessary) a defense of basic science as ever. Vaccination, we learn, is derived from vacca —for cow—after the 17th-century discovery that a small application of cowpox was often enough to inoculate against the scourge of smallpox, an etymological digression that belies modern conspiratorial fears of Big Pharma and its vaccination agenda. But Biss never scolds or belittles the fears of others, and in her generosity and openness pulls off a neat (and important) trick: insofar as we are of the very world we fear, she seems to be suggesting, we ourselves are impure, have always been so, permeable, vulnerable, yet so much stronger than we think.  –Jonny Diamond, Editor-in-Chief 

Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions (2016)

When Rebecca Solnit’s essay, “Men Explain Things to Me,” was published in 2008, it quickly became a cultural phenomenon unlike almost any other in recent memory, assigning language to a behavior that almost every woman has witnessed—mansplaining—and, in the course of identifying that behavior, spurring a movement, online and offline, to share the ways in which patriarchal arrogance has intersected all our lives. (It would also come to be the titular essay in her collection published in 2014.) The Mother of All Questions follows up on that work and takes it further in order to examine the nature of self-expression—who is afforded it and denied it, what institutions have been put in place to limit it, and what happens when it is employed by women. Solnit has a singular gift for describing and decoding the misogynistic dynamics that govern the world so universally that they can seem invisible and the gendered violence that is so common as to seem unremarkable; this naming is powerful, and it opens space for sharing the stories that shape our lives.

The Mother of All Questions, comprised of essays written between 2014 and 2016, in many ways armed us with some of the tools necessary to survive the gaslighting of the Trump years, in which many of us—and especially women—have continued to hear from those in power that the things we see and hear do not exist and never existed. Solnit also acknowledges that labels like “woman,” and other gendered labels, are identities that are fluid in reality; in reviewing the book for The New Yorker , Moira Donegan suggested that, “One useful working definition of a woman might be ‘someone who experiences misogyny.'” Whichever words we use, Solnit writes in the introduction to the book that “when words break through unspeakability, what was tolerated by a society sometimes becomes intolerable.” This storytelling work has always been vital; it continues to be vital, and in this book, it is brilliantly done.  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends (2017)

The newly minted MacArthur fellow Valeria Luiselli’s four-part (but really six-part) essay  Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions  was inspired by her time spent volunteering at the federal immigration court in New York City, working as an interpreter for undocumented, unaccompanied migrant children who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. Written concurrently with her novel  Lost Children Archive  (a fictional exploration of the same topic), Luiselli’s essay offers a fascinating conceit, the fashioning of an argument from the questions on the government intake form given to these children to process their arrivals. (Aside from the fact that this essay is a heartbreaking masterpiece, this is such a  good  conceit—transforming a cold, reproducible administrative document into highly personal literature.) Luiselli interweaves a grounded discussion of the questionnaire with a narrative of the road trip Luiselli takes with her husband and family, across America, while they (both Mexican citizens) wait for their own Green Card applications to be processed. It is on this trip when Luiselli reflects on the thousands of migrant children mysteriously traveling across the border by themselves. But the real point of the essay is to actually delve into the real stories of some of these children, which are agonizing, as well as to gravely, clearly expose what literally happens, procedural, when they do arrive—from forms to courts, as they’re swallowed by a bureaucratic vortex. Amid all of this, Luiselli also takes on more, exploring the larger contextual relationship between the United States of America and Mexico (as well as other countries in Central America, more broadly) as it has evolved to our current, adverse moment.  Tell Me How It Ends  is so small, but it is so passionate and vigorous: it desperately accomplishes in its less-than-100-pages-of-prose what centuries and miles and endless records of federal bureaucracy have never been able, and have never cared, to do: reverse the dehumanization of Latin American immigrants that occurs once they set foot in this country.  –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Zadie Smith, Feel Free (2018)

In the essay “Meet Justin Bieber!” in Feel Free , Zadie Smith writes that her interest in Justin Bieber is not an interest in the interiority of the singer himself, but in “the idea of the love object”. This essay—in which Smith imagines a meeting between Bieber and the late philosopher Martin Buber (“Bieber and Buber are alternative spellings of the same German surname,” she explains in one of many winning footnotes. “Who am I to ignore these hints from the universe?”). Smith allows that this premise is a bit premise -y: “I know, I know.” Still, the resulting essay is a very funny, very smart, and un-tricky exploration of individuality and true “meeting,” with a dash of late capitalism thrown in for good measure. The melding of high and low culture is the bread and butter of pretty much every prestige publication on the internet these days (and certainly of the Twitter feeds of all “public intellectuals”), but the essays in Smith’s collection don’t feel familiar—perhaps because hers is, as we’ve long known, an uncommon skill. Though I believe Smith could probably write compellingly about anything, she chooses her subjects wisely. She writes with as much electricity about Brexit as the aforementioned Beliebers—and each essay is utterly engrossing. “She contains multitudes, but her point is we all do,” writes Hermione Hoby in her review of the collection in The New Republic . “At the same time, we are, in our endless difference, nobody but ourselves.”  –Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Tressie McMillan Cottom, Thick: And Other Essays (2019)

Tressie McMillan Cottom is an academic who has transcended the ivory tower to become the sort of public intellectual who can easily appear on radio or television talk shows to discuss race, gender, and capitalism. Her collection of essays reflects this duality, blending scholarly work with memoir to create a collection on the black female experience in postmodern America that’s “intersectional analysis with a side of pop culture.” The essays range from an analysis of sexual violence, to populist politics, to social media, but in centering her own experiences throughout, the collection becomes something unlike other pieces of criticism of contemporary culture. In explaining the title, she reflects on what an editor had said about her work: “I was too readable to be academic, too deep to be popular, too country black to be literary, and too naïve to show the rigor of my thinking in the complexity of my prose. I had wanted to create something meaningful that sounded not only like me, but like all of me. It was too thick.” One of the most powerful essays in the book is “Dying to be Competent” which begins with her unpacking the idiocy of LinkedIn (and the myth of meritocracy) and ends with a description of her miscarriage, the mishandling of black woman’s pain, and a condemnation of healthcare bureaucracy. A finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction, Thick confirms McMillan Cottom as one of our most fearless public intellectuals and one of the most vital.  –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Dissenting Opinions

The following books were just barely nudged out of the top ten, but we (or at least one of us) couldn’t let them pass without comment.

Elif Batuman, The Possessed (2010)

In The Possessed Elif Batuman indulges her love of Russian literature and the result is hilarious and remarkable. Each essay of the collection chronicles some adventure or other that she had while in graduate school for Comparative Literature and each is more unpredictable than the next. There’s the time a “well-known 20th-centuryist” gave a graduate student the finger; and the time when Batuman ended up living in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, for a summer; and the time that she convinced herself Tolstoy was murdered and spent the length of the Tolstoy Conference in Yasnaya Polyana considering clues and motives. Rich in historic detail about Russian authors and literature and thoughtfully constructed, each essay is an amalgam of critical analysis, cultural criticism, and serious contemplation of big ideas like that of identity, intellectual legacy, and authorship. With wit and a serpentine-like shape to her narratives, Batuman adopts a form reminiscent of a Socratic discourse, setting up questions at the beginning of her essays and then following digressions that more or less entreat the reader to synthesize the answer for herself. The digressions are always amusing and arguably the backbone of the collection, relaying absurd anecdotes with foreign scholars or awkward, surreal encounters with Eastern European strangers. Central also to the collection are Batuman’s intellectual asides where she entertains a theory—like the “problem of the person”: the inability to ever wholly capture one’s character—that ultimately layer the book’s themes. “You are certainly my most entertaining student,” a professor said to Batuman. But she is also curious and enthusiastic and reflective and so knowledgeable that she might even convince you (she has me!) that you too love Russian literature as much as she does. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist (2014)

Roxane Gay’s now-classic essay collection is a book that will make you laugh, think, cry, and then wonder, how can cultural criticism be this fun? My favorite essays in the book include Gay’s musings on competitive Scrabble, her stranded-in-academia dispatches, and her joyous film and television criticism, but given the breadth of topics Roxane Gay can discuss in an entertaining manner, there’s something for everyone in this one. This book is accessible because feminism itself should be accessible – Roxane Gay is as likely to draw inspiration from YA novels, or middle-brow shows about friendship, as she is to introduce concepts from the academic world, and if there’s anyone I trust to bridge the gap between high culture, low culture, and pop culture, it’s the Goddess of Twitter. I used to host a book club dedicated to radical reads, and this was one of the first picks for the club; a week after the book club met, I spied a few of the attendees meeting in the café of the bookstore, and found out that they had bonded so much over discussing  Bad Feminist  that they couldn’t wait for the next meeting of the book club to keep discussing politics and intersectionality, and that, in a nutshell, is the power of Roxane. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Rivka Galchen, Little Labors (2016)

Generally, I find stories about the trials and tribulations of child-having to be of limited appeal—useful, maybe, insofar as they offer validation that other people have also endured the bizarre realities of living with a tiny human, but otherwise liable to drift into the musings of parents thrilled at the simple fact of their own fecundity, as if they were the first ones to figure the process out (or not). But Little Labors is not simply an essay collection about motherhood, perhaps because Galchen initially “didn’t want to write about” her new baby—mostly, she writes, “because I had never been interested in babies, or mothers; in fact, those subjects had seemed perfectly not interesting to me.” Like many new mothers, though, Galchen soon discovered her baby—which she refers to sometimes as “the puma”—to be a preoccupying thought, demanding to be written about. Galchen’s interest isn’t just in her own progeny, but in babies in literature (“Literature has more dogs than babies, and also more abortions”), The Pillow Book , the eleventh-century collection of musings by Sei Shōnagon, and writers who are mothers. There are sections that made me laugh out loud, like when Galchen continually finds herself in an elevator with a neighbor who never fails to remark on the puma’s size. There are also deeper, darker musings, like the realization that the baby means “that it’s not permissible to die. There are days when this does not feel good.” It is a slim collection that I happened to read at the perfect time, and it remains one of my favorites of the decade. –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Charlie Fox, This Young Monster (2017)

On social media as in his writing, British art critic Charlie Fox rejects lucidity for allusion and doesn’t quite answer the Twitter textbox’s persistent question: “What’s happening?” These days, it’s hard to tell.  This Young Monster  (2017), Fox’s first book,was published a few months after Donald Trump’s election, and at one point Fox takes a swipe at a man he judges “direct from a nightmare and just a repulsive fucking goon.” Fox doesn’t linger on politics, though, since most of the monsters he looks at “embody otherness and make it into art, ripping any conventional idea of beauty to shreds and replacing it with something weird and troubling of their own invention.”

If clichés are loathed because they conform to what philosopher Georges Bataille called “the common measure,” then monsters are rebellious non-sequiturs, comedic or horrific derailments from a classical ideal. Perverts in the most literal sense, monsters have gone astray from some “proper” course. The book’s nine chapters, which are about a specific monster or type of monster, are full of callbacks to familiar and lesser-known media. Fox cites visual art, film, songs, and books with the screwy buoyancy of a savant. Take one of his essays, “Spook House,” framed as a stage play with two principal characters, Klaus (“an intoxicated young skinhead vampire”) and Hermione (“a teen sorceress with green skin and jet-black hair” who looks more like The Wicked Witch than her namesake). The chorus is a troupe of trick-or-treaters. Using the filmmaker Cameron Jamie as a starting point, the rest is free association on gothic decadence and Detroit and L.A. as cities of the dead. All the while, Klaus quotes from  Artforum ,  Dazed & Confused , and  Time Out. It’s a technical feat that makes fictionalized dialogue a conveyor belt for cultural criticism.

In Fox’s imagination, David Bowie and the Hydra coexist alongside Peter Pan, Dennis Hopper, and the maenads. Fox’s book reaches for the monster’s mask, not really to peel it off but to feel and smell the rubber schnoz, to know how it’s made before making sure it’s still snugly set. With a stylistic blend of arthouse suavity and B-movie chic,  This Young Monster considers how monsters in culture are made. Aren’t the scariest things made in post-production? Isn’t the creature just duplicity, like a looping choir or a dubbed scream? –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Elena Passarello, Animals Strike Curious Poses (2017)

Elena Passarello’s collection of essays Animals Strike Curious Poses picks out infamous animals and grants them the voice, narrative, and history they deserve. Not only is a collection like this relevant during the sixth extinction but it is an ambitious historical and anthropological undertaking, which Passarello has tackled with thorough research and a playful tone that rather than compromise her subject, complicates and humanizes it. Passarello’s intention is to investigate the role of animals across the span of human civilization and in doing so, to construct a timeline of humanity as told through people’s interactions with said animals. “Of all the images that make our world, animal images are particularly buried inside us,” Passarello writes in her first essay, to introduce us to the object of the book and also to the oldest of her chosen characters: Yuka, a 39,000-year-old mummified woolly mammoth discovered in the Siberian permafrost in 2010. It was an occasion so remarkable and so unfathomable given the span of human civilization that Passarello says of Yuka: “Since language is epically younger than both thought and experience, ‘woolly mammoth’ means, to a human brain, something more like time.” The essay ends with a character placing a hand on a cave drawing of a woolly mammoth, accompanied by a phrase which encapsulates the author’s vision for the book: “And he becomes the mammoth so he can envision the mammoth.” In Passarello’s hands the imagined boundaries between the animal, natural, and human world disintegrate and what emerges is a cohesive if baffling integrated history of life. With the accuracy and tenacity of a journalist and the spirit of a storyteller, Elena Passarello has assembled a modern bestiary worthy of contemplation and awe. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias (2019)

Esmé Weijun Wang’s collection of essays is a kaleidoscopic look at mental health and the lives affected by the schizophrenias. Each essay takes on a different aspect of the topic, but you’ll want to read them together for a holistic perspective. Esmé Weijun Wang generously begins The Collected Schizophrenias by acknowledging the stereotype, “Schizophrenia terrifies. It is the archetypal disorder of lunacy.” From there, she walks us through the technical language, breaks down the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual ( DSM-5 )’s clinical definition. And then she gets very personal, telling us about how she came to her own diagnosis and the way it’s touched her daily life (her relationships, her ideas about motherhood). Esmé Weijun Wang is uniquely situated to write about this topic. As a former lab researcher at Stanford, she turns a precise, analytical eye to her experience while simultaneously unfolding everything with great patience for her reader. Throughout, she brilliantly dissects the language around mental health. (On saying “a person living with bipolar disorder” instead of using “bipolar” as the sole subject: “…we are not our diseases. We are instead individuals with disorders and malfunctions. Our conditions lie over us like smallpox blankets; we are one thing and the illness is another.”) She pinpoints the ways she arms herself against anticipated reactions to the schizophrenias: high fashion, having attended an Ivy League institution. In a particularly piercing essay, she traces mental illness back through her family tree. She also places her story within more mainstream cultural contexts, calling on groundbreaking exposés about the dangerous of institutionalization and depictions of mental illness in television and film (like the infamous Slender Man case, in which two young girls stab their best friend because an invented Internet figure told them to). At once intimate and far-reaching, The Collected Schizophrenias is an informative and important (and let’s not forget artful) work. I’ve never read a collection quite so beautifully-written and laid-bare as this. –Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Ross Gay, The Book of Delights (2019)

When Ross Gay began writing what would become The Book of Delights, he envisioned it as a project of daily essays, each focused on a moment or point of delight in his day. This plan quickly disintegrated; on day four, he skipped his self-imposed assignment and decided to “in honor and love, delight in blowing it off.” (Clearly, “blowing it off” is a relative term here, as he still produced the book.) Ross Gay is a generous teacher of how to live, and this moment of reveling in self-compassion is one lesson among many in The Book of Delights , which wanders from moments of connection with strangers to a shade of “red I don’t think I actually have words for,” a text from a friend reading “I love you breadfruit,” and “the sun like a guiding hand on my back, saying everything is possible. Everything .”

Gay does not linger on any one subject for long, creating the sense that delight is a product not of extenuating circumstances, but of our attention; his attunement to the possibilities of a single day, and awareness of all the small moments that produce delight, are a model for life amid the warring factions of the attention economy. These small moments range from the physical–hugging a stranger, transplanting fig cuttings–to the spiritual and philosophical, giving the impression of sitting beside Gay in his garden as he thinks out loud in real time. It’s a privilege to listen. –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Honorable Mentions

A selection of other books that we seriously considered for both lists—just to be extra about it (and because decisions are hard).

Terry Castle, The Professor and Other Writings (2010) · Joyce Carol Oates, In Rough Country (2010) · Geoff Dyer, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (2011) · Christopher Hitchens, Arguably (2011) ·  Roberto Bolaño, tr. Natasha Wimmer, Between Parentheses (2011) · Dubravka Ugresic, tr. David Williams, Karaoke Culture (2011) · Tom Bissell, Magic Hours (2012)  · Kevin Young, The Grey Album (2012) · William H. Gass, Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts (2012) · Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey (2012) · Herta Müller, tr. Geoffrey Mulligan, Cristina and Her Double (2013) · Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams (2014)  · Meghan Daum, The Unspeakable (2014)  · Daphne Merkin, The Fame Lunches (2014)  · Charles D’Ambrosio, Loitering (2015) · Wendy Walters, Multiply/Divide (2015) · Colm Tóibín, On Elizabeth Bishop (2015) ·  Renee Gladman, Calamities (2016)  · Jesmyn Ward, ed. The Fire This Time (2016)  · Lindy West, Shrill (2016)  · Mary Oliver, Upstream (2016)  · Emily Witt, Future Sex (2016)  · Olivia Laing, The Lonely City (2016)  · Mark Greif, Against Everything (2016)  · Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood (2017)  · Sarah Gerard, Sunshine State (2017)  · Jim Harrison, A Really Big Lunch (2017)  · J.M. Coetzee, Late Essays: 2006-2017 (2017) · Melissa Febos, Abandon Me (2017)  · Louise Glück, American Originality (2017)  · Joan Didion, South and West (2017)  · Tom McCarthy, Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish (2017)  · Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can’t Kill Us Until they Kill Us (2017)  · Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power (2017)  ·  Samantha Irby, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life (2017)  · Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel (2018)  · Alice Bolin, Dead Girls (2018)  · Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here? (2018)  · Lorrie Moore, See What Can Be Done (2018)  · Maggie O’Farrell, I Am I Am I Am (2018)  · Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race (2018)  · Rachel Cusk, Coventry (2019)  · Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror (2019)  · Emily Bernard, Black is the Body (2019)  · Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard (2019)  · Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations (2019)  ·  Rachel Munroe, Savage Appetites (2019)  · Robert A. Caro,  Working  (2019) · Arundhati Roy, My Seditious Heart (2019).

Emily Temple

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Essay on 21st Century Literature

Students are often asked to write an essay on 21st Century Literature in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on 21st Century Literature

What is 21st century literature.

21st Century Literature is writing from the year 2000 onwards. It includes novels, poems, and plays. This period is marked by the use of digital technology and cultural diversity. Writers use the internet to share their work. They also explore themes like identity, globalization, and technology.

Features of 21st Century Literature

This literature is known for its variety. It has a mix of different styles, genres, and themes. Many books deal with real-world issues. They talk about politics, social changes, and personal struggles. Writers use simple language to express complex ideas.

Impact of Technology

Technology has a big role in this literature. Writers use it to create new forms of storytelling. E-books and audiobooks are popular. Online platforms allow writers to reach a global audience. They can also interact with readers in real-time.

Representation and Diversity

21st Century Literature is rich in diversity. It includes voices from different cultures, races, and genders. This literature challenges old ideas and promotes equality. It helps us understand different perspectives and experiences.

In conclusion, 21st Century Literature is a reflection of our time. It is shaped by technology and diversity. It offers a wide range of stories and ideas. This literature encourages us to think, learn, and grow.

250 Words Essay on 21st Century Literature

Introduction to 21st century literature.

21st century literature is the writing that’s been created from the year 2000 to now. It’s a time of great change and new thoughts. It’s a time when writers have more freedom and creativity than ever before.

One key feature of 21st century literature is diversity. Many writers from different backgrounds, cultures, and experiences are sharing their stories. This means you’ll find books about all kinds of people and places.

Technology’s Impact

Technology has also played a big role in shaping 21st century literature. With the internet and social media, writers can share their work with the world instantly. This has led to new types of writing, like blogs and tweets, becoming part of literature.

Themes and Genres

In terms of themes, 21st century literature often deals with issues like identity, diversity, and change. Also, many new genres have emerged, such as young adult fiction and graphic novels.

In conclusion, 21st century literature is rich and diverse. It reflects our changing world and the many voices within it. It’s an exciting time to be a reader and a writer.

500 Words Essay on 21st Century Literature

21st Century Literature is the term we use for books written and published in the years 2000 and onwards. This period has seen a lot of changes in how stories are told and what topics they cover. The digital age has also influenced how we read and write these books.

Topics and Themes

One of the key features of 21st Century Literature is the variety of topics it covers. Writers from all over the world have been telling stories about different cultures, experiences, and views. Many books talk about important issues like climate change, social justice, and mental health. These are topics that people care about a lot today.

Style and Form

The way stories are told in 21st Century Literature is also very different. Writers have been playing with the form and structure of their books. Some books might not have a clear start, middle, and end. Others might use different points of view or mix up the timeline. This makes the books more interesting and gives readers new ways to think about the story.

Influence of Technology

Technology has had a big impact on 21st Century Literature. E-books and audiobooks have become very popular. This means that people can read or listen to books on their phones or computers. It’s easier than ever to find and read books from different countries or in different languages. The internet has also made it possible for writers to share their work with the world without needing a traditional publisher.

21st Century Literature is also known for its focus on representation and diversity. Writers are telling stories about people from all walks of life. This includes people of different races, religions, genders, and sexual orientations. These stories help us understand and appreciate the experiences of people who might be different from us.

In conclusion, 21st Century Literature is a rich and exciting field. It covers a wide range of topics and uses new and innovative ways to tell stories. It’s influenced by technology and focused on representation and diversity. As readers, we’re lucky to have so many interesting books to choose from. As we move further into the 21st Century, it will be exciting to see how literature continues to evolve.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

• Essay on 21st Century Learners
• Essay on 21st Century Education
• Essay on 21st Century Communication

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The War-Prone and Chaotic 21st Century Essay

Introduction, weapons and mass destruction, the gap between the south and the north.

Bibliography

A number of challenges, ranging from economic, political to social, characterize the 21 st century. The main problems that confront all states in the global system are the preservation of sovereignty and promotion of national interests. In fact, states are concerned more with the promotion of national security.

Research shows that states would do everything within their power to protect their national borders. The emergence of global problems is indeed the main issue that threatens human life. The security of many states is at stake due to terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction.

Powerful states are threatened just as the weak states because terrorism does not spare any state. Moreover, there is always tension between the developed and the developing countries because of issues surrounding resource distribution.This article looks at some of the factors that have contributed to the prevalence of problems in the 21 st century. The article invokes a number of theories and incorporates the views of international relations scholars.

In the current international system, terrorism is the major threat facing all states. Countries are faced with both internal and external threats, but terrorism remains the major threat. Terrorism is a problem that cannot be resolved unless states delve into its origins.

Terrorists use violence to frustrate governments, irrespective of whether the country is developed or poor. In other words, no country or individual is spared by the heinous acts of terrorists. In the modern international system, there are various categories of terrorists, each with its own mode of operation.

Some terrorists threaten to use weapons of mass destruction while others resort to suicide bombing 1 . Scholars argue that terrorism is a result of depression, melancholy, hopelessness, helplessness, and defeat. Before the Cold War era, terrorism was not a big issue in the international system because extremist organizations were under the control of the US and the Soviet Union.

The hostilities between the US and the Soviet Union could not give room to terrorism. In fact, countries that were suspected to support terrorism were constantly frustrated.

It should be noted that there is no Leviathan in the international system, which is compared to the centralized government. This gives state and non-state actors an opportunity to act in a manner that is beneficial to them.

Moreover, there are weak and powerful states in the international system. Powerful states are well off in terms of military technology and development. In this regard, weak states feel threatened, which inspires them to develop some of the sophisticated weapons to counter the influence of powerful states.

Availability of weapons of mass destruction is another threat to the world security in the current international system, which has made the 21 st century the most disordered century in the human history. It is upon this that the Atomic Agency was created to supervise the production and distribution of weapons of mass destruction.

Before the Cold War, only powerful states, such as Russia and the US, had the capability of manufacturing weapons of mass destruction. However, these weapons could not be used to destroy life and property. In fact, the superpowers wanted to prove to each other that they were technologically competent.

They could not engage in war because they were mutually assured of destruction. Currently, a number of states have the ability to produce weapons of mass destruction. For instance, countries such as India and Pakistan have the ability to produce nuclear energy. This is very dangerous to the world security, especially when such weapons get into the hands of terrorism.

The ideas of Mearsheimer support the fact that the international system exists according to the Hobbestian state of nature meaning that life is short-lived, anarchic, brutal, and nasty 2 . This implies that each state is concerned with its national security. States would do everything to ensure that they achieve their national interests.

The third problem facing the world in the 21 st century is the increasing economic gap between poor and rich states. Studies show that the gap between the south and the north is always in the increase. The problems facing countries of the south is how to initiate development projects.

However, scholars blame colonialism for the problems that are currently facing developing countries, particularly in Africa. The effects of neocolonialism are severe in the 21 st century meaning that even the few available solutions are inapplicable. For instance, the issue of anger and insecurity cannot be resolved through provision of aid and monetary assistance.

Neocolonialists focus so much on establishing a cash economy by emphasizing on cash crops such as coffee and tea. This has always affected the agricultural policies of developing countries. Moreover, the infrastructural development was tempered with during colonialism, which is now haunting poor states in the 21 st century 3 .

This explains the reasons why weak states attempt to acquire nuclear energy. In the third assumption, Mearsheimer was of the view that states would always suspect the actions of each other because one state will never understand the intentions of the other. Due to this, states try as much as possible to match the policies of their counterparts in terms of economic and military development.

Since powerful states struggle to maintain their influence globally, they always apply repressive rules, which force weak states to repel. This has even complicated the situation in the 21 st century because weak states are forced to adopt policies that do not support their domestic economic policies.

Mearsheimer seems to agree with the ideas of liberalist scholars such as Aart Scholte and Brent Steele because actors in the international system are rational actors meaning that they understand the external environment. This view is misplaced because states cooperate only to achieve their national interests.

Steele suggests that states respect the internationally recognized laws. This view is actually inaccurate because powerful states are not even members of the internationally established organizations such as the International Criminal Court 4 . Scholte analyzed the role of global civil societies in the 21 st century.

Similarly, his analysis was misplaced because the activities of the civil groups are not always similar in all societies. Globalization is a political concept that is used to suppress and dictate policies to the poor states in the international system. This means that globalization benefits only the rich states.

Mearsheimer, John. The Tragedy of Great Power Politics . New York: Norton & Company, 2001.

Scholte, Aart. The Political Economy of Globalization . London: Macmillan, 2000.

Sciolino, Elaine. Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran . New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.

Steele, Brent. “Liberal-Idealism: A constructivist Critique.” International Studies Review 9.1 (2007): 23–52.

1 Elaine Sciolino, Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 98.

2 John Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: Norton & Company, 2001), 26.

3 Aart Scholte, The Political Economy of Globalization (London: Macmillan, 2000), 181.

4 Brent Steele, “Liberal-Idealism: A constructivist Critique,” International Studies Review 9.1 (2007): 29.

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IvyPanda. (2019, April 17). The War-Prone and Chaotic 21st Century. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-war-prone-and-chaotic-21st-century/

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IvyPanda . 2019. "The War-Prone and Chaotic 21st Century." April 17, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-war-prone-and-chaotic-21st-century/.

1. IvyPanda . "The War-Prone and Chaotic 21st Century." April 17, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-war-prone-and-chaotic-21st-century/.

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Essay on the world of the 21st century

It is all the transcendence of human race that people today reach the height of maximum luxury upgrading from the days of their very ancient Stone and Cave age. What human being has achieved today was once only a dream out of reach. But man’s curiosity—perhaps the most wonderful gift given to man by God was behind his quest leading to wholehearted efforts to convert all impossible dreams of yesteryears into reality.

Today in the 21st century, men have reasons enough to be proud for their unique achievements. From stepping into the moon of cloning genes, there has been a long list of tremendous success of science and technology. But restless people’s mind has still enough desire for even greater achievements. And there is every reason to believe that in the coming days many of such dreams would be possible for us.

Today at the starting days of the 21st century, Technology is the most pronouncing name all over the world. We are at the age of computer. Application of computer is becoming a common name in all aspects of life.

Computer now no longer remains only a laboratory kit. Its application ventures into industrial setups, health care facilities, educational institutions, banking systems, ticket booking counters, carrying out business proceedings, governmental jobs in fact in all aspects. Greater accuracy, more memory capacity and time saving ability of computer make people more and more interested towards its application.

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CD-ROMS have already ventured into conventional paper printings with their greater storage capacity and longer safety. Internet the name has already created history turning out the world into a global village.

Electronic commerce (E-com) is all set to create big bonanza in the 21st century where a man in India sitting with his computer could order his required assets at a market complex in America and within hours, he could get delivered his required assets at his doorstep. Software experts are continuing their efforts to create even new miracles.

Home works have already been carried out to regulate computer applications. Pirated software packages, leaving computer viruses in the net are creating havoc all over the world. The recent “love bug” menace stalled net application throughout the world for several hours leading billions of dollar loss incurred in the worldwide business proceedings. Need therefore now arises to have strict international cyber laws to prevent such crimes.

Medical science is yet another area where man has already gained big success. Bypass surgery organ transplantation, CAT scan, ultrasound, Keyhole surgery are the names that have given maximum safety to human life. Using modern equipment in human body, diagnosis and surgery has already created history. Computer application has given greater accuracy and sophisticated modes to medical facilities.

Telemedicine now makes possible distant treatment, where a patient can consult with his physician by pressing keys in the keyboard. In the coming days, it would have greater access where a patient sitting in India could consult and get treatment from a specialist in America. Application of robots in surgery is already under experiment in Western countries.

In the coming days of the 21st century where a surgeon could sit in his place and just by pressing keys perform surgery getting assistance from the robot. The recent success by the scientists in human gene mapping has marked another grand success in the field of medical science. Scientists now believe that it would be possible to have absolute treatment for diseases like cancer or AIDS in our coming days.

Like polio or pox, many other diseases would also be completely eradicated from our life. However, in the time of overall human health management, there remain many shortfalls. Inequality in human health security is a big defeat for medical science. High cost now becomes a factor where the rich can only afford to get specialised medical facilities.

For the poor, better medical facilities are still a distant dream. Large number of children still is dying of malnutrition in many African countries. Every day, more than 1000 women die all over the world in problems related to pregnancy and childbirth. In our country malaria and tuberculosis still cost large number of deaths. In many places, villagers nave still to depend on quacks since they cannot afford modern medical treatment.

What we now need is equality in terms of health care facilities. Let’s hope we achieve this goal in the coming days of the 21st century.

In the field of space science, there has been success beyond imagination. Once people dreamt of getting the moon in their hands. And today after stepping into the moon they are now dreaming of making holiday resorts at moon.

Success achieved in mission Mars has thrown new light on the possibility of life in other planets. Grand success achieved in space science has now led to spectacular achievements in the field of communications like E-mail, Internet, ISD system, mobile Tele system, fax etc. Recent revolution in TV broadcasting is also due to grand success achieved in the Space science.

In transport, air service system has already created revolution turning the world into an area of only a few hours of journey. Supersonic jets are now under trial, which would give fastest ever transport facilities. Railway system of transportation has achieved steep heights. Japan has already created history by introducing fastest ever electronic railway engine. Gradual decrease of conventional fuels like petroleum or coal has now led people to find out non-conventional fuel resources.

A vehicle driven with solar energy is already under trial. Solar energy would be the mains source of fuel in future, which would also be eco-friendly.

In the field of agriculture also, people’s efforts have led to tremendous achievements. Green revolution has created history all over the world Biotechnology has helped hybridization where scientists have come out with success in producing advanced varieties of high-yielding, disseat resistance or drought-resistance seeds.

With the assistance of satellites meteorological science has got new boost-up with early prediction of proper time management or water management for better cultivation. As has been reported scientists in Britain recently created a type of insect the can kill any other type of crop destructing pests. In the coming days man new evolutions are in the line which, would make possible even evolution are in the line which would make possible even better crop management.

In the field of nuclear science, scientists have already developed fission technology to produce greater energy. They have already learnt to produce nuclear energy from high-powered radioactive elements like plutonium, thorium or uranium. In the wake of decreasing stock of non-renewable sources, people have even learnt of making artificial radioactive material India’s Kamini Research Reactor has already set example using “Uranium 233”; a man-made fissionable material derived from thorium, as fuel.

Efforts have been continued to harness fusion of hydrogen atom. In the coming days of the 21st century, scientists would certainly come out with success trapping large amount of energy from fusion of hydrogen atoms, to be used in useful purposes.

Success of science and technology is tremendous. We have already achieved a lot and there is lot more to be achieved in the coming days. But where science and technology has made us materially rich in socioeconomic front, the world is also going to be a big loser. Man’s de; to achieve beyond limit has now threatened safety of human life.

We fast proceeding industrial setup, environmental pollution is becoming a common name. Vehicular pollution is fast growing at a pace emitting poisonous gases everyday in the environment. Number of patients suffering from respiratory ailments, skin diseases or other health hazards is increasing every day. Being one of the most polluted cities in the world, thousands of residents in Delhi are reportedly suffering from respiratory problems.

Green house effect is becoming a serious concern threatening world environment. With the increase of industrial activity and decrease of forest coverage, carbon-di-oxide level is rising in the environment at a rate faster than the normal resulting in rising of world temperatures. Scientists have reported melting of ice in the Polar Regions and rising of the sea level. It has now been predicted that by the mid of the 21st century, many islands and parts of the countries will submerge under sea.

Ozone depletion is yet another reality creating havoc in our life. Refrigerator, a success of science, has added luxury to our life, but the coolants used here now remain one of the major sources of chloro-floro- carbon (CFC), that causes depletion of the Ozone layer, the protection barrier of the poisonous ultraviolet light. With the influence of UV light, danger of skin cancer is rising tremendously.

As Darwin explained in his theory of evolution, to keep balance on earth every species need to keep its multiplication at a balanced rate. With excessive multiplication of human population, other species are downing their population rate. Several varieties of birds and animals are already extinct from our environment. With greater human establishment, forest coverage is fast reducing. Landslides, heavy rains leading to floods have now become the common occurrences.

Large-scale competition among the human beings has led to shortage of all conventional resources on the earth. For example, the scientists have predicted that by the mid of this century, the world would face big potable water crisis.

On the social front, disparity between the rich and the poor is increasing tremendously. Social tension is mounting steadily. People are going to be more and more mechanical. Joint family norms is now almost outdated.

People have become more and more self-centered. With lack of sympathy among the rich for the poor, social crimes are raising reducing safety to man’s life with deprived classes as also neo-rich taking to crime.

Disparity among the countries has also been rising. Countries have become more and thirstier to increase their influence. Various world organisations like WTO, UN, etc. have no longer remained fair in conducting their business. In these organisations, voice of the rich countries prevails to the neglect of the poor countries.

The North-South gap has been rising tremendously. Where the American and European countries are turning to be world’s heaven in terms of luxury, people of many African countries are dying of malnutrition, disease and death.

Political disparity is mounting among the global powers increasing regional tensions. Even after experiencing war havoc a number of times; nations do not seem to have learnt to avoid conflict. To show their own muscle power, countries have concentrated beefing up their stockpile of conventional and nuclear arms.

Again both economic and political disparity is giving birth to rebel groups within the countries. World terrorism is now creating havoc all over the world. Man is the most successful creation of God. And all human beings always seek mental peace perhaps the most wonderful gift of God. The revolution of scientific inventions was all started to give comfort and happiness to man’s life.

When Einstein evaluated his theory of relativity (E=mc2) perhaps he did not even imagine that one day men would apply it to enrich their stockpile of dreaded nuclear weapons. But very unfortunately people’s desires to feed beyond limit make them hawkish against one another. It took thousands of years to reach at today’s level of progress, but it will not take even a day to go back to our days of origin.

Fortunately a sane human mind can never desire for destruction. World efforts are continuing to ensure permanent peace. At the beginning of the 21st century, can we really hope of getting a world of love, unity and peace in our coming days? Religion which should be source of mental peace, universal brotherhood, and respect for other beliefs is now being misused to promote terrorism whether it is Kashmir, Chechnya, the Philippines or elsewhere by Islamic fundamentalists.

The unprovoked killing of innocent and devout pilgrims to Amarnath, the Nature-made (not man-made) Shiv lingam, in Jammu & Kashmir is a gruesome reminder to the extent where religious fanaticism has reached. Is it not better to be an atheist than theist, if such brutalities are to be heaped on human beings in the name of religion? Amar Nath symbolises God’s incarnation in snow to most, it is not Ram Janambhoomi-Babri Mosque dispute which should lead to inter- religion clashes.

Let man learn to co-exist that is the only wish of every peace-loving person for the 21st century.

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King Charles' polarizing portrait, explained by the artist himself

After a dramatic new portrait of King Charles III caused a stir around the world earlier this week, many art experts are weighing in with their opinions about the painting.

The bold portrait, painted by British artist Jonathan Yeo, is the first official portrait of the 75-year-old king since his  May 2023 coronation . It was unveiled inside Buckingham Palace on May 14.

The portrait, drenched in the color red, depicts Charles wearing the red military uniform of the Welsh Guards, as he sits with his hand on his sword, amid a vibrant red background. A monarch butterfly hovers over the king's right shoulder.

Yeo told the BBC that Charles himself approved of the contemporary portrait. He noted that when the king first saw a "half-done" version of the painting he was "initially mildly surprised by the strong color but otherwise he seemed to be smiling approvingly."

Camilla, the queen consort, also seemed to like the portrait, telling Yeo, "Yes, you’ve got him," when she first saw it, the artist recalled.

Still, like royal watchers around the globe, many in the art world are polarized in their response to Yeo's portrait.

Art critic Richard Morris  wrote on X , “I really like the portrait of King Charles by Jonathan Yeo — the go-to artist for slightly edgy but convincingly recognizable contemporary portraits; before photography, to have a great painter capture your real appearance you accepted the revelation of your flaws and your mortality. It’s what Yeo captures here.”

On the other hand, artist Robert Brinkerhoff, who teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island, tells TODAY.com he was surprised by the portrait when he saw it online.

"The instant I saw it, having no idea what to expect, I literally heard the word 'blood' in my head. It was a bit of a shock — all that red, dripped here and there and scrubbed on and scrubbed off," Brinkerhoff says.

Other art critics called it a " stylistic mess "

The king's "mottled" face and hands, which seemed to jump out from the background, says Brinkerhoff, add to the portrait's weird quality.

"The face is gentle, weary and a little sad. I feel less empathy for the face when I study the hands— which are a bit like talons. They’re not painted badly — they just evoke something a little monstrous to me," he tells TODAY.com.

Read on to learn more about what inspired Jonathan Yeo's painting of King Charles III.

Yeo wanted to put a 21st century spin on a traditional royal portrait

Yeo, who has previously painted  the queen consort  and the  late Duke of Edinburgh , told the BBC that he wanted his portrait of King Charles to break with the past.

Yeo opted to depict Charles in his military uniform of the Welsh Guards as he would be appear in the traditional royal portraiture of days past.

Charles was made Regimental Colonel of the Welsh Guards in 1975 and holds the position today.

He mixed it up, however, with his bold red color palette and the addition of the symbolic butterfly.

Yeo wanted the painting to “make reference to the traditions of royal portraiture but in a way that reflects a 21st century monarchy," he said in a statement released by Buckingham Palace on Dec. 14.

The symbolism of the color red

The royal family posted the first image of Yeo’s portrait May 14 on its official Instagram account . Many fans of the monarchy were shocked by the painting's blast of red color.

“I’m sorry but his portrait looks like he’s in hell,” one person wrote in the comments. 

"Without sounding rude this is the worst royal portrait I’ve ever seen," wrote another.

Others remarked that the red color reminded them of blood, violence and passion.

Brinkerhoff wonders if the red was meant to symbolize the violence in the royal family's past, or perhaps the emotions Charles has had to publicly suppress as one of the family's most prominent members.

"Is it the blood that has been shed as a result of British colonialism for centuries?" he says. "Is it the rarely seen, passionate emotion of a man constrained by generations of stiff convention and regal duty?"

Interpretations abound — but on his website , Yeo provided insight as to the use of the “vivid color.”

The red shades are meant to “echo the uniform’s bright red tunic, not only resonating with the royal heritage found in many historical portraits but also injecting a dynamic, contemporary jolt into the genre with its uniformly powerful hue.”

The meaning of the butterfly

Yeo included the image of a monarch butterfly in his portrait to illustrate Charles' evolving role in recent years, he told the BBC.

“In history of art, the butterfly symbolizes metamorphosis and rebirth,” explained Yeo, who was commissioned by The Drapers’ Company to paint Charles portrait in 2020 when he was still the Prince of Wales.

The butterfly, said Yeo, also represents the king's work for environmental causes, which “he has championed most of his life and certainly long before they became a mainstream conversation."

His website says the butterfly is a "visual contrast to the military steeliness of the uniform and sword." Butterflies also symbolize rebirth and transformation, representing Charles' transition into becoming king while the portrait was being created.

Yeo told the BBC the butterfly was Charles' own idea, chosen as a symbol for his reign.

“I said: ‘When schoolchildren are looking at this in 200 years and they’re looking at the who’s who of the monarchs, what clues can you give them?’

“He said: ‘What about a butterfly landing on my shoulder?’” It's worth noting the butterfly is a monarch .

Did royal family anticipate the intense reaction to the portrait?

Neither Yeo nor the royal family have commented on the divided response to Yeo's polarizing portrait.

"Charles himself is no stranger to art, so I think he knew what the effect and the reaction would be," Brinkerhoff says. "In that sense, it’s a pretty bold move — maybe even a little honorable — and I think that’s worth reflecting on. Controversy is usually more important than convention in art, even when the reactions are harsh.

"This is my favorite thing about the painting: it depicts a man with a lifetime of inherited history: he may be conceding all the weight of social constraints, public attention and bloody pursuit of power," he adds.

But ultimately, it's up to interpretation.

Gina Vivinetto is a writer for TODAY.com.

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Di college baseball's single-season home run leaders.

Georgia's Charlie Condon connected on his 34th home run of the season against South Carolina on May 9, 2024 to earn a spot in the DI college baseball record book. 

Condon's 34 homers are most in a DI baseball season since the BBCOR (bat-ball coefficient restitution) took effect for the 2011 season . His total surpasses Florida's Jac Caglianone, who hit 33 in 2023. Next on the list in the BBCOR era are Ivan Melendez (32 in 2022 for Texas), Brock Wilken (31 in 2023 for Wake Forest) and Kris Bryant (31 in 2013 for San Diego). 

At the top of the all-time list, you'll find Oklahoma State's Pete Incaviglia with 48 home runs through 75 games in 1985. Incaviglia holds several NCAA baseball records, including most home runs in a career , most total bases in a season, most RBIs in a season and best slugging percentage in a season.

Here are the all-time single-season home-run leaders in NCAA DI college baseball history (per the  NCAA.org record book )

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The 10 Best Spanish-Language Movies of the 21st Century, Ranked According to IMDb

Celebrating the brilliance of Spanish cinema.

The Spanish-speaking world has made a number of classics both old and modern, outstanding films that have stood the test of time as some of the finest movies of all time. This hasn't stopped in the 21st century, when countries like Mexico and Spain have continued to prove why their body of work has more than enough material to rival Hollywood.

On IMDb, users have been raving about some of these modern masterpieces for years, praising their ability to transcend the language barrier in delivering riveting stories populated by memorable characters and thought-provoking themes. From Pan's Labyrinth to Wild Tales , the 21st century has seen plenty of outstanding movies in Spanish.

10 'Roma' (2018)

IMDb Rating: 7.7/10

Roma is far and away the most intimate film of Alfonso Cuarón 's fruitful career. It's a drama drawing heavy inspiration from the director's own childhood and upbringing in the Roma neighborhood of Mexico City, and it's quite surprising that such a personal story struck a chord with so many audience members across the world.

The way Cuarón was able to capture the look, sound, and feel of '70s Mexico City is nothing short of admirable, and the narrative is more than gripping enough to make that atmosphere all the more valuable. It's definitely a slow-burner, but with a little patience, all movie fans will inevitably fall in love with this touching story about family, class, and culture.

9 'Y Tu Mamá También' (2001)

The title of Y Tu Mamá También , Cuarón's second film made in Mexico, translates to "and your mom, too." It's a fittingly unique and catchy title to an absolutely unforgettable drama about love and friendship, one of the most endearing queer stories in all of Mexican cinema, and one of the best road trip movies of all time .

The immaculate performances by leads Maribel Verdú , Gael García Bernal , and Diego Luna really help carry the story to the finish line, in an incredibly gut-wrenching ending of incredible emotional power. Sensual, funny, and entertaining from beginning to end, it's a movie whose naturalism and genuineness make it as poignant as it is fun.

8 'Nine Queens' (2000)

IMDb Rating: 7.9/10

Nine Queens is an incredible Argentinian crime drama about two con men trying to sell counterfeit stamps to a wealthy collector. Executed with unparalleled style and flair, the story of the film is as entertaining and satisfyingly twist-filled as any other caper movie you can find.

The style of the movie is really the main draw, imbued with a slick dynamism that makes all the twists and surprises all the more thrilling and satisfying. The story is engaging, the dialogue is sharp, the characters are intriguing, and Ricardo Darín is clearly having a blast proving why he's one of the country's most acclaimed actors.

7 'Talk to Her' (2002)

If you're at all familiar with Spanish cinema, you're bound to be familiar with Pedro Almodóvar . And if you're at all familiar with Almodóvar, surely you've heard of Talk to Her . One of the director's greatest modern works, the film is a devastating character study showcasing all of the auteur's greatest strengths as a filmmaker.

The director has a unique way of making his stories look and feel simple while packing incredible complexity under the surface, and Talk to Her is one of the best examples of this ability. With its nuanced characters and fascinatingly experimental concept, it tells a story far more emotional than the presentation would have you expect.

6 'The Sea Inside' (2004)

IMDb Rating: 8.0/10

Javier Bardem is one of Spain's most popular and celebrated actors, and for good reason. All it takes to understand why he's such an inimitable talent is watching The Sea Inside , a biopic where he plays Ramón Sampedro , who fought a decades-long campaign to win the right to end his life with dignity.

Sure, Bardem is amazing in the lead role, but his performance isn't the only thing that makes this Spanish drama so highly acclaimed by IMDb users. It's skillfully directed and sensitively written, while also being a great tear-jerking movie for those looking for a good cry.

5 'The Invisible Guest' (2016)

Oriol Paulo has been cementing himself as one of the most interesting new voices in the thriller genre in Spain, and The Invisible Guest is probably his best work. Tightly written and with more surprises than you could ever hope to see coming, it's the textbook definition of a great mystery thriller.

Alfred Hitchcock fans are guaranteed to have a blast with The Invisible Guest , which clearly draws inspiration from the master of suspense on more than one occasion. Some of its twists are more predictable than others, and a few are even a bit outlandish, but that's hardly an issue when the story and characters are so compelling.

4 'Wild Tales' (2014)

IMDb Rating: 8.1/10

As rare as they may be nowadays, there are numerous fantastic anthology films that prove this concept is far more than just a gimmick. Argentinian cinema experimented with that concept in 2014 with Wild Tales , one of the country's most popular and widely acclaimed films.

All of Wild Tales ' separate stories deal with the overarching theme of revenge, and they do so through a variety of tones, genres, and styles. Each of the vignettes is as irresistibly energetic, charming, and fun as the last, keeping a sense of momentum that not many other films of its kind manage to attain.

3 'Amores Perros' (2000)

The feature directing debut of Alejandro G. Iñárritu is still considered one of the greatest Mexican films ever made, and it isn't hard to see why. Through its sprawling narrative, it shows three stories that intersect in an explosive central set piece, and all have something in common: Themes of loyalty and human nature represented through the symbol of dogs.

Amores Perros isn't an easy movie to watch. It's violent, impressively dark, and pretty much devoid of any sense of hope or any feeling that resembles it. That's precisely what makes it so unforgettable, though. By the time the credits roll, you'll still be thinking about the engrossing story and all of its equally fascinating characters.

2 'The Secret In Their Eyes' (2009)

IMDb Rating: 8.2/10

Winner of a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar , The Secret In Their Eyes is probably the best Argentinian film of all time, and IMDb users evidently agree. With a mesmerizing atmosphere and rich symbolism, it carefully constructs a riveting narrative about violence, love, and human passion.

Is it the marvelous performances? The richly intricate script full of surprises that'll please any mystery thriller fan? The pristine visuals that make the atmosphere of the film utterly enveloping? Whatever it is, none can deny that The Secret In Their Eyes is an amazing movie more than worthy of its fame.

1 'Pan's Labyrinth' (2006)

There are movies that transcend the language barrier, and then there are movies like Pan's Labyrinth , which transcend the screen altogether. Dark fantasy is never in better hands than in those of Guillermo del Toro , and this Mexican-Spanish coproduction is typically accepted to be the director's best work.

Pan's Labyrinth is grim, graphic, and vocal in its critique of fascism and violence; however, it also finds plenty of spaces to be a sweet and understated coming-of-age fantasy story, where audiences get to see the world through the innocent eyes of the protagonist. It's an incredible masterpiece, and it's no wonder why cinephiles on IMDb love it so much.

NEXT: The Best Spanish Horror Movies