essays about contemporary world

Essays About the Contemporary World: Top 5 Examples

We live in a very different world from the one our parents lived in; if you are writing essays about the contemporary world, you can start by reading essay examples.

The contemporary world refers to the circumstances and ideas of our current time. From costly conflicts to tremendous political developments to a global pandemic, it is safe to say that the 21st century has been quite chaotic. Recent events have put various issues including bodily autonomy, climate change, and territorial sovereignty, at the forefront of the global discussion.

A good understanding of the contemporary world helps us become more conscious, responsible citizens, no matter what country we are from. Therefore, many schools have included subjects such as “the contemporary world” or “contemporary issues” in their curricula. 

If you wish to write essays about the contemporary world, here are five essay examples to help you. 

You might also be interested in these essays about engineering and essays about cooperation .

1. Our Future Is Now by Francesca Minicozzi

2. what it may be like after the chaos by kassidy pratt, 3. does social media actually reflect reality by kalev leetaru.

• 4.  Importance of English by Terry Walton

5. The Meaning of Life in Modern Society (Author Unknown)

1. the effects of technology, 2. why you should keep up with current events, 3. college education: is it essential, 4. politics in the contemporary world, 5. modern contemporary issues.

Top 5 Examples of Essays About the Contemporary World

“Our globe is in dire need of help, and the coronavirus reminds the world of what it means to work together. This pandemic marks a turning point in global efforts to slow down climate change. The methods we enact towards not only stopping the spread of the virus, but slowing down climate change, will ultimately depict how humanity will arise once this pandemic is suppressed. The future of our home planet lies in how we treat it right now.”

Minicozzi discusses the differences in the U.K.’s and her native U.S.’s approaches to one of today’s greatest issues: climate change. The U.K. makes consistent efforts to reduce pollution, while the U.S., led by President Donald Trump, treats the issue with little to no regard. She laments her homeland’s inaction and concludes her essay with suggestions for Americans to help fight climate change in their way. 

“College began, in-person classes were allowed, but with half the students, all social distanced, wearing a mask at all times. Wearing a mask became natural, where leaving without one felt like I was leaving without my phone. It is our normal for now, and it has worked to slow the spread. With the vaccines beginning to roll out, we all hope that soon things will go back to the way

we remember them a year ago before the pandemic began.”

Pratt reflects on her school life throughout the COVID-19 pandemic in this short essay. She recalls the early days of class suspension, the lockdowns, and the social distancing and mask guidelines. She understands why it has to be this way but remains hopeful that things will return as they once were. 

You might be interested in these essays about cheating .

“While a tweet by Bieber to his tens of millions of followers will no doubt be widely read, it is unlikely that his musings on the Syrian peace process will suddenly sway the warring factions and yield overnight peace. In fact, this is a common limitation of many social analyses: the lack of connection between social reality and physical reality. A person who is highly influential in the conversation on Twitter around a particular topic may or may not yield any influence in the real world on that topic.”

Leetaru criticizes the perception that social media gives users that what they see is an accurate representation of contemporary worldviews. However, this is not the case, as the content that social media shows you are based on your interactions with other content, and specific demographics dominate these platforms. As a result, people should be more aware that not everything they read on social media is accurate. 

4.   Importance of English by Terry Walton

“We can use English to develop ourselves culturally and materially so that we can compete with the best side in the world of mind and matter. We can say that English language is our window to the world. One of advantage is that it is the world most used business and political language. Those who are still unaware about the importance of English. They should start learning English as a time come when everything would be understood spoken and written in English.”

According to author Terry Walton, proficiency in the English language is vital in today’s world. He discusses its status as a lingua franca used by people worldwide. He also lists some of the ways English is used today, such as in business, science and technology, and education. 

“The socialites have ensured the meaning of life is to push their followers beyond their healthy lives by making them feel that they are only worthy of keeping tabs on the next big thing that they are engaging. These socialites have ensured that life has been reduced to the detrimental appraisal of egos. They have guaranteed that the experience of social media is the only life worth living in the modern society.”

This essay describes the idea in contemporary culture that prioritizes social media image over well-being. People have become so obsessed with monitoring likes and follow that their lives revolve around social media. We seldom genuinely know a person based on their online presence. The meaning of life is reduced to the idea of a “good” life rather than the true reality. 

Top Prompts On Essays About the Contemporary World

Technology is everywhere in our life –  in social media, internet services, and artificial intelligence. How do you think technology affects the world today, and how will it affect the future? If this topic seems too broad, you can focus on technology in one particular sector, such as education or medicine. Describe the common technologies used in everyday life, and discuss the benefits and disadvantages of relying on these technologies.

In your essay, you can write about the importance of being aware of whatever is happening in the contemporary world. Discuss lessons you can learn from current events and the advantages of being more conscious or knowledgeable in day-to-day life.

In the 21st century, we have heard many success stories of people who dropped out or did not attend college. In addition, more and more job opportunities no longer require a college degree. Decide whether or not a college education is still necessary in the contemporary world and discuss why. Also include context, such as reasons why people do not attend college.

Many countries have undergone drastic political changes, from coups d’état to wars to groundbreaking elections. In your essay, write about one important political event, global or in your home country, in the contemporary world. Provide context by giving the causes and effects of your chosen event. 

From vaccination to the racial justice movement to gun control. For your essay, you can pick a topic and explain your stance on it. Provide a defensible argument, and include ample evidence such as statistics, research, and news articles. 

Tip: If writing an essay sounds like a lot of work, simplify it. Write a simple 5 paragraph essay instead.

If you’d like to learn more, check out our guide on how to write an argumentative essay .

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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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The World We Live in Today: a Complex Landscape

Table of contents, globalization and interconnectedness, the digital revolution and information age, environmental concerns and sustainability, pursuit of inclusivity and social justice.

• Friedman, T. L. (2007). The World is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century. Picador.
• Castells, M. (2010). The Rise of the Network Society. Wiley-Blackwell.
• IPCC. (2021). Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge University Press.
• Sen, A. (2006). Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny. W. W. Norton & Company.
• Hickel, J. (2020). Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World. Penguin.

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How functional the theory of “the culture of fear” is in helping us to understand the relationship between risk and crime in the contemporary world, serving the marginalized: a matthew perspective, popular essay topics.

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50 Must-Read Contemporary Essay Collections

Essay collections: Like short stories, but TRUE! When you're in the mood for fact over fiction, check out these must-read contemporary essay collections.

Liberty Hardy

Liberty Hardy is an unrepentant velocireader, writer, bitey mad lady, and tattoo canvas. Turn-ons include books, books and books. Her favorite exclamation is “Holy cats!” Liberty reads more than should be legal, sleeps very little, frequently writes on her belly with Sharpie markers, and when she dies, she’s leaving her body to library science. Until then, she lives with her three cats, Millay, Farrokh, and Zevon, in Maine. She is also right behind you. Just kidding! She’s too busy reading. Twitter: @MissLiberty

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I feel like essay collections don’t get enough credit. They’re so wonderful! They’re like short story collections, but TRUE. It’s like going to a truth buffet. You can get information about sooooo many topics, sometimes in one single book! To prove that there are a zillion amazing essay collections out there, I compiled 50 great contemporary essay collections, just from the last 18 months alone.  Ranging in topics from food, nature, politics, sex, celebrity, and more, there is something here for everyone!

I’ve included a brief description from the publisher with each title. Tell us in the comments about which of these you’ve read or other contemporary essay collections that you love. There are a LOT of them. Yay, books!

Must-Read Contemporary Essay Collections

They can’t kill us until they kill us  by hanif abdurraqib.

“In an age of confusion, fear, and loss, Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib’s is a voice that matters. Whether he’s attending a Bruce Springsteen concert the day after visiting Michael Brown’s grave, or discussing public displays of affection at a Carly Rae Jepsen show, he writes with a poignancy and magnetism that resonates profoundly.”

Would Everybody Please Stop?: Reflections on Life and Other Bad Ideas  by Jenny Allen

“Jenny Allen’s musings range fluidly from the personal to the philosophical. She writes with the familiarity of someone telling a dinner party anecdote, forgoing decorum for candor and comedy. To read  Would Everybody Please Stop?  is to experience life with imaginative and incisive humor.”

Longthroat Memoirs: Soups, Sex and Nigerian Taste Buds  by Yemisi Aribisala

“A sumptuous menu of essays about Nigerian cuisine, lovingly presented by the nation’s top epicurean writer. As well as a mouth-watering appraisal of Nigerian food,  Longthroat Memoirs  is a series of love letters to the Nigerian palate. From the cultural history of soup, to fish as aphrodisiac and the sensual allure of snails,  Longthroat Memoirs  explores the complexities, the meticulousness, and the tactile joy of Nigerian gastronomy.”

Beyond Measure: Essays  by Rachel Z. Arndt

“ Beyond Measure  is a fascinating exploration of the rituals, routines, metrics and expectations through which we attempt to quantify and ascribe value to our lives. With mordant humor and penetrating intellect, Arndt casts her gaze beyond event-driven narratives to the machinery underlying them: judo competitions measured in weigh-ins and wait times; the significance of the elliptical’s stationary churn; the rote scripts of dating apps; the stupefying sameness of the daily commute.”

Magic Hours  by Tom Bissell

“Award-winning essayist Tom Bissell explores the highs and lows of the creative process. He takes us from the set of  The Big Bang Theory  to the first novel of Ernest Hemingway to the final work of David Foster Wallace; from the films of Werner Herzog to the film of Tommy Wiseau to the editorial meeting in which Paula Fox’s work was relaunched into the world. Originally published in magazines such as  The Believer ,  The New Yorker , and  Harper’s , these essays represent ten years of Bissell’s best writing on every aspect of creation—be it Iraq War documentaries or video-game character voices—and will provoke as much thought as they do laughter.”

Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession  by Alice Bolin

“In this poignant collection, Alice Bolin examines iconic American works from the essays of Joan Didion and James Baldwin to  Twin Peaks , Britney Spears, and  Serial , illuminating the widespread obsession with women who are abused, killed, and disenfranchised, and whose bodies (dead and alive) are used as props to bolster men’s stories. Smart and accessible, thoughtful and heartfelt, Bolin investigates the implications of our cultural fixations, and her own role as a consumer and creator.”

Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life  by Jenny Boully

“Jenny Boully’s essays are ripe with romance and sensual pleasures, drawing connections between the digression, reflection, imagination, and experience that characterizes falling in love as well as the life of a writer. Literary theory, philosophy, and linguistics rub up against memory, dreamscapes, and fancy, making the practice of writing a metaphor for the illusory nature of experience.  Betwixt and Between  is, in many ways, simply a book about how to live.”

Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give by Ada Calhoun

“In  Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give , Ada Calhoun presents an unflinching but also loving portrait of her own marriage, opening a long-overdue conversation about the institution as it truly is: not the happy ending of a love story or a relic doomed by high divorce rates, but the beginning of a challenging new chapter of which ‘the first twenty years are the hardest.'”

How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays  by Alexander Chee

“ How to Write an Autobiographical Novel  is the author’s manifesto on the entangling of life, literature, and politics, and how the lessons learned from a life spent reading and writing fiction have changed him. In these essays, he grows from student to teacher, reader to writer, and reckons with his identities as a son, a gay man, a Korean American, an artist, an activist, a lover, and a friend. He examines some of the most formative experiences of his life and the nation’s history, including his father’s death, the AIDS crisis, 9/11, the jobs that supported his writing—Tarot-reading, bookselling, cater-waiting for William F. Buckley—the writing of his first novel,  Edinburgh , and the election of Donald Trump.”

Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays  by Durga Chew-Bose

“ Too Much and Not the Mood is a beautiful and surprising exploration of what it means to be a first-generation, creative young woman working today. On April 11, 1931, Virginia Woolf ended her entry in A Writer’s Diary with the words ‘too much and not the mood’ to describe her frustration with placating her readers, what she described as the ‘cramming in and the cutting out.’ She wondered if she had anything at all that was truly worth saying. The attitude of that sentiment inspired Durga Chew-Bose to gather own writing in this lyrical collection of poetic essays that examine personhood and artistic growth. Drawing inspiration from a diverse group of incisive and inquiring female authors, Chew-Bose captures the inner restlessness that keeps her always on the brink of creative expression.”

We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy  by Ta-Nehisi Coates

“‘We were eight years in power’ was the lament of Reconstruction-era black politicians as the American experiment in multiracial democracy ended with the return of white supremacist rule in the South. In this sweeping collection of new and selected essays, Ta-Nehisi Coates explores the tragic echoes of that history in our own time: the unprecedented election of a black president followed by a vicious backlash that fueled the election of the man Coates argues is America’s ‘first white president.'”

Look Alive Out There: Essays by Sloane Crosley

“In  Look Alive Out There,  whether it’s scaling active volcanoes, crashing shivas, playing herself on  Gossip Girl,  befriending swingers, or squinting down the barrel of the fertility gun, Crosley continues to rise to the occasion with unmatchable nerve and electric one-liners. And as her subjects become more serious, her essays deliver not just laughs but lasting emotional heft and insight. Crosley has taken up the gauntlets thrown by her predecessors—Dorothy Parker, Nora Ephron, David Sedaris—and crafted something rare, affecting, and true.”

Fl â neuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London  by Lauren Elkin

“Part cultural meander, part memoir,  Flâneuse  takes us on a distinctly cosmopolitan jaunt that begins in New York, where Elkin grew up, and transports us to Paris via Venice, Tokyo, and London, all cities in which she’s lived. We are shown the paths beaten by such  flâneuses  as the cross-dressing nineteenth-century novelist George Sand, the Parisian artist Sophie Calle, the wartime correspondent Martha Gellhorn, and the writer Jean Rhys. With tenacity and insight, Elkin creates a mosaic of what urban settings have meant to women, charting through literature, art, history, and film the sometimes exhilarating, sometimes fraught relationship that women have with the metropolis.”

Idiophone  by Amy Fusselman

“Leaping from ballet to quiltmaking, from the The Nutcracker to an Annie-B Parson interview,  Idiophone  is a strikingly original meditation on risk-taking and provocation in art and a unabashedly honest, funny, and intimate consideration of art-making in the context of motherhood, and motherhood in the context of addiction. Amy Fusselman’s compact, beautifully digressive essay feels both surprising and effortless, fueled by broad-ranging curiosity, and, fundamentally, joy.”

Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture  by Roxane Gay

“In this valuable and revealing anthology, cultural critic and bestselling author Roxane Gay collects original and previously published pieces that address what it means to live in a world where women have to measure the harassment, violence, and aggression they face, and where they are ‘routinely second-guessed, blown off, discredited, denigrated, besmirched, belittled, patronized, mocked, shamed, gaslit, insulted, bullied’ for speaking out.”

Sunshine State: Essays  by Sarah Gerard

“With the personal insight of  The Empathy Exams , the societal exposal of  Nickel and Dimed , and the stylistic innovation and intensity of her own break-out debut novel  Binary Star , Sarah Gerard’s  Sunshine State  uses the intimately personal to unearth the deep reservoirs of humanity buried in the corners of our world often hardest to face.”

The Art of the Wasted Day  by Patricia Hampl

“ The Art of the Wasted Day  is a picaresque travelogue of leisure written from a lifelong enchantment with solitude. Patricia Hampl visits the homes of historic exemplars of ease who made repose a goal, even an art form. She begins with two celebrated eighteenth-century Irish ladies who ran off to live a life of ‘retirement’ in rural Wales. Her search then leads to Moravia to consider the monk-geneticist, Gregor Mendel, and finally to Bordeaux for Michel Montaigne—the hero of this book—who retreated from court life to sit in his chateau tower and write about whatever passed through his mind, thus inventing the personal essay.”

A Really Big Lunch: The Roving Gourmand on Food and Life  by Jim Harrison

“Jim Harrison’s legendary gourmandise is on full display in  A Really Big Lunch . From the titular  New Yorker  piece about a French lunch that went to thirty-seven courses, to pieces from  Brick ,  Playboy , Kermit Lynch Newsletter, and more on the relationship between hunter and prey, or the obscure language of wine reviews,  A Really Big Lunch  is shot through with Harrison’s pointed aperçus and keen delight in the pleasures of the senses. And between the lines the pieces give glimpses of Harrison’s life over the last three decades.  A Really Big Lunch  is a literary delight that will satisfy every appetite.”

Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me  by Bill Hayes

“Bill Hayes came to New York City in 2009 with a one-way ticket and only the vaguest idea of how he would get by. But, at forty-eight years old, having spent decades in San Francisco, he craved change. Grieving over the death of his partner, he quickly discovered the profound consolations of the city’s incessant rhythms, the sight of the Empire State Building against the night sky, and New Yorkers themselves, kindred souls that Hayes, a lifelong insomniac, encountered on late-night strolls with his camera.”

Would You Rather?: A Memoir of Growing Up and Coming Out  by Katie Heaney

“Here, for the first time, Katie opens up about realizing at the age of twenty-eight that she is gay. In these poignant, funny essays, she wrestles with her shifting sexuality and identity, and describes what it was like coming out to everyone she knows (and everyone she doesn’t). As she revisits her past, looking for any ‘clues’ that might have predicted this outcome, Katie reveals that life doesn’t always move directly from point A to point B—no matter how much we would like it to.”

Tonight I’m Someone Else: Essays  by Chelsea Hodson

“From graffiti gangs and  Grand Theft Auto  to sugar daddies, Schopenhauer, and a deadly game of Russian roulette, in these essays, Chelsea Hodson probes her own desires to examine where the physical and the proprietary collide. She asks what our privacy, our intimacy, and our own bodies are worth in the increasingly digital world of liking, linking, and sharing.”

We Are Never Meeting in Real Life.: Essays  by Samantha Irby

“With  We Are Never Meeting in Real Life. , ‘bitches gotta eat’ blogger and comedian Samantha Irby turns the serio-comic essay into an art form. Whether talking about how her difficult childhood has led to a problem in making ‘adult’ budgets, explaining why she should be the new Bachelorette—she’s ’35-ish, but could easily pass for 60-something’—detailing a disastrous pilgrimage-slash-romantic-vacation to Nashville to scatter her estranged father’s ashes, sharing awkward sexual encounters, or dispensing advice on how to navigate friendships with former drinking buddies who are now suburban moms—hang in there for the Costco loot—she’s as deft at poking fun at the ghosts of her past self as she is at capturing powerful emotional truths.”

This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America  by Morgan Jerkins

“Doubly disenfranchised by race and gender, often deprived of a place within the mostly white mainstream feminist movement, black women are objectified, silenced, and marginalized with devastating consequences, in ways both obvious and subtle, that are rarely acknowledged in our country’s larger discussion about inequality. In  This Will Be My Undoing , Jerkins becomes both narrator and subject to expose the social, cultural, and historical story of black female oppression that influences the black community as well as the white, male-dominated world at large.”

Everywhere Home: A Life in Essays  by Fenton Johnson

“Part retrospective, part memoir, Fenton Johnson’s collection  Everywhere Home: A Life in Essays  explores sexuality, religion, geography, the AIDS crisis, and more. Johnson’s wanderings take him from the hills of Kentucky to those of San Francisco, from the streets of Paris to the sidewalks of Calcutta. Along the way, he investigates questions large and small: What’s the relationship between artists and museums, illuminated in a New Guinean display of shrunken heads? What’s the difference between empiricism and intuition?”

One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter: Essays  by Scaachi Koul

“In  One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter , Scaachi Koul deploys her razor-sharp humor to share all the fears, outrages, and mortifying moments of her life. She learned from an early age what made her miserable, and for Scaachi anything can be cause for despair. Whether it’s a shopping trip gone awry; enduring awkward conversations with her bikini waxer; overcoming her fear of flying while vacationing halfway around the world; dealing with Internet trolls, or navigating the fears and anxieties of her parents. Alongside these personal stories are pointed observations about life as a woman of color: where every aspect of her appearance is open for critique, derision, or outright scorn; where strict gender rules bind in both Western and Indian cultures, leaving little room for a woman not solely focused on marriage and children to have a career (and a life) for herself.”

Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions  by Valeria Luiselli and jon lee anderson (translator)

“A damning confrontation between the American dream and the reality of undocumented children seeking a new life in the U.S. Structured around the 40 questions Luiselli translates and asks undocumented Latin American children facing deportation,  Tell Me How It Ends  (an expansion of her 2016 Freeman’s essay of the same name) humanizes these young migrants and highlights the contradiction between the idea of America as a fiction for immigrants and the reality of racism and fear—both here and back home.”

All the Lives I Want: Essays About My Best Friends Who Happen to Be Famous Strangers  by Alana Massey

“Mixing Didion’s affected cool with moments of giddy celebrity worship, Massey examines the lives of the women who reflect our greatest aspirations and darkest fears back onto us. These essays are personal without being confessional and clever in a way that invites readers into the joke. A cultural critique and a finely wrought fan letter, interwoven with stories that are achingly personal, All the Lives I Want is also an exploration of mental illness, the sex industry, and the dangers of loving too hard.”

Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish: Essays  by Tom McCarthy

“Certain points of reference recur with dreamlike insistence—among them the artist Ed Ruscha’s  Royal Road Test , a photographic documentation of the roadside debris of a Royal typewriter hurled from the window of a traveling car; the great blooms of jellyfish that are filling the oceans and gumming up the machinery of commerce and military domination—and the question throughout is: How can art explode the restraining conventions of so-called realism, whether aesthetic or political, to engage in the active reinvention of the world?”

Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump’s America  by Samhita Mukhopadhyay and Kate Harding

“When 53 percent of white women voted for Donald Trump and 94 percent of black women voted for Hillary Clinton, how can women unite in Trump’s America? Nasty Women includes inspiring essays from a diverse group of talented women writers who seek to provide a broad look at how we got here and what we need to do to move forward.”

Don’t Call Me Princess: Essays on Girls, Women, Sex, and Life  by Peggy Orenstein

“Named one of the ’40 women who changed the media business in the last 40 years’ by  Columbia Journalism Review , Peggy Orenstein is one of the most prominent, unflinching feminist voices of our time. Her writing has broken ground and broken silences on topics as wide-ranging as miscarriage, motherhood, breast cancer, princess culture and the importance of girls’ sexual pleasure. Her unique blend of investigative reporting, personal revelation and unexpected humor has made her books bestselling classics.”

When You Find Out the World Is Against You: And Other Funny Memories About Awful Moments  by Kelly Oxford

“Kelly Oxford likes to blow up the internet. Whether it is with the kind of Tweets that lead  Rolling Stone  to name her one of the Funniest People on Twitter or with pictures of her hilariously adorable family (human and animal) or with something much more serious, like creating the hashtag #NotOkay, where millions of women came together to share their stories of sexual assault, Kelly has a unique, razor-sharp perspective on modern life. As a screen writer, professional sh*t disturber, wife and mother of three, Kelly is about everything but the status quo.”

Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman  by Anne Helen Petersen

“You know the type: the woman who won’t shut up, who’s too brazen, too opinionated—too much. She’s the unruly woman, and she embodies one of the most provocative and powerful forms of womanhood today. In  Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud , Anne Helen Petersen uses the lens of ‘unruliness’ to explore the ascension of pop culture powerhouses like Lena Dunham, Nicki Minaj, and Kim Kardashian, exploring why the public loves to love (and hate) these controversial figures. With its brisk, incisive analysis,  Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud  will be a conversation-starting book on what makes and breaks celebrity today.”

Well, That Escalated Quickly: Memoirs and Mistakes of an Accidental Activist  by Franchesca Ramsey

“In her first book, Ramsey uses her own experiences as an accidental activist to explore the many ways we communicate with each other—from the highs of bridging gaps and making connections to the many pitfalls that accompany talking about race, power, sexuality, and gender in an unpredictable public space…the internet.”

Shrewed: A Wry and Closely Observed Look at the Lives of Women and Girls  by Elizabeth Renzetti

“Drawing upon Renzetti’s decades of reporting on feminist issues,  Shrewed  is a book about feminism’s crossroads. From Hillary Clinton’s failed campaign to the quest for equal pay, from the lessons we can learn from old ladies to the future of feminism in a turbulent world, Renzetti takes a pointed, witty look at how far we’ve come—and how far we have to go.”

What Are We Doing Here?: Essays  by Marilynne Robinson

“In this new essay collection she trains her incisive mind on our modern political climate and the mysteries of faith. Whether she is investigating how the work of great thinkers about America like Emerson and Tocqueville inform our political consciousness or discussing the way that beauty informs and disciplines daily life, Robinson’s peerless prose and boundless humanity are on full display.”

Double Bind: Women on Ambition  by Robin Romm

“‘A work of courage and ferocious honesty’ (Diana Abu-Jaber),  Double Bind  could not come at a more urgent time. Even as major figures from Gloria Steinem to Beyoncé embrace the word ‘feminism,’ the word ‘ambition’ remains loaded with ambivalence. Many women see it as synonymous with strident or aggressive, yet most feel compelled to strive and achieve—the seeming contradiction leaving them in a perpetual double bind. Ayana Mathis, Molly Ringwald, Roxane Gay, and a constellation of ‘nimble thinkers . . . dismantle this maddening paradox’ ( O, The Oprah Magazine ) with candor, wit, and rage. Women who have made landmark achievements in fields as diverse as law, dog sledding, and butchery weigh in, breaking the last feminist taboo once and for all.”

The Destiny Thief: Essays on Writing, Writers and Life  by Richard Russo

“In these nine essays, Richard Russo provides insight into his life as a writer, teacher, friend, and reader. From a commencement speech he gave at Colby College, to the story of how an oddly placed toilet made him reevaluate the purpose of humor in art and life, to a comprehensive analysis of Mark Twain’s value, to his harrowing journey accompanying a dear friend as she pursued gender-reassignment surgery,  The Destiny Thief  reflects the broad interests and experiences of one of America’s most beloved authors. Warm, funny, wise, and poignant, the essays included here traverse Russo’s writing life, expanding our understanding of who he is and how his singular, incredibly generous mind works. An utter joy to read, they give deep insight into the creative process from the prospective of one of our greatest writers.”

Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race by Naben Ruthnum

“Curry is a dish that doesn’t quite exist, but, as this wildly funny and sharp essay points out, a dish that doesn’t properly exist can have infinite, equally authentic variations. By grappling with novels, recipes, travelogues, pop culture, and his own upbringing, Naben Ruthnum depicts how the distinctive taste of curry has often become maladroit shorthand for brown identity. With the sardonic wit of Gita Mehta’s  Karma Cola  and the refined, obsessive palette of Bill Buford’s  Heat , Ruthnum sinks his teeth into the story of how the beloved flavor calcified into an aesthetic genre that limits the imaginations of writers, readers, and eaters.”

The River of Consciousness  by Oliver Sacks

“Sacks, an Oxford-educated polymath, had a deep familiarity not only with literature and medicine but with botany, animal anatomy, chemistry, the history of science, philosophy, and psychology.  The River of Consciousness  is one of two books Sacks was working on up to his death, and it reveals his ability to make unexpected connections, his sheer joy in knowledge, and his unceasing, timeless project to understand what makes us human.”

All the Women in My Family Sing: Women Write the World: Essays on Equality, Justice, and Freedom (Nothing But the Truth So Help Me God)  by Deborah Santana and America Ferrera

“ All the Women in My Family Sing  is an anthology documenting the experiences of women of color at the dawn of the twenty-first century. It is a vital collection of prose and poetry whose topics range from the pressures of being the vice-president of a Fortune 500 Company, to escaping the killing fields of Cambodia, to the struggles inside immigration, identity, romance, and self-worth. These brief, trenchant essays capture the aspirations and wisdom of women of color as they exercise autonomy, creativity, and dignity and build bridges to heal the brokenness in today’s turbulent world.”

We Wear the Mask: 15 True Stories of Passing in America  by Brando Skyhorse and Lisa Page

“For some, ‘passing’ means opportunity, access, or safety. Others don’t willingly pass but are ‘passed’ in specific situations by someone else.  We Wear the Mask , edited by  Brando Skyhorse  and  Lisa Page , is an illuminating and timely anthology that examines the complex reality of passing in America. Skyhorse, a Mexican American, writes about how his mother passed him as an American Indian before he learned who he really is. Page shares how her white mother didn’t tell friends about her black ex-husband or that her children were, in fact, biracial.”

Feel Free: Essays by Zadie Smith

“Since she burst spectacularly into view with her debut novel almost two decades ago, Zadie Smith has established herself not just as one of the world’s preeminent fiction writers, but also a brilliant and singular essayist. She contributes regularly to  The New Yorker  and the  New York Review of Books  on a range of subjects, and each piece of hers is a literary event in its own right.”

The Mother of All Questions: Further Reports from the Feminist Revolutions  by Rebecca Solnit

“In a timely follow-up to her national bestseller  Men Explain Things to Me , Rebecca Solnit offers indispensable commentary on women who refuse to be silenced, misogynistic violence, the fragile masculinity of the literary canon, the gender binary, the recent history of rape jokes, and much more. In characteristic style, Solnit mixes humor, keen analysis, and powerful insight in these essays.”

The Wrong Way to Save Your Life: Essays  by Megan Stielstra

“Whether she’s imagining the implications of open-carry laws on college campuses, recounting the story of going underwater on the mortgage of her first home, or revealing the unexpected pains and joys of marriage and motherhood, Stielstra’s work informs, impels, enlightens, and embraces us all. The result is something beautiful—this story, her courage, and, potentially, our own.”

Against Memoir: Complaints, Confessions & Criticisms  by Michelle Tea

“Delivered with her signature honesty and dark humor, this is Tea’s first-ever collection of journalistic writing. As she blurs the line between telling other people’s stories and her own, she turns an investigative eye to the genre that’s nurtured her entire career—memoir—and considers the price that art demands be paid from life.”

A Twenty Minute Silence Followed by Applause  by Shawn Wen

“In precise, jewel-like scenes and vignettes,  A Twenty Minute Silence Followed by Applause  pays homage to the singular genius of a mostly-forgotten art form. Drawing on interviews, archival research, and meticulously observed performances, Wen translates the gestural language of mime into a lyric written portrait by turns whimsical, melancholic, and haunting.”

Acid West: Essays  by Joshua Wheeler

“The radical evolution of American identity, from cowboys to drone warriors to space explorers, is a story rooted in southern New Mexico.  Acid West  illuminates this history, clawing at the bounds of genre to reveal a place that is, for better or worse, home. By turns intimate, absurd, and frightening,  Acid West  is an enlightening deep-dive into a prophetic desert at the bottom of America.”

Sexographies  by Gabriela Wiener and Lucy Greaves And jennifer adcock (Translators)

“In fierce and sumptuous first-person accounts, renowned Peruvian journalist Gabriela Wiener records infiltrating the most dangerous Peruvian prison, participating in sexual exchanges in swingers clubs, traveling the dark paths of the Bois de Boulogne in Paris in the company of transvestites and prostitutes, undergoing a complicated process of egg donation, and participating in a ritual of ayahuasca ingestion in the Amazon jungle—all while taking us on inward journeys that explore immigration, maternity, fear of death, ugliness, and threesomes. Fortunately, our eagle-eyed voyeur emerges from her narrative forays unscathed and ready to take on the kinks, obsessions, and messiness of our lives.  Sexographies  is an eye-opening, kamikaze journey across the contours of the human body and mind.”

The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative  by Florence Williams

“From forest trails in Korea, to islands in Finland, to eucalyptus groves in California, Florence Williams investigates the science behind nature’s positive effects on the brain. Delving into brand-new research, she uncovers the powers of the natural world to improve health, promote reflection and innovation, and strengthen our relationships. As our modern lives shift dramatically indoors, these ideas—and the answers they yield—are more urgent than ever.”

Can You Tolerate This?: Essays  by Ashleigh Young

“ Can You Tolerate This?  presents a vivid self-portrait of an introspective yet widely curious young woman, the colorful, isolated community in which she comes of age, and the uneasy tensions—between safety and risk, love and solitude, the catharsis of grief and the ecstasy of creation—that define our lives.”

What are your favorite contemporary essay collections?

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Essay on Contemporary Issues

Students are often asked to write an essay on Contemporary Issues 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 Contemporary Issues

What are contemporary issues.

Contemporary issues are problems or challenges that society is facing today. These issues can be local, national, or global. They often involve topics like the environment, technology, social issues, and politics. Understanding these issues can help us make better decisions for our future.

Environmental Issues

One of the biggest contemporary issues is environmental problems. These include climate change, pollution, and loss of biodiversity. Climate change is causing extreme weather events, like hurricanes and droughts. Pollution is harming our air, water, and land. Loss of biodiversity means many animal and plant species are disappearing.

Technological Issues

Technology is changing our lives in many ways. But it also brings new challenges. For example, cybercrime is a growing problem. This includes things like hacking and identity theft. There are also concerns about privacy and data security. We need to find ways to use technology safely and responsibly.

Social Issues

Social issues are another important contemporary issue. These include things like poverty, inequality, and discrimination. Many people lack access to basic needs like food, shelter, and healthcare. Inequality means some people have much more wealth and power than others. Discrimination is when people are treated unfairly because of their race, gender, age, or other characteristics.

Political Issues

250 words essay on contemporary issues, what are contemporary issues.

Contemporary issues are problems that we face in today’s world. These problems affect a lot of people, and they are often the subject of a lot of debate. They include things like climate change, inequality, and technology use.

Climate Change

Climate change is one of the most pressing contemporary issues. It refers to long-term changes in temperature and typical weather. Many scientists believe that human activities contribute to climate change. As a result, we see more extreme weather events, like hurricanes and droughts, that can harm people, animals, and our environment.

Inequality is another important contemporary issue. This can mean that people don’t have the same opportunities because of their race, gender, or how much money they have. It can affect many parts of life, like jobs, education, and health. Many people are working hard to fight against inequality and to ensure that everyone has the same opportunities.

Technology Use

Technology use is a newer contemporary issue. As more people use smartphones, tablets, and computers, we need to think about how this affects us. Some people worry that we spend too much time on these devices and not enough time talking to each other. There are also concerns about privacy and how data is used.

In conclusion, contemporary issues are problems that affect us all and are the subject of much debate. By understanding these issues and thinking about how we can solve them, we can make the world a better place. It’s important for everyone, including students, to learn about these issues and think about how they can help.

500 Words Essay on Contemporary Issues

Introduction to contemporary issues.

In the world of politics, there are many current issues. One of them is the fight for human rights. In many parts of the world, people are not treated equally. They do not have the same rights as others because of their race, religion, gender, or beliefs. This is a big problem that we need to solve.

Another political issue is corruption. Some people in power use their position for their own benefit, not for the good of the people. This is wrong and it harms society. We need to fight against corruption to make our world better.

Another social issue is discrimination. Some people are treated badly because they are different. This can be because of their skin color, their gender, their age, their religion, or other things. Discrimination is not fair and it hurts people. We need to respect and value everyone’s differences.

Our environment is facing many challenges. One of them is climate change. The world is getting warmer and this is causing problems like more extreme weather and rising sea levels. This is a big threat to our planet and we need to take action to stop it.

Technology is changing our lives in many ways. But it also brings some problems. One issue is privacy. With so much information online, it is hard to keep our personal data safe. We need to find ways to protect our privacy in the digital world.

Another technological issue is the digital divide. Not everyone has access to the internet and digital devices. This is not fair and it can make it harder for people to learn and work. We need to make sure that everyone can benefit from technology.

Contemporary issues are important topics that we need to understand and address. By learning about these issues, we can work together to solve them and make our world a better place. Remember, change starts with understanding and action.

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

Apart from these, you can look at all the essays by clicking here .

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Nonfiction Books » Essays

The best essays: the 2021 pen/diamonstein-spielvogel award, recommended by adam gopnik.

WINNER OF the 2021 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay

Had I Known: Collected Essays by Barbara Ehrenreich

Every year, the judges of the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay search out the best book of essays written in the past year and draw attention to the author's entire body of work. Here, Adam Gopnik , writer, journalist and PEN essay prize judge, emphasizes the role of the essay in bearing witness and explains why the five collections that reached the 2021 shortlist are, in their different ways, so important.

Interview by Benedict King

Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader by Vivian Gornick

Nature Matrix: New and Selected Essays by Robert Michael Pyle

Terroir: Love, Out of Place by Natasha Sajé

Maybe the People Would be the Times by Luc Sante

10 Contemporary American Essayists You Should Be Reading Right Now

Today marks the release of celebrated novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson’s newest collection of essays, When I Was a Child I Read Books . We’ve been excited about this book for a while now, so if you’ve been reading our books coverage with any regularity you probably already know we think it’s something worth picking up. Great as it is, Robinson’s collection only whet our appetites for more essays by contemporary writers, so in case it does the same for you, we’ve put together a list of contemporary essayists we think everyone should be reading right now (or, you know, whenever you finish watching Downton Abbey ). We’ve tried to stick to authors who are still alive — so David Foster Wallace and Christopher Hitchens are off the table, though they both would have made this list with flying colors were they still with us — and limited ourselves to American writers, but even with those caveats, there is enough in these writers’ oeuvres to keep you up and thinking for weeks on end. Click through to read our list, and please do add your own suggestions for top-notch essayists we should all be reading in the comments.

Marilynne Robinson

Though Robinson is much lauded for her fiction (she won the Pulitzer Prize for her second novel, Gilead ), she is equally adored for her incisive essays, which often take hard looks at Americanism and the social political system writ both large and very small. Dorris Lessing called her 1998 collection, The Death of Adam , “a useful antidote to the increasingly crude and slogan-loving culture we inhabit,” and we’re comfortable expanding that statement to Robinson’s work at large — always challenging, always thought provoking, always making us want to be better.

John Jeremiah Sullivan

Sullivan’s recent collection, Pulphead , has had everyone raving since it hit shelves in October — and with good reason. With exacting, witty prose, Sullivan tackles pop culture and history with equal ability, writing about everything from Real World alumni to Christian rock festivals in the Ozarks to Constantine Rafinesque, a nineteenth-century genius struggling for a foothold. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll wonder about modern existence — and what else are essays for?

Cynthia Ozick

Though David Foster Wallace was disqualified from this list, he lives on in Ozick, whom he listed (alongside Cormac McCarthy and Don DeLillo) as one of the country’s best living fiction writers. From the king of the contemporary essay, that’s a ringing endorsement. Not that she really needs it, however — Ozick has no less than seven essay collections to her name, alongside a host of novels and short fiction, and writes on almost every subject, though she tends to favor the Jewish American lens. Her prose is perfectly self-conscious, sharp and crystal clear, she is witty and definitely smarter than you. Which is really never bad.

John D’Agata

D’Agata, already a celebrated essayist, has been in the news recently due to the release of The Lifespan of a Fact , a years-long conversation between D’Agata and his fact checker about the very nature of essay-writing. The book must itself, of course, be a semi-fiction, proving its own point, in a way — but that just makes the whole thing all the more interesting. But if for no other reason, you should read D’Agata because he’s tackling questions that have long stumped both readers and writers, and will probably continue to for some time. Better get acquainted.

An important social equality activist and scholar, bell hooks’ writings are must-reads for anyone. Incredibly prolific both in the academic and essay format (and in many other types of media as well), hooks writes about race, gender, feminism, class, art, and the world at large, often through a postmodern lens. She is fiery and unabashed about her beliefs, as every intelligent woman should be, and though this has of course caused some to criticize her, it has caused many more to love her. Obviously, we’re in the latter camp.

Sarah Vowell

The author of six nonfiction books on American history and culture as well as many essays, Vowell is practiced at cultural criticism. A frequent contributor to This American Life , where many of her essays get their starts, she comes at the contemporary social world with a supreme understanding of our country’s past. After all, she does write a lot about assassinated presidents. Fun fact: she’s also a voice actor, best known for her portrayal as Violet Parr in The Incredibles . Though she doesn’t really need it, we admit that makes us like her more.

Elif Batuman

Elif Batuman’s first collection of essays, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them , published last year, reveals her to be a complete nerd — in the best of ways, of course. Unpretentiously in love with literature and blessed with a relentlessly charming voice, almost everything we read by Batuman sends us scrambling back to our bookshelves for that novel she’s reminded us we’re dying to dive into. And that, friends, is always a good thing.

Touré sort of has a hand in everything — he writes essays and short stories, has a novel under his belt, is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and hosts hip-hop shows on Fuse. Constant through all his mediums, however, are his insightful, intimate — and often hilarious — observations about race, class, and the wild and crazy world of pop culture. In his most recent book, Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness?: What It Means to Be Black Now , he explores race as “a completely liquid shape-shifter that can take any form” and aims “to attack and destroy the idea that there is a correct or legitimate way of doing blackness.” Provocative and brilliant, we think this is a guy who’ll keep changing the cultural landscape for years to come.

David Shields

Like D’Agata, Shields is concerned with probing the edges of what makes an essay an essay — or if we should even have terms like “essay” at all. In his 2010 book Reality Hunger , Shields argues that the “lyric essay” is contemporary culture’s premier literary form — but that such terms don’t really matter, as all of culture is in the midst of getting mixed up in a huge intellectual blender. While we had our issues with the book, he makes some fascinating points, all worth reading in this age of mash-ups and DIY and shifting intellectual property rights.

Sloane Crosley

Crosley’s hilarious personal essays are smart and observant and relentlessly sly. Like a lady Sedaris, she wins you over with self-deprecating humor and indignant reactions to the weirdness of the everyday world. Though her essays are no intellectual slog, they will make you smile, commiserate, and perhaps enjoy your day just a little bit more.

The Contemporary American Essay

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TITLES CAN BE MISLEADING.  In one sense, The Contemporary American Essay is perfectly chosen. It describes with commendable exactitude the nature of this volume. But though it pinpoints period, country, and genre, its matter-of-fact plainness belies the verve and color of the contents. What Phillip Lopate has so skilfully assembled is “a vast and variegated treasure.” That description is taken from another brilliant anthology, Lydia Fakundiny’s The Art of the Essay (1991). Fakundiny says that essays “make the language of the day” perform the essential task of “saying where we are in the moment of writing.” In so doing, she reckons that—over the centuries—this form of writing has done no less than amass “the memorabilia of individual responsiveness to all that is.” This is the treasure she talks about and that anthologists tap into. Even limiting himself to a fraction of it—just one nation’s essays, written between 2000 and the present—Lopate lays a rare trove of riches before readers.

There are forty-nine essays. To attempt to list—still less summarize—them would be inappropriate in a review. In any case, essays are resistant to summary. While academic articles submit to abstracts of their main points, essays, where the voice of the individual is paramount, are a different matter. Reading a book like this is not dissimilar to taking a long, invigorating walk that winds its way through a variety of fascinating terrains. Without attempting to condense its 600-plus pages into a paragraph, noting a few of the landmarks that particularly struck this reader should give some indication of the ground covered.

Lina Ferreira, in “CID-LAX-BOG,” talks about taking part in medical trials that involve being injected with the rabies virus—and through this unlikely lens gives considerable insight into issues of immigration, deportation, and belonging, in particular as these affect international students in America who wish to prolong their stay. Floyd Skloot, in “Gray Area: Thinking with a Damaged Brain,” touches on the nature of mind, brain, and consciousness. He considers how boxing inflicted serious brain injury on his childhood hero, Floyd Patterson. With considerable honesty, courage, and self-awareness, his essay shows how he’s come to terms with his own neurological impairment. Meghan O’Gieblyn’s “Homeschool” poses a whole catalog of questions about education, particularly the ideas behind homeschooling. Her presentation of Rousseau’s Émile as “the vade mecum of modern homeschooling” is particularly revealing—and it’s useful to be reminded that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was written in part “as a critique of Rousseau’s pedagogy” rather than being simply the “parable about technological hubris” that it’s often presented as.

Aleksandar Hemon writes a heartbreaking account of a daughter’s death from a rare and virulent form of cancer, showing the power of words in a situation where they may seem powerless. Thomas Beller gives a luminously affectionate and atmospheric memoir about working in a bagel factory. Patricia Hampl’s “Other People’s Secrets” is an at times uncomfortable meditation on the ethics of writing. Joyce Carol Oates, in a rawly disturbing piece about imprisonment and execution, recounts her visit to San Quentin. Rebecca Solnit’s “Cassandra among the Creeps” deftly explores gender inequalities. There are also essays about disfigurement, revenge, race, vaccination, interior design, domestic abuse, and failure. And this is merely to skate over a fraction of what’s offered. Naturally, some essays appeal more than others. But all are finely written pieces. Lest the fluency of the writing make it seem easy, it’s good to have John McPhee’s “Draft No. 4,” a reminder of the sheer hard work involved in writing, and the many revisions that will have happened before each of these impressively polished essays emerged into publication.

In his short and moving “Invitation,” in which he reflects on what he learned from his years of traveling with Indigenous people, Barry Lopez suggests that “perhaps the first rule of everything we endeavor to do is to pay attention.” All of the pieces in The Contemporary American Essay are written by individuals who have followed that rule. Whatever their subject, no matter what stance they take, regardless of their background, or the cadence of the voice they elect to use, these essays are exercises in paying attention. Indeed, it’s almost as if Phillip Lopate used this first rule as his criterion for choosing what to include. It’s sad that Barry Lopez—surely one of the most accomplished nature essayists of our time—died before the book he contributed to appeared.

Unsurprisingly, given the quality of the writing that’s been assembled, the volume beautifully exemplifies many of the key features of the genre. In his influential book The Observing Self: Rediscovering the Essay , Graham Good argues that “anyone who can look attentively, think freely, and write clearly can be as essayist.” The forty-nine essays in Lopate’s selection are pleasingly varied—this is a richly diverse collection—but they all exhibit the attentive looking, freethinking, and clear writing that Good identifies as essential prerequisites. In another well-known characterization of the genre, Edward Hoagland says that essays “hang somewhere on a line between two sturdy poles: this is what I think, and this is what I am.” Again, these forty-nine essays could be arranged on precisely the line Hoagland identifies, some inclining more to one pole, some to the other, some almost dead center between them.

Many readers will be familiar with Phillip Lopate’s landmark 1994 anthology, The Art of the Personal Essay , which—deservedly—remains a key text. Putting it alongside his The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present (2020), The Golden Age of the American Essay, 1945–1970 (2021), and now The Contemporary American Essay makes for an impressive quartet. Each volume puts a treasury of first-rate writing before readers. Cumulatively, they constitute an important literary milestone, celebrating—demonstrating—the history, development, and present vigor of this mercurial genre. They also suggest a topic for a future essay: “On the Art of the Anthologist.” It is an art in which Phillip Lopate clearly excels.

Chris Arthur St. Andrews, Scotland

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Muscogee writer  Cynthia Leitich Smith , winner of the 2021 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s & Young Adult Literature, headlines the January 2022 issue with a reflective essay on “Decolonizing Neverland” in YA lit. Also inside, essays, poetry, fiction, and interview, as well as more than twenty book reviews—plus recommended reads and other great content—make the latest issue of  WLT , like every issue, your passport to great reading.

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• How to Use This Book.
• Politics and Government.
• 1: Should the United States Enact Tougher Laws to Stem Illegal Immigration?.
• 2: Resolving the Issue of Illegal Immigration: A Question Of Balance.
• 3: Homeland Insecurity, Personal Security, and Constitutional Safeguards.
• 4: Structural Barriers or Impediments to Third-Party Candidates.
• 5: Party Identification and Core Political Principles.
• 6: The Roots of Roe: Not Liberty, But Privacy.
• 7: Going Beyond “Flying While Arab”: Islamophobic Profiling in the Era of Homeland Security.
• 8: Why Mixing Religion and Political Activity Leads to a Poisoned Chalice: Ending Compelled Taxpayer Support for Religious Political Activity.
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• 9: Gender Equality in Sport: (Un)Awareness, Education, and Resolve.
• 10: Breaking the Gender Binary in Sport: Femaleto-Male Recreational Athlete.
• 11: Feminisms Coming and Going.
• 12: Intersex: Beyond the Sex Binary.
• 13: Living with Gender Dysphoria.
• 14: Substance Abuse and Transgender Youth.
• 15: Exploring Victimization in the Digital Age: Perspectives on Social Media and Sexual Assault.
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• 16: The Politics of Human Embryonic Stem Cells.
• 17: The U.S. Government Should Not Require Gm Food Labels.
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• 19: Desalination and Reuse: Facing a Global Water Crisis with Alternative Technologies.
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• 27: Safety, Human Fallibility, and Nuclear Power.
• 28: A Brave New World For CRISPR/Cas9: Scientific Limitatio

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The Contemporary World Cinema Project

A collection of video essays to explore how we view the world, one film at a time. Presented in Fall 2022 by AU Honors Class of 2026

What is world cinema?

When the villain Elektra King tells James Bond “I could have given you the world,” he replies coyly with the line that gives the film its title: “The world is not enough.” But what does “the world” mean anyway? Is, as Bond might imply, the world actually smaller than something more tangible? In some ways, these questions are being confronted by studies of “world cinema”: what happens to our grasp of “world culture” when we reduce it to studying one place – or, perhaps, one film? And what happens to our perspective when we take those individual close readings and join them back together?

Inspired by ideas articulated by Dudley Andrew, Franco Moretti and Catherine Grant and modeled after the journal [in]Transition , this collection of video essays propose answers to those questions. Crafted by first-year students for a  Complex Problems  class within a living-learning community ( AU Scholars  in Fall 2018, University College in Spring 2015 and Fall 2019, AU Honors in Fall 2020, 2021, and 2022) at American University, each video essay closely examines a single contemporary film from a different country; each comes accompanied by a short crafter statement. Taken as a group, they attempt to answer the question: what is world cinema today?

Browse through the collections. And let us know what you think: comments are available below, and on each of the individual pages.

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Philosophy in the Contemporary World: Thinking about Ideology

This series, Philosophy in the Contemporary World, is aimed at exploring the various ways philosophy can be used to discuss issues of relevance to our society. There are no methodological, topical, or doctrinal limitations to this series; philosophers of all persuasions are invited to submit posts regarding issues of concern to them.  Please contact us here if you would like to submit a post to this series.

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about ideology. My thoughts were prompted by remarks by some of my philosopher friends, as well as comments in the mass media, to the effect that Donald Trump does not have an ideology. This claim didn’t sit well with me. I felt that there was something wrong with it, but I didn’t know what, so I decided to dig a little deeper and reconsider what’s meant by “ideology.” I’ve come to some conclusions that might be of interest to readers of this blog.

“Ideology” is an ambiguous term. The meanings of the word are all over the map.  That’s obvious from even a cursory look at the scholarly literature. As the political scientist John Gerring remarked,

Condemned time and again for its semantic excesses, for its bulbous unclarity, the concept of ideology remains, against all odds, a central term of social science discourse.

So the answer to the question of whether or not Trump has an ideology is going to depend on what you mean by “ideology.” If you think of ideology as something like a coherent, well-articulated political Weltanschauung , then it’s probably true that Trump doesn’t have an ideology.  But I don’t think that’s the most useful way to think about ideology.

If ideology is nothing but a political world-view, then why complicate matters by using the already overburdened term “ideology”?   To me, it makes more sense to reserve “ideology” for something that’s not covered by any of the other terms that are currently on the table.  That’s why I’m attracted to what’s known as the functional conception of ideology.

Stripped down to its barest bones, the functional approach states that beliefs (and related practices, institutions, representations, etc.) are ideological if they have the function of promoting oppression. [1]

There’s a problem lurking behind this seemingly clear definition. The problem is that “function” can mean a couple of different things. The function of a thing might be its causal role in a system—it’s what a thing does (for instance, the liver functions to maintain normal blood glucose levels). Call this a causal function .  Alternatively, the function of a thing might be what a thing is for (the liver is for, among other things, maintaining normal blood glucose levels). Call this a teleological function (or teleofunction , for short).

Consider the parts of a washing machine. The agitator is the part of the machine that moves dirty laundry around in the tub. The agitator has the causal function of agitating laundry, because having that effect how the agitator contributes to the capacity of the machine to wash laundry. The teleofunction of the agitator is to agitate laundry, because that’s what the agitator is for.

Don’t these two boil down to the same thing?  No, not really. If the agitator is broken, or there’s a power outage, or there’s some other reason why it can’t agitate the washing, then it no longer produces the right effect and thus loses (temporarily or permanently) its causal function. But it doesn’t lose its teleofunction. A defective agitator still has the purpose of churning the laundry around, because things retain their teleofunctions even if they can’t discharge them. Furthermore, if the causal function of a thing is just the effect that it has, then things can have causal functions accidentally—they produce the effect serendipitously. But this isn’t true of teleofunctions.  A thing can’t just happen to have a certain purpose, because purpose is always a product of design.

Now it’s clear that there are two different ways that we can understand what’s meant by the functional conception of ideology. If ideological beliefs have the causal function of promoting oppression, then it follows that there’s no such thing as a “broken” or dysfunctional ideology. Once a belief no longer promotes oppression, it stops being an ideological belief. The causal approach also allows that beliefs can be accidentally ideological—beliefs count as ideological even if they only coincidentally happen to underwrite oppression. But if ideology has the teleofunction of promoting oppression, this leads to quite a different picture. From the teleofunctional perspective, ideological beliefs have the purpose of producing oppression.  That’s their raison d’etre.   And they have this purpose whether they succeed or fail at bringing oppression about. The teleofunctional approach allows that there are “broken” or causally inefficacious ideologies and it’s incompatible with the idea that beliefs can be accidentally ideological.

I suspect that most philosophers who are attracted to the functional approach think that ideologies have the purpose of promoting oppression, and are comfortable with the idea that there are “broken” or failed ideologies.  Anyone who looks at ideology in this way implicitly prefers the teleological approach to the causal one, and I think that they’re right to do so. To my mind, the teleological interpretation of the functional makes a lot more sense than the causal one.

But the analysis can’t stop here. To develop a clear account of ideology, we need to be able to explain how ideologies get their teleofunctions and to explore what this implies about the nature of ideology. To do this, let’s return to the example of the washing machine for a moment, and consider how the agitator gets its teleofunction.  The answer is straightforward. It gets its teleofunction from the intentions of its designers. The folks who designed the washing machine did so with the intention of making a part for agitating laundry and that explains why the agitator is for agitating laundry.

This sort of explanation isn’t useful for explaining how ideological beliefs get their teleofunctions, because people who embrace ideological beliefs don’t embrace them in order to promote oppression. They don’t say to themselves, or to others, “I will believe such-and-such because it contributes to the oppression of such-and-such a group.”  Rather, they say to themselves, or to others, “I believe such-and-such because it’s true.”  People adopt ideological beliefs because they think that these beliefs are true, so it can’t be the case that ideological beliefs get their teleofunctions from the oppressive intentions of those who adopt them.

I grew up in the Deep South at the tail end of the Jim Crow era. Many of the people that I knew and interacted with were marinated in the ideology of white supremacism. These people held beliefs that promoted the oppression of African Americans, but if you were to ask any one of them why they believed that white people are superior to black people, they would sincerely answer that it is just obviously true that whites are the superior race. Something similar could be said of Nazi anti-Semites.  People like Hitler and Goebbels didn’t just pretend to believe that Jews are evil.  They really believed that it was true.  If you don’t get this point, you are missing something very important about ideology.

If we can’t explain how ideologies get their teleofunctions by citing people’s oppressive intentions, then how can we explain it?  Fortunately, philosophers of biology have already figured this out. We often talk about the purposes of parts of organisms. Eyes are for seeing, wings are for flying, hearts are for pumping blood, and livers are for regulating blood glucose. Unless you’re a certain kind of theist, you’ve got to rule out the idea that these sorts of purposes are derived from anyone’s intentions. But philosophers of biology—most notably, Ruth Millikan—have an alternative explanation at hand.  Millikan argues that to have a non-intentional purpose (or, in her jargon, a “proper function”) a thing must be a member of a reproductive lineage that proliferated because of some effect that was produced by ancestral members of that lineage. It’s this effect fixes the biological purpose of the item. Take eyes. On her analysis, the reason that eyes are for seeing is because (a) eyes are part of a lineage of eyes, and (b) that eyes enabled ancestral organisms to see explains why eyes were reproduced down the generations (this is, of course, a deliberately oversimplified version of a much more complex biological story). Millikan’s analysis can be applied very general: anything that’s part of a lineage (anything that’s a copy, or a copy of a copy) and which was copied because of some effect that it had thereby has a teleofunction. This works for cultural items such as beliefs and practices every bit as much as it works for biological items such as eyes and wings.

So, teleofunctions are fixed historically. The teleofunction of a thing is what its ancestors did to get copied. If we look at ideology through this explanatory lens, we get the following picture.  To count as ideological, beliefs must be copies of earlier beliefs, or copies of copies of earlier beliefs. These earlier beliefs were reproduced because they promoted oppression.

Let me illustrate this using the example of white supremacism.  The doctrine of white supremacism emerged in the context of the transatlantic slave trade. The belief that Africans are inferior to Europeans, and that Africans benefitted from being enslaved (a racialized version of Aristotle’s doctrine of natural slavery), was reproduced because it legitimated the oppression of black people and thereby enabled the beneficiaries of the ideology to accumulate wealth. White supremacism is an ideology because of these historical facts—historical facts that are widely accepted by scholars of racism. What the teleofunctional approach does is to explain how these historical facts make it the case that white supremacism is an ideology.

This analysis of ideology has a wealth of implications, some of which fly in the face of conventional assumptions about ideology. I’ll restrict myself here to considering only four of them. First, the ideological character of a belief can’t be understood psychologically. You can’t discover that you embrace an ideology by introspection or any other psychological means. That’s because the ideologicity of a belief is not a psychological property of it. To recognize that you embrace an ideology you have to track the social-historical pedigree of your beliefs. Second, beliefs don’t have to be false in order to be ideological. The popular idea that ideology necessarily involves “false consciousness” turns out to be misleading.  Ideological beliefs don’t have to misrepresent social reality because it’s possible for true beliefs to spread not because of their truth but rather because they promote oppression. Third, beliefs don’t have to be coherent in order to count as ideological.  It’s sufficient that a person’s beliefs, however incoherent, are products of a certain sort of historical trajectory. Finally, a person can hold oppressive beliefs without these beliefs being ideological, and can also hold ideological beliefs without these beliefs having oppressive consequences. Because a belief’s present-day causal powers can come apart from its history, a belief can have oppressive effects even if it did not proliferate because of those effects, and a belief can have proliferated because of its oppressive effects without currently giving rise to any of these effects.

It should now be evident why I reject the claim that Trump does not have an ideology. Even if Trump doesn’t operate with anything like a coherent framework of political beliefs, the fact that many of his beliefs have an oppressive historical pedigree (for example, those expressed in the slogan “Make America Great Again”) is sufficient to make it the case that they are ideological.  But perhaps it is incorrect to say that Donald Trump—or anybody else, for that matter—has an ideology. In light of the considerations that I’ve presented here, it might be more accurate to say that ideologies have us , for we are all, to some degree, vessels into which the oppressive forces of history have been poured.

[1] Although I talk about ideological beliefs in this essay, this is shorthand.  I don’t think that beliefs can be segregated from the practices that they underpin and that they are underpinned by.

Update: David Livingstone Smith was interviewed about ideology and the politics of fear on “Truth, Politics, and Power” with Neal Conan.  You can listen to the show here .

• David Livingstone Smith

David Livingstone Smith is professor of philosophy at the University Of New England, in Maine. He is author of three books on dehumanization, the most recent of which,  Making Monsters: The Uncanny Power of Dehumanization , was published last year by Harvard University Press.

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Two questions:

What’s the difference that makes a difference between Millikan on teleofunctions and Dennett on the design stance? Is it just that Millikan is more forthrightly committed to realism about functions? I was struck by this: “Ideological beliefs don’t have to misrepresent social reality because it’s possible for true beliefs to spread not because of their truth but rather because they promote oppression.” If that’s right then there’s a systematic error that runs through Ideologiekritik from Marx through the Frankfurt School and beyond.

But that raises the question, how does one empirically distinguish between “true beliefs spreading because of their truth” and “true beliefs spreading because they promote oppression”? In short, what happens to the Marxian contrast between science and ideology, given this theory of ideology?

For 1, have a look at the Dennett-Millikan exchange in Dennett’s Philosophy: A Comprehensive Assessment. For 2, yes, I think that the whole “false consciousness” thing is a red herring. It is true that ideologies are likely to be false, but they don’t HAVE to be.

Thanks, David, for sharing your insightful weblog. I particularly like this observation you make on the “character” of an ideological belief: “[T]he ideological character of a belief can’t be understood psychologically. You can’t discover that you embrace an ideology by introspection or any other psychological means. That’s because the ideologicity of a belief is not a psychological property of it. To recognize that you embrace an ideology, you have to track the social-historical pedigree of your beliefs.” When students in my Introduction to Ethics class try to deflect a challenging question by replying, “Well, that’s just what I believe,” I remind them that tyrants of all ages have said the same thing. If we don’t take the time to understand where our beliefs come from, why we hold them, or what social consequences they might entail, then our beliefs have the character of being dogmatic or ideological rather than ethically justified.

For me, the practical meaning of “ideology” or “ideological” should be understood in relation to ethics or axiology more broadly as well as in connection with the “social-historical pedigree” of one’s beliefs. The thread that connects the study of ideology to ethics and social history is the use of institutional/governmental power or authority.

Any political office is therefore “ideological” in a functional sense, even if the person in office is ignorant of the genealogical pedigree of his own political beliefs or views. This kind of ignorance may be a benign fault from an individual standpoint, but it is a vice and a danger for anyone who occupies a political office that can exercise power over others.

Thanks for your kind and thoughtful comments, David.

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I broke away from my traditional Amish community. Here's what grabbed me most in the modern world — and what I miss.

• Daniel Beiler grew up in an Amish community with few modern conveniences.
• He dreamed of a bigger world, and was excommunicated a decade ago.
• He told BI what he misses most — and what thrills him still about his new life.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Daniel Beiler, 33, an emergency medical technician and aid volunteer who grew up in a traditional Amish community in Pennsylvania.

The following has been edited for length and clarity.

I was born in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, one of the main Old Order Amish places in the US. I grew up on a small farm in a little community surrounded by mountains and valleys — I was always hunting, swimming, and riding horses.

We didn't have video games or a TV. No AC and no electric heating — we used a wood or coal stove. We traveled using horses and buggies; if we had to go longer distances, we'd hire a taxi.

We had some rather intense family dynamics, but overall, the way I grew up was actually really neat.

You can go to 10 different Amish communities and they have 10 different ways of doing it . We didn't have Rumspringa — where the Amish youth go out and sow their wild oats, drugs, alcohol, sex, that kind of thing.

That's a reality in some communities, but we had no parts of that where I come from.

On the business side of things, the community is changing — by the time we left there, a lot of businesses used smartphones and computers. Some families were starting to have electricity.

The Amish recognized that where business is going in the world today, if we want to keep up and be successful, we're going to have to allow some things in.

I wanted answers, and I wasn't getting them

I was always a round peg in a square hole.

Growing up, I had a burning passion to see the world. I'd go hiking up the mountain. When I'd crest the top, I'd just want to cross the next mountain.

I grew up with this deep, deep desire to do big things. But because I was Amish, I couldn't even fly in an airplane.

Typically, the way the Amish operate, in my opinion, is you're taught to blindly believe what the elders tell you. I'd ask, "Why do we believe this way?

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"We believe this way because that's what our grandparents told us," they'd say.

Well, shucks. I wanted answers.

I was inquisitive. There was a big world out there, and I was disconnected from it.

60 seconds from death

When I was 14, we set out for a sleigh ride in the snow. I tried to hook the horse to the sled, but he had other ideas. He reared up on his back legs and hit me right in the temple.

I had a fractured skull and a brain bleed. By the time they got in there for emergency surgery, the doctor said I was within 60 seconds of death.

After, I had ADHD, OCD, and depression. I had back issues, concentration issues, and seizures. I became depressed and had suicidal thoughts.

I got loaded up on medication, and met with psychiatrists, psychologists, and that's how I limped through my teen years.

I sat down with a Mennonite counselor one day. Mennonites are like Amish, but have vehicles, they are a little more modern. My life changed that day.

He taught me that there were other Amish people questioning things — and eventually the Amish system couldn't hold us anymore.

We either had to leave or be excommunicated. However, the community we come from does not do it as strongly or harshly as many others do.

I was 23, and I was getting married. The bishop waited till three days after the wedding before excommunicating us, so that family members wouldn't have to boycott the celebration. Kind of a way to say goodbye.

I have an excellent relationship with the community now. I can still visit, I can still talk with them — for the most part, it's not a big deal.

The open road

After we left, so much of life opened up.

I had the whole universe in front of me. We were married, and we were trying to figure out what life looks like without the restrictions of the Amish system.

When I started driving a vehicle, that was quite a wild moment for me — it felt liberating. It felt so freeing sitting out in the driveway, in a vehicle.

I remember when the realization hit me: You know what? I have wheels. I'm free to go.

That was a bigger deal than all the other aspects of modern life, including electricity and other tech.

We never had much time to plunge into modern America, because ten weeks after leaving, we traveled to Iraq to become aid volunteers .

I had never been on an airplane until we flew from Philadelphia to northern Iraq, where ISIS were running rampant.

On the plane, I was a bit scared it was going to blow up. I knew that most of them don't, but I had some fears to work through from 9/11.

For the next ten years, we flew from country to country, aiding crises in places like Ukraine, Syria and Bolivia, even as our family has grown to five kids.

We've now moved to Idaho, where I'll be an EMT for the firefighters working the huge wildfires there.

Life on the grid

We still identify as Amish, but now we're connected to the grid system. We have electricity, we have vehicles, that kind of thing.

And I still am challenged with it. When a storm comes through and the electric goes out, life kind of slows down, and I don't like that feeling.

It was actually a feeling of freedom to live off-grid before, when we didn't depend on the electric and we raised a lot of our own food. Who cared if there was a three-day snowstorm? It was no problem.

I still miss that feeling to this day.

Being that close to nature is something I believe is missing in society today, and I believe it greatly affects people.

I'm not saying we have to be in nature all the time, but if it's only concrete and video games, I believe we're disconnected from the raw organic thing that God made.

My family don't have any technological restrictions now, but we haven't embraced too much trash culture. I do like my phone though — social media is a guilty pleasure.

Funnily enough, at one stage I spent months binge-watching Tom and Jerry. I really don't know why.

We don't have a TV in our house simply because I'm really not interested in my children having that influence, but we do go to the movies and the kids watch YouTube, stuff like that.

We've noticed that if the kids get an extended amount of screen time, they tend to just get more cantankerous.

Those days we tell them, you know what? Just go play with the dogs outside, or go run in the woods.

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Extraordinary Voyager: Jules Verne Endures

• Alberto M. Fernandez
• — August 28, 2024

The afterlife of an artist—of writers and painters—can be almost as eventful as when they were alive. They are forgotten or rediscovered, exalted or derided. Some become greater than they were when they lived. Others become so obscure that it is hard to understand why they were ever so popular. Some enter a half- life in which they are famous but not actually read. Others become famous for reasons far removed from what they intended.

Jules Gabriel Verne (1828-1905) seems rather spry almost 120 years after his death. He remains the most translated French author of all time. His cultural influence has been tremendous, inspiring real-life scientists worldwide as much as fantasy and science fiction writers. Dozens of film versions of his work have been made over the past century, starting with Georges Méliès’ famous 15-minute silent film Le voyage dans la lune (1902). As recently as 2008 and 2012, profitable new Hollywood film adaptations of his work used the amusing conceit that Verne’s novels are actually non-fiction.

That idea is not so far-fetched, considering that most of Verne’s most famous work was serialized in magazines intended for families, meaning they were intended not just to entertain, but also to enlighten. They were informed by up-to-date factual information about geography and science (such baggage, which seemed fascinating in 1863, may seem less compelling to contemporary readers). Verne’s visionary editor, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, was not only a close friend but also a collaborator who greatly influenced the content of Verne’s work. Hetzel made Verne wealthy (and himself even wealthier) with a brilliant scheme of first serializing Verne’s work in his magazine, then publishing a book version, and then publishing a lavishly illustrated Christmas edition intended for children. The quality of Verne’s work deteriorated after Hetzel’s death in 1886, but that may have more to do with Verne’s own increasingly poor health and family problems than with the loss of his publisher and advisor.

Verne was an international success in his own lifetime. His posthumous success in the English-speaking world is even more remarkable considering the vagaries his work suffered in the decades after his death. Hetzel’s counsel helped to enhance Verne’s considerable narrative gifts when they were both alive, but other factors suffocated or distorted Verne’s work after his death, unbeknownst to the general public. Verne’s son Michel (who died in 1925) rewrote or passed off some of his own work as that of his father. But much worse than Michel’s machinations were the English language translations of Verne’s work. Essentially, much of Verne’s work available in English for about a century was mistranslated, mutilated, rewritten, or hacked to pieces by his British and American translators. This bowdlerization had already begun when Verne was alive, when scenes that could offend imperial British or patriotic American sensibilities were removed. Verne knew that the translations were bad, but he could do nothing about it. The use and reprinting of these mutilated works went on for decades.

Some of the changes don’t even seem to make sense. The hero of Verne’s The Mysterious Island is called Cyrus Harding in some translations, as opposed to the original’s Cyrus Smith. As a child, I was gifted with a deluxe, slipcased hardcover edition of Journey to the Center of the Earth , published by the Heritage Press in 1966. Imagine my surprise when I opened it and found that the main protagonist’s name was Von Hardwigg and not Liedenbrock as in the original. Years later, I was to learn that this ‘deluxe edition’ was in fact a reprint of the mediocre first English translation of 1871, which changed the names of the main characters, added chapter headings that didn’t exist, and rewrote or deleted portions of the text.

A later popularizer of Verne’s work (and critic of the earlier bad translations) was the British-South African Idrisyn Oliver Evans (1894-1977), better known as I.O. Evans, FRGS (Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society). A retired civil servant with literary aspirations, Evans has been called “Verne’s best friend and his worst enemy.” Beginning in the 1950s and continuing for several decades thereafter, Evans reintroduced much of Verne’s work in popular editions published in the United Kingdom and United States. The ‘Fitzroy Editions’ produce by Evans (63 hardcovers in the UK and 10 paperback editions in the U.S.) were extremely popular. I grew up reading the Fitzroy Edition Ace paperbacks, and they are still relatively common in the Science Fiction sections of used bookstores.

Unfortunately, Evans, who was certainly aware of the poor translations of the late 19th and early 20th century, carried out his own heavy-handed editing of Verne’s work in order to meet the demands of the marketplace and to satisfy his own personal preferences. Although the Fitzroy Editions were intended to offer new versions— and in some cases, works were translated for the first time—they were also described as “modernized for uniform presentation.” In practice, this meant that the publishing formula required each volume to be less than 200 pages long. Evans did whatever he needed to cut them down to size, rewriting, or even dropping chapters as needed.

Longer works were also split into two books using new titles. The Mysterious Island became two books: Dropped from the Clouds and Secret of the Island . Evans sometimes used old and inferior translations, sometimes used better ones, and sometimes even did the translations himself. His national pride led him to remove portions of the texts that seemed anti-British. Nevertheless, his chief priority was to make Verne more accessible to the modern public. He explained later that his new versions of Verne had been “stripped of their excessively long passages” and that “long passages of geographical information, many of which are outdated” had been deleted.

Evans seems like an extreme version of American fantasy writer and editor L. Sprague de Camp, who popularized the Conan stories of Robert E. Howard in the 1950s and ’60s, but who also tampered with and rewrote some of those stories. De Camp helped popularize Howard’s work for new audiences but, decades later, Howard aficionados would demand (and get) versions of Howard’s tales untouched by de Camp’s ministrations.

As the centenary of Verne’s death approached in 2005, the situation for English language readers markedly improved. Reappraisals of the writer, both in English and French, rescued him from being pigeonholed as merely a writer for children or a “science fiction writer.” Scholars and admirers, such as Arthur B. Evans and the late Brian Taves, did much great work in reviving interest in Verne and his writing. Newer, much more accurate and scholarly translations of Verne’s most famous works have been issued. I enjoyed Jordan Stump’s new translation of The Mysterious Island in 2001 almost as much as I did the old version of the book, with its magisterial N.C. Wyeth illustrations, that I discovered as a child in the library at Palm Springs Middle School in Hialeah, Florida so long ago.

The new scholars have also cleared up a considerable amount of confusion about Verne’s works. In 2007, Verne biographer and translator William Butcher published the first English translation of Verne’s posthumously published novel The Lighthouse at the End of the World . Written in 1901 and published in 1905, it was later considered to be one of those works mostly or wholly written by Michel Verne but passed off as having been written by his father. However, it turns out that Verne did, in fact, finish a final draft of the work, so Butcher’s translation rescues the original from oblivion. I have not read the Michel Verne version, first published in English in 1914 in The Boy’s Own Paper , but the Butcher translation is a fine adventure story. 

Verne, suffering from cataracts and diabetes, scribbling away in his little study next to an iron bed in his Amiens home, could still write well even near the end of his life. Lighthouse is a vivid, grim tale set in an unforgiving natural landscape. The book attests to Verne’s experience as a life-long sailor who knew about ships and the sea, although the South American setting was a product of his reading and his imagination. Verne is—emphatically—still worth reading today. Not all of his work has aged well, but the half dozen of his best books, written at the height of his powers in the 1860s-70s, have stood the test of time. Of these, the two Captain Nemo books— Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869) and The Mysterious Island (1874)—are his best, followed by Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), which is 160 years old this year. 

We are fortunate to have excellent recent translations by Dr. Butcher of several of Verne’s best works. These are still truly “Extraordinary Voyages,” as Hetzel called the famous series of Verne books. Even later books have their considerable virtues. Verne’s 1885 Mediterranean adventure Mathias Sandorf , a book inspired by and dedicated to Alexandre Dumas (father and son, both of whom Verne knew) is very much Verne’s homage to The Count of Monte Cristo , derivative but still enjoyable. There are also the two late Robur the Conqueror books (1886 and 1904), with a supervillain protagonist who is something like a Captain Nemo of the Air (although Nemo, as we know, is not really a villain).

The question today is not whether Jules Verne is still worth reading, but instead whether anyone is actually reading anything. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average American spent 23 minutes a day reading in 2004; in 2019, that number had declined to just 16 minutes. Americans over the age of 75 are the biggest readers for pleasure. But in 2018, less than 20% of Americans read for pleasure on a given day.

Europeans don’t seem to be doing much better. A Eurostat survey conducted between 2008 and 2015 found that the average time spent reading a book ranged from 13 minutes a day in Estonia to—incredibly—two minutes a day in France. Such numbers are hardly a surprise in our distracted, noisy, and permanently online world. Who is reading, and what is being read, are also skewed. Because most current readers of literary fiction are women, the choice of what new works are published is shaped by attempts to appeal to the female-heavy reading public.

I do not know whether many women read Verne’s mostly male-oriented adventures, but I suspect that the core of Verne admirers in various societies and groups worldwide are mostly men. The first such group, the Jules Verne Confederacy, was established in 1921 by Royal Navy cadets. Yet my mother was the person who first encouraged me to read Jules Verne, she having read him in Spanish as a child in Cuba. Insofar as Verne can muster a sense of wonder and adventure among readers, he will always have an audience. In an age when few read anything, some will learn of Verne from the movies or other media, such as graphic novels. Perhaps I.O. Evans was not completely mistaken to attempt abridging and ‘updating’ Verne’s work in translation—and he worked in a far less distracted age than our own.

Indeed, how many 19th century writers are still read these days? I read mostly Verne, H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, Alexandre Dumas, and Mark Twain. There will always be aristocrats of the soul, even in our present age, who read those or other writers—Dickens and Tolstoy come to mind—with genuine pleasure. The immortal Jane Austen is another 19th century literary survivor. Fortunately for those who read Jules Verne, we have new, good, and faithful translations to keep us company on our way.

This essay appears in the  Summer 2024 edition  of  The European Conservative , Number 31:74-77.

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The Problem With Our Modern Quest For A Pain-Free Existence

We live in a political, social, economic and fundamentally cultural environment that viscerally rejects all pain and suffering as irrelevant. for the modern individual, it is not so much a case of being free to do this or that, as to be free from whatever limits us..

What is happiness and what truly leads us to it?

BUENOS AIRES — We live in times of an “emphatic self,” as the South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han points out in one of his best books, The Palliative Society . We live in a political, social, economic and fundamentally cultural environment that viscerally rejects all pain and suffering as irrelevant — worse, useless to our lives.

Or put another way: For our utilitarian epoch, uselessness is a form of wickedness.

For the latest news & views from every corner of the world, Worldcrunch Today is the only truly international newsletter. Sign up here .

If pain is a sign of the unfathomable limits of the human condition, today we frenetically avoid anything that weakens our self-perception based on a sense of absolute control over the inner and outer worlds . The song "We Are the Champions," from Queen's 1977 album News of the World, is symptomatic of all this, eloquently announcing the only news we'll listen to: That we're in charge of it all.

Free to or from?

The French thinker Pascal Bruckner observed much the same in his book Perpetual Euphoria ( L'euphorie perpétuelle ) on the modern imperative to be happy at any price — without a thought for what happiness might be and what truly leads us to it.

We long to be free of all restrictions, and suffering certainly is one.

We long to be free of all restrictions, and suffering certainly is one of them. It deserves to be eliminated as the cause of a nonsensical impediment to our passion for "freedom of the moderns," discussed by the Swiss-French thinker Benjamin Constant in the early 19th century. For the modern individual then, it is not so much a case of being free to do this or that, as to be free from whatever limits us.

Yet with our aching emphasis on an identity that cannot conceive of limits, that itself becomes our only response to the delicate question of who we are. And paradoxically, this freedom has a cost, namely to make us prisoners of a dogmatic desire that is nothing short of dictatorial. This sense of freedom and "the me" become one and the same, rejecting (often with hostility) anything other than itself .

We long to be free of all restrictions.

Alex Alvarez/Unsplash

Suffering is part of existence

Material goods and their benefits are precarious, like life and happiness no doubt. As American philosopher Martha Nussbaum recalls after reading the ancient Greek tragedies, suffering is an intrinsic part of existence.

And while it may not be the most agreeable part, it is a pointer to the fact that we all need compassion and consolation, which cannot come from individuals hell-bent on self-confinement.

An inner dictatorial self, in its indifference to the plight of others, cannot see how perpetual euphoria is more a nightmare than a dream and how selfishness will narrow our choices, leading to emptiness, and loneliness .

It is not in vain that the words company and companionship come from the Latin cum panis; companions are those who share bread, those who have finally discovered that the secret of life lies in going out of oneself and choosing, not so much not to be alone, as not wanting to leave others alone ever.

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Here's How Netanyahu Uses The Philadelphi Corridor To Dynamite Negotiations

The philadelphi corridor has again become a sticking point in the ceasefire talks between hamas and israel. it's all premeditated as prime minister benjamin netanyahu pursues his undeclared goal: keep fighting in order to occupy gaza..

Israeli Defense Minister YOAV GALLANT during a tour of the Philadelphi Corridor.

CAIRO — All parties involved in the Gaza ceasefire negotiations know that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu does not intend to end the aggression against the Palestinian people. Rather, he aims to reoccupy the Gaza Strip, or at the very least, gain full control and subjugate it.

Back in May, The Jerusalem Post reported on what it said was a plan from Netanyahu’s office to end Gaza's role as an “Iranian outpost” that “sabotages emerging supply chains.” The three-phase plan calls for establishing Hamas-free zones within 12 months, starting in northern Gaza, before slowly spreading to the south. An Arab and Palestinian force would take over security and oversee aid distribution and a de-radicalization program.

During the second phase, which would come in the next five to 10 years, Israel would maintain security in Gaza, while Arab countries would be in charge of the Strip's reconstruction. The third phase, termed "self-governance,” would see Israel retain the right to act against "security threats,” the newspaper reported.

Power would slowly be transferred to either a local Gaza government or a unified Palestinian government (including the West Bank). Yet this is contingent on the successful de-radicalization and demilitarization of the Gaza Strip and will be subject to agreement by all parties, it reported, “The final step would be for the Palestinians to fully manage Gaza independently and join the Abraham Accords."

Subjugating Gazans

The plan could not succeed unless the Palestinian people and their resistance surrender, under the pressure of the Israeli violent strikes. And the plan has been spoiled by their steadfastness and resistance as well as Arab countries' refusal take part in any day-after arrangements before the aggression has stopped.

Yet that has not stopped Netanyahu from working to subjugate Gaza in a way that does not allow it to remain a threat to Israel's security.

As external and domestic pressure mounts on Netanyahu, he shows some flexibility and agrees to dispatch intelligence and technical delegations to participate in the negotiations held in European or Arab capitals. At the same time, he creates obstacles that disrupt effects to achieve a ceasefire deal — no matter how many concessions the resistance makes.

Netanyahu agreed to participate in the latest round of negotiations under pressure from the United States . Washington called for the talks, with the aim to cool the fire that Netanyahu ignited — by assassinating Hezbollah commander Fouad Shukr, and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh — and to delay the response from Iran and its allies to those attacks.

Not one Israeli soldier

Delegations moved between Egypt and Qatar. But Netanyahu announced that he would not leave the Strip and that his army would continue to control the Netzarim Corridor, the Philadelphi Corridor and the Rafah Crossing. He rejected all proposals put forward by the mediators, including the deployment of an international force along the narrow border strip between Egypt and Gaza.

Netanyahu's undeclared goal is to spoil the talks.

By rejecting the proposed American and Egyptian solutions, Netanyahu has thrown a wrench in the works. His undeclared goal is to spoil the talks. He knows full well that neither Hamas nor Cairo will accept the presence of Israeli forces in the Philadelphi Corridor, which deprives the resistance of its air, violates the peace treaty, its security annexes, and the crossings’ agreement with Egypt.

"We will not accept the presence of even one Israeli soldier on the Philadelphi Corridor or the Rafah Crossing, and this is a decisive position that cannot be reversed, even if it leads to a direct escalation between Egypt and Israel,” a senior Egyptian official told me. He said Egypt could accept participating with other Arab countries in "day-after" arrangements, but only after aggression stops.

Israeli tanks rolling through Gaza.

Ariel Hermoni/Israel Mod/Zuma

Oslo revisited

“The Philadelphi Corridor is the great trick that Netanyahu has been holding onto since the establishment of the State of Israel," said Israeli retired Major General Yitzhak Brick , adding that Netanyahu seeks to deceive the Israeli public when he says that controlling the corridor "a major achievement that cannot be dispensed with."

“The army is present on the corridor above ground, but in the depths, there are many tunnels that are 50 meters underground and the army cannot reach them,” Brick said on Israel's Channel 12. He believes that Netanyahu is sabotaging the negotiations by insisting on controlling the corridor and that he prime minister doesn’t want the war to stop because its end would mean the end of his political future.

Aluf Benn, editor-in-chief of Israeli daily Haaretz , wrote in an analysis that Netanyahu's war goal is the occupation of Gaza, as the he has repeatedly declared since the beginning of the war: Israeli security control. Benn wrote that controlling the Philadelphi Corridor allows Israel to encircle Gaza on its three land sides and isolate it from Egypt, while controlling the Netzarim Corridor enables Israel to determine the number of displaced people who will return to their homes in northern Gaza.

If Donald Trump returns to the White House, Netanyahu expects to be given more freedom.

Meanwhile, Benn wrote that “the south of Gaza will remain Hamas’s, and the movement will be forced to care for the residents who lack everything, imprisoned under an Israeli siege, especially after the international community loses interest in this story and moves on to other crises (in the world).

Worldcrunch 🗞 Extra!

Translation matters • Egyptian journalist Mohamed Saad Abdel-Hafeiz uses the Arabic idiom “yadaa al-auqda fi el-minshar ” to say that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is keeping the ceasefire talks from succeeding. Translated literally to English, the phrase is "puts the knot in the saw.” I've translated this to “throws a wrench in the works.” — Elias Kassem (read more about the Worldcrunch method here )

According to Benn, Netanyahu estimates that after the U.S. presidential election in November, the influence of pro-Palestinian protesters on American policy will diminish, even if Kamala Harris wins. If Donald Trump returns to the White House, Netanyahu expects to be given more freedom.

Benn concluded that in the cabinet meeting last week, Netanyahu reiterated his 1996 election slogan when he campaigned against Oslo Accords: “Negotiations, not concessions,” which means that the occupied territory will not be returned, not even under international pressure.

With Netanyahu’s plans known to all parties, including the Israelis, the question is: How will the resistance deal with it? And what will the mediators do?

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• Return At Your Own Risk: Gazans Stranded In Egypt Use Ceasefire To Go Back Home ›
• Why Egypt Is Key To Hostages-For-Ceasefire Negotiations — And A Deal May Be Close ›
• Blinken urges Middle East leaders to press Hamas for Gaza ceasefire ›
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• Egypt was mediating a deal to end the Gaza war. Then Saleh Al ... ›

Paralympics Tech: How Airbus Applies Aeronautic Expertise To Equip Disabled Champions

The kamala i know, a rose by any another pronunciation, ben-gvir, israel's pyromaniac security minister ready to set jerusalem on fire, kursk nuclear risk, paris paralympics begin, indonesia’s “kicking” festival.

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Europe’s Crackdown on Environmental Dissent Is Silencing Voices the World Needs to Hear

By Christopher Ketcham

Mr. Ketcham is writing a book about direct climate action and citizen rebellion in defense of nature. He is the author of “This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption Are Ruining the American West.”

A British court last month issued extraordinarily harsh prison sentences to five climate activists convicted of helping to plan a series of road blockades in London. One of the activists, Roger Hallam, 58, a co-founder of the direct action groups Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion, got five years. The others were each sentenced to four years.

Mr. Hallam’s crime wasn’t that he participated in the protest, which snarled London’s major beltway, the M25, during four days in November 2022. He merely gave a 20-minute talk on Zoom, a few days before the event, to explain the tactics of civil disobedience and emphasize its value as society’s failure to curb carbon emissions is increasing the chance of catastrophe within our lifetimes. He also stated during the Zoom call that he thought the action should go forward.

This is only the latest example of a wave of repressive government measures against climate protesters across Europe. The crackdown has come in response to a rise in demonstrations and disruptive tactics such as blocking roads and access to airports, defacing art in museums and interrupting sporting events.

Reflecting growing public frustration with such tactics, Rishi Sunak, the former British prime minister, endorsed this tough approach last year after two climate protesters were sentenced to prison terms of three years and two years and seven months for creating a public nuisance by climbing Queen Elizabeth II bridge in Kent. Forty hours of traffic gridlock followed after authorities closed the crossing.

“Those who break the law should feel the full force of it,” Mr. Sunak asserted , writing on X. “It’s entirely right that selfish protesters intent on causing misery to the hard-working majority face tough sentences. It’s what the public expects and it’s what we’ve delivered.”

But Michel Forst, the United Nations special rapporteur on environmental defenders, sees this crackdown as “a major threat to democracy and human rights,” as he put it in a report in February.

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Children and the internet: helping kids navigate this modern minefield

Senior Researcher at the Children's Institute, University of Cape Town

Senior Lecturer in Bioethics, Department of Medicine, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Cape Town

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Medical doctor and postgraduate student in epidemiology and clinical neurosciences, University of Oxford

Disclosure statement

Wakithi Mabaso receives funding from the Rhodes Trust.

Heidi Matisonn and Lucy Jamieson do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

University of Cape Town provides funding as a partner of The Conversation AFRICA.

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The United States’ most senior public health official, surgeon-general Vivek Murthy, believes social media platforms should come with warning labels . The United Nations’ education, science and culture agency says smartphones should be banned in schools . Chinese regulators are pushing to limit children’s smartphone use to just two hours a day .

These are just a few high profile examples of growing global concerns about the risks young people face when using the internet. Those worries are backed by a large, global body of research . Social media use has been linked to feelings of envy , depression and anxiety among young people all over the world, including those in African countries .

This evidence can make for depressing reading, especially if you’re the parent or caregiver of a teenager. Many may be tempted to confiscate their teens’ cellphones, lock away their tablets and keep them as far away from the internet as possible. But that’s neither practical nor helpful in a hyper-connected, digital world.

Though we come from different academic disciplines as a children’s rights researcher , a moral philosopher and a clinical researcher , our current work focuses on the same thing: the ethics of new and emerging technologies and their impact .

We know that protecting children is a shared responsibility. Government, service providers and education systems all have a role to play. But parents are key. So, drawing from our ongoing research, we have three messages for parents trying to navigate this modern minefield.

One, the internet and social media are not all bad for children. Some online spaces may even help young people to manage their mental health .

Two, children and teens have rights to access information, share their views and have those views respected.

Three, by creating a strong foundation of open, loving and trusting communication, you help your children navigate the risks, identify the ethical pitfalls and enjoy the benefits of social media platforms.

Benefits of online spaces

While it is true that internet use comes with risks, there’s also evidence that it can benefit young people.

For instance, interactive features and user-generated content platforms such as social media, blogs and forums enable social interaction and connection. These online spaces allow children to engage with peers, share interests and build communities. They also provide outlets for creativity and self-expression, helping kids to develop digital literacy skills and shape their identities.

Some internet spaces may help children and teens to manage their mental health. The COVID pandemic accelerated the development of digital mental health services like free platforms that connect children to counsellors, chat bots, text tools and apps that offer support for children and parents. Childline South Africa’s free online chat service is one example.

Children’s rights

Too many societies and communities forget that children, like adults, have rights.

In South Africa, for instance, children’s rights are enshrined in section 28 of the constitution .

Globally, the Convention on the Rights of Children (which was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1989) guarantees children’s rights to access information, to freedom of association, to share their thoughts freely and to have their views respected, to health, including mental health, and to privacy, non-discrimination, protection, education and play.

More recently, the United Nations issued guidance on children’s rights in the digital environment.

Several countries (among them Australia , Brazil , Canada , China and the UK now have online safety legislation aimed at protecting kids and teens.

Some parents may wonder why all countries don’t simply make laws to reduce the risks posed by social media platforms. The reality is that it is difficult to implement and enforce these regulations.

African countries have been slow to regulate online safety for minors. South Africa is working on a White Paper that aims to protect children from harmful content and ensure that content meets their needs. However, it is still a draft; new legislation and regulation are years away.

But there is no need for parents to wait before starting to teach their children how to safely use the internet.

Trust and communication

Some parents may fear that they don’t have the skills and knowledge to properly support their teens. Just remember that parents find their way around new things all the time: setting boundaries for young children, teaching them to read and write, and, later on, managing adolescent mood swings, discussing sexuality or counselling teens through their first heartbreaks.

When it comes to safe internet navigation and use, parents and caregivers can help children in two main ways.

The first is by prioritising open, trusting and loving communication from when your children are young. Since children are constantly developing, the kinds of things you discuss will shift over time. You can start talking about the internet and social media when you think your children are ready. This will differ from child to child.

Read more: Social media for sex education: South African teens explain how it would help them

The second is to develop their critical thinking skills so they can analyse and evaluate information and arguments in a clear, rational and objective manner. Parents and caregivers can encourage children to ask questions, challenge assumptions and explore different ways of seeing things. There are also programmes like Web Rangers that help children to develop these skills so they can become responsible digital citizens.

Children who can think critically will gain the confidence to rely on their own reasoning rather than just unthinkingly adopting others’ attitudes. These skills will help them to make responsible choices.

Spending time building a trusting relationship with your children is also crucial. Parenting for a digital future goes beyond the fear-driven response of regulating screen time and parental policing. Critical capacity is developed through negotiation and engagement. And of course these skills are universally applicable, protecting children in other aspects of their lives, too.

• Social media
• Critical thinking
• Children's rights
• Critical thinking skills
• Internet safety
• Children online
• Social media bans
• TikTok bans
• Parenting matters

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