Essays Social

America's maestro reporter/novelist gives America an MRI at the dawn of a new age. Tom Wolfe scrutinizes everything from the sexual manners and mores of teenagers to the reasons why no one is celebrating the second American Century. Hooking Up is a chronicle of the here and now. Browse more Wolfe.

In this 10th anniversary edition, renowned political commentator Cokie Roberts once again examines the nature of women's roles. From mother to mechanic, sister to soldier, Roberts reveals how much progress has now been made and how much further we have to go. Updated and expanded to include a diverse new cast of women, including Hillary Clinton, Laura Bush, Billie Jean King, and others, this collection of essays offers tremendous insight into the opportunities and challenges that women encounter today.

The Fable of the Bees—a satirical poem, prose discussion, three essays and six dialogues completed in 1729—exposes human vices but defends them as a necessity within a wealthy society. Mandeville’s bees thrive until they start living by honesty and virtue… then they are impoverished. Mandeville did not play by the rules: he satirized the sins of society but also ridiculed the widespread hypocrisy of deploring these sins whilst reaping their benefits. He and his work were attacked for the rest of the century.

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.

As humankind moves deeper into the Anthropocene, a period marked by climate disruption, species extinction, and profound challenges to human and animal welfare, what and how we teach our children has never been of greater importance. In this passionate, incisive, and diverse collection of 13 interconnected essays, educators at every level of education and from four continents call for a re-imagined pedagogy that embeds respect for the other-than-human world, encourages imagination and resilience, and fosters open inquiry based on principles of justice, fairness, and equity.

The CliffsNotes study guide on Emerson's Essays supplements the original literary work, giving you background information about the author, an introduction to the work, a graphical character map, critical commentaries, expanded glossaries, and a comprehensive index, all for you to use as an educational tool that will allow you to better understand the work. This study guide was written with the assumption that you have read Essays. This study guide will help supplement your reading.

Jill Louise Busby spent years in the nonprofit sector specializing in diversity and inclusion. She spoke at academic institutions, businesses, and detention centers on the topics of race, power, and privilege and delivered over 200 workshops to nonprofit organizations all over the California Bay Area. In 2016, fed up with what passed as progressive in the Pacific Northwest, Busby uploaded a one-minute video about race, white institutions, and faux liberalism to Instagram. The video received millions of views across social platforms.

Mohsin Hamid's brilliant, moving, and extraordinarily clever novels have not only made him an international best seller, they have earned him a reputation as a "master critic of the modern global condition" ( Foreign Policy). His stories are at once timeless and of-the-moment, and his themes are universal: love, language, ambition, power, corruption, religion, family, identity. Here, he explores this terrain from a different angle in essays that deftly counterpoise the personal and the political.

This combination of serious artistic engagement with warmth and clarity of prose revels in the experiences and pleasures of art and the body, identity, and community.

Nuclear proliferation, Zionism, and the global economy are just a few of the insightful and surprisingly prescient topics scientist Albert Einstein discusses in this volume of collected essays from between 1931 and 1950. Written with a clear voice and a thoughtful perspective on the effects of science, economics, and politics in daily life, Einstein’s writings provide an intriguing view inside the mind of a genius addressing the philosophical challenges of the Depression, the Second World War, and more.

Solitude offers us that other space of thinking, another modality where we can meet different ingredients of perfection. The author is letting his pen engrave what the fuel of the holy history of solitude may inspire.

Compiled, edited, and newly revised by Ralph Ellison's literary executor, John F. Callahan, this classic collection includes posthumously discovered reviews, criticism, and interviews, as well as the essay collections Shadow and Act (1964), hailed by Robert Penn Warren as "a body of cogent and subtle commentary on the questions that focus on race," and Going to the Territory (1986), an exploration of literature and folklore, jazz and culture, and the nature and quality of lives that Black Americans lead.

What does it mean to be a body behind a screen, lost in the hustle of an online world? In our age of digital hyper-connection, Athena Dixon invites us to consider this question with depth, heart, and ferocity, investigating the gaps that technology cannot fill and confronting a lifetime of loneliness.

A new collection of essays by the legendary literary scholar and critic. In the year of his 100th birthday, preeminent literary critic, scholar, and teacher M. H. Abrams brings us a collection of nine new and recent essays that challenge the reader to think about poetry in new ways. In these essays, three of them never before published, Abrams engages afresh with pivotal figures in intellectual and literary history, among them Kant, Keats, and Hazlitt.

Tolstoy claims that all good art is related to the authentic life of the broader community and that the aesthetic value of a work of art is not independent of its moral content.

Famines are becoming smaller and rarer, but optimism about the possibility of a famine-free future must be tempered by the threat of global warming. That is just one of the arguments that Cormac Ó Gráda, one of the world's leading authorities on the history and economics of famine, develops in this wide-ranging audiobook, which provides crucial new perspectives on key questions raised by famines around the globe between the 17th and 21st centuries.

Demokratie gegen Demokratie - illiberale gegen liberale, direkte gegen repräsentative Demokratie, vielleicht sogar "the people vs. democracy"? Es scheint, die Demokratie war noch nie so unumstritten wie heute, während zugleich noch nie so umstritten war, was aus ihr folgt. Jeder tritt in ihrem Namen an und beschuldigt den Gegner, ein Gegner der Demokratie zu sein. Der Demokratie droht heute nur noch Gefahr von ihr selbst. Unsere Lage, so die These Philip Manows, ist von der gleichzeitigen Demokratisierung und Ent-Demokratisierung der Demokratie gekennzeichnet.

Picking up where Berton Roueche's The Medical Detectives left off, The Deadly Dinner Party presents 15 edge-of-your-seat, real-life medical detective stories written by a practicing physician. Award-winning author Jonathan Edlow, MD, shows the doctor as detective and the epidemiologist as elite sleuth in stories that are as gripping as the best thrillers.

The Stoicism Collection is a collection of 5 essential pieces of stoic philosophy, alongside a biography of Marcus Aurelius, read by an esteemed cast of award-winning narrators. Stoicism is a school of Hellenistic philosophy that flourished in Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome. The Stoics believed that the practice of virtue is enough to achieve eudaimonia: a well-lived life.

Elena Ferrante is the best-selling author of My Brilliant Friend, now an HBO original series. Collected here for the first time are the seeds of future novels, the timely reflections of this internationally beloved storyteller, the abiding preoccupations of a writer who has been called “one of the great novelists of our time” (New York Times).