Essays Social

In this collection, Vivian Gornick turns her attention to a large theme in literature: the struggle for the semblance of inner freedom. In the essays collected here, she explores the work of V. S. Naipaul, James Baldwin, George Gissing, Randall Jarrell, H. G. Wells, Loren Eiseley, Allen Ginsberg, Hayden Carruth, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth.

Peggy Noonan is one of the most brilliant and influential political thinkers and writers of our time. The author of five best-selling books ( What I Saw at the Revolution is now a classic), her column in The Wall Street Journal is a must-read for millions of Americans. Witty, incisive, and always original, Peggy Noonan is a conservative intellectual with wide-reaching appeal across the political spectrum. Now, for the first time, the best of Noonan's writing will be collected in one indispensable volume.

A "Proustian minimalist on the order of Lydia Davis" ( Kirkus Reviews), Sarah Manguso is one of the finest literary artists at work today. To hear her work is to witness acrobatic acts of compression in the service of extraordinary psychological and spiritual insight. 300 Arguments, a foray into the frontier of contemporary nonfiction writing, is at first glance a group of unrelated aphorisms.

This collection includes two of Emerson’s essays: History and Intellect. Emerson wrote most of his essays to be presented as lectures first, and later revised them for print. The essay History explores the nature and importance of historical understanding. Emerson holds that history is not simply a jumble of events and facts, but rather a living and dynamic force that can inspire and guide human action. In his essay Intellect, Emerson notes that the intellectual power of humans separates them from all other living beings on earth.

Humans have long turned to gardens—both real and imaginary—for sanctuary from the frenzy and tumult that surrounds them. Those gardens may be as far away from everyday reality as Gilgamesh’s garden of the gods or as near as our own backyard, but in their very conception and the marks they bear of human care and cultivation, gardens stand as restorative, nourishing, necessary havens.

Invisible in the food we eat, the people we kiss, and inside our own bodies, viruses flourish - with the power to shape not only our health, but our social, political, and economic systems. Drawing on his expertise in microbiology, Joseph Osmundson brings listeners under the microscope to understand the structure and mechanics of viruses and to examine how viruses like HIV and COVID-19 have redefined daily life. Virology is a critical warning, a necessary reflection, and a call for a better future.

This highly regarded volume features a modern translation of all ten books of The Republic. Translated by Raymond Larson. The Republic is an explosion of thought; a ten-book brainstorm of one of the greatest minds of all-time.

With the rise of cyberbullying and hate speech online, issues around climate change and technology, and the "move fast and break things" mentality of tech culture, Which Side of History? will urge listeners to draw the line. This book will help shape the conversations we have around technology in our society and our future for years to come.

This essay comes from the NPR series This I Believe, which features brief personal reflections from both famous and unknown Americans. The pieces that make up the series compel listeners to rethink not only what and how they have arrived at their beliefs, but also the extent to which they share them with others.

Tacky is about the power of pop culture - like any art - to imprint itself on our lives and shape our experiences, no matter one's commitment to "good" taste. These 14 essays are a nostalgia-soaked antidote to the millennial generation's obsession with irony, putting the aesthetics we hate to love - snakeskin pants, Sex and the City, Cheesecake Factory's gargantuan menu - into kinder and sharper perspective.

Learn how to leverage dark psychology and emotional manipulation techniques to get what you want out of people.

This philosophical essay is the development of a lecture on probabilities which I delivered in 1795 to the normal schools whither I had been called, by a decree of the national convention, as professor of mathematics with Lagrange. I have recently published upon the same subject a work entitled The Analytical Theory of Probabilities. I present here without the aid of analysis the principles and general results of this theory, applying them to the most important questions of life, which are indeed for the most part only problems of probability.

In a series of penetrating and alarming essays, whose centerpiece is a commentary on the events of September 11, 2001 (deemed then too controversial to publish), Gore Vidal challenges the comforting consensus following September 11th and goes back and draws connections to Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City. He asks were these simply the acts of “evil-doers?”

In her latest forays into the American scene, Joan Didion covers ground from Washington to Los Angeles, from a TV producer's gargantuan "manor" to the racial battlefields of New York's criminal courts. At each stop she uncovers the mythic narratives that elude other observers: Didion tells us about the fantasies the media construct around crime victims and presidential candidates; she gives us new interpretations of the stories of Nancy Reagan and Patty Hearst; she charts America's rollercoaster ride through evanescent booms and hard times that won't go away.

Si l'Église réfléchit depuis déjà longtemps autour de la protection de la nature, jamais un pape ne lui a consacré une encyclique, son mode d'expression le plus solennel. Les mots italiens "Laudato si': Dieu soit loué", qui ouvrent la première encyclique du pape François sont les premiers du "Cantique des créatures", écrit par Saint François d'Assise peu avant sa mort en 1226. Considéré comme l'un des premiers textes de la littérature italienne, le Poverello y célèbre Dieu à travers sa création : frère soleil, sœur lune, frère vent, sœur eau, frère feu, notre mère la terre.

Drawing on the author’s seven years of caring for his mother through Alzheimer's, Be With: Letters to a Caregiver is what its title promises: four dispatches to an anonymous long-term caregiver. In brief passages that cast fresh light on what it means to live with dementia, Barnes shares trials, insights, solace - and, ultimately, inspiration.

Periferia di Milano, anni Settanta. Gli anni del terrorismo e della droga, dei sogni di Oriente e di liberazione. Una mattina, nella classe di un Istituto Agrario, fa la sua apparizione Giulia, una giovane professoressa di lettere che parla di letteratura e di poesia con una passione sconosciuta. È quell'incontro a "salvare" Massimo Recalcati che, in questo libro dedicato alla pratica dell'insegnamento, riflette su cosa significa essere insegnanti in una società senza padri e senza maestri.

In his short life, the Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the leading thinkers and activists of the anticolonial revolution, leading movements in North America, South America, the African continent, and the Caribbean. In each locale, Rodney found himself a lightning rod for working class Black Power. His deportation catalyzed 20th century Jamaica's most significant rebellion, the 1968 Rodney riots, and his scholarship trained a generation how to think politics at an international scale.

Biographer Michael Shelden called Orwell’s Politics and the English Language “his most important essay on style”. First published in 1946, the essay exploded the language trends of the time and served as an inflection point in the debate about communication in the 20th century. This collection of essays published 1946-48 provides a comprehensive critique of the status of politics and speech in the mid-century.

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