Essays Social

Time does not hold history—people do. Emerson's History is not a chronicle of names and dates, not a reverence for the past, but a revelation: every life is a vessel of all that came before. The individual is not separate from history but its continuation, its living pulse. Emerson does not ask his readers to study history; he asks them to recognize themselves within it. Every triumph, every downfall, every flash of genius from ages past is not distant—it is ours, woven into the mind that thinks, the hand that writes, the heart that dares.

In this thought-provoking, endlessly enlightening, and entertaining essay on the art of the novel, renowned author Milan Kundera suggests that "the curtain" represents a ready-made perception of the world that each of us has - a pre-interpreted world. The job of the novelist, he argues, is to rip through the curtain and reveal what it hides. Here an incomparable literary artist cleverly sketches out his personal view of the history and value of the novel in Western civilization.

Are Australian schools safe? And if they're not, what happens when kids are caught in a bleak collision between ill-equipped school staff and a confected media scandal? In 2016, the Safe Schools program became the centre of an ideological firestorm. In QE67, Benjamin Law explores how and why this happened. He weaves a subtle, gripping account of schools today, sexuality, teenagers, new ideas of gender fluidity, tabloid media scares and mental health.

More than 50 years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote his Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Much has transpired in the half-century since, and progress has been made in the issues that were close to Dr. King’s heart. Thankfully, the burning crosses, biting police dogs, and angry mobs of that day are long gone. But in their place, passivity has emerged. A passivity that must be addressed. That’s the aim of Letters to a Birmingham Jail. A collection of essays written by men of various ethnicities and ages.

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.

At Uluru, an invitation was issued to the Australian people. With the upcoming referendum, the nation will decide whether to accept that invitation. In this compelling, fresh and imaginative essay, Megan Davis draws out the significance and the promise of this “constitutional moment” – what it could mean for recognition and justice. Davis presents the Voice to Parliament as an Australian solution to an Australian problem. For Indigenous people, it is a practical response to “the torment of powerlessness”.

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.

This book is for and about the women who kicked in doors, as pioneers of their craft or making politics central to their sound: those who offer a new way of thinking about the vast spectrum of women in music. In this radical departure from the historic narrative of music and music writing being written by men, for men, This Woman’s Work challenges the male dominance and sexism that have been hard-coded in the canons of music, literature, and film and has forced women to fight pigeon-holing or being side-lined by carving out their own space.

What songs have made up your life's soundtrack? Which have captured your every mood and deepest sentiments? Pop music, like no other form of entertainment or art, is capable of articulating our feelings, desires, joy, and pain. In a few soul-grabbing minutes, artists from every genre - from Little Richard to Lou Reed, Willie Nelson to Wu-Tang Clan, Sly and the Family Stone to the Rolling Stones - can help us understand our place in our own lives.

The Challenge of Things joins earlier collections like The Reason of Things and Thinking of Answers but this time to collect Grayling's recent writings on the world in a time of war and conflict. In describing and exposing the dark side of things, he also explores ways out of the habits and prejudices of mind that would otherwise trap us forever in the deadly impasses of conflicts of all kinds.

"Je suis convaincue de l'urgence morale qu'il y a à nous atteler à imaginer ensemble une éducation différente pour nos enfants, pour tenter de créer un monde plus juste à l'égard des femmes et des hommes." À une amie qui lui demande quelques conseils pour élever selon les règles de l'art du féminisme la petite fille qu'elle vient de mettre au monde, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie répond sous la forme d'une missive enjouée, non dénuée d'ironie, qui prend vite la tournure d'un manifeste.

Embodiment is not an easy business. From violence to illness, sexuality to racism, the fact of a body can be impossibly hard to inhabit. Olivia Laing draws on her own background in protest and alternative medicine to investigate the reasons why. Laing’s exploration of the complexities of bodily life takes in some of the most significant and beguiling figures of the past century, among them the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, the painters Francis Bacon and Agnes Martin and the singer and civil rights activist Nina Simone.

In this galloping collection of twenty pointed essays, G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936) nimbly punctures the philosophical pretensions of modern non-Christian thinkers and artists—heretics, as he calls them. Chesterton good-naturedly takes on contemporaries Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells, James McNeill Whistler, and even his good friend George Bernard Shaw, exposing the muddled logic of their popular ideas with his characteristic wisdom and razor-sharp wit. He also begins to lay the groundwork for Orthodoxy, his subsequent account of a rational and coherent Christian faith.

Spanning more than thirty five years of Lawrence Wright’s reporting for The New Yorker, Texas Monthly, Rolling Stone and other magazines, these pieces remind us what a brilliant observer Wright has been of institutions, of political maneuverings, and of people—dangerous, eccentric, or beloved.

Liberty of conscience and freedom of thought are twin, core components of modern life in societies across the world. The ability to pursue one's vision of the right and the good, coupled with liberty to pursue individual reason and enlightenment, helped produce so much of modern life that we may be apt to forget that libertarian philosophy was not dictated by Nature.

In this thought-provoking essay, Life Coach and Author Joseff McKenneth Goodwin, explores how modern civilization, shaped by a “colonized dream,” manipulates our beliefs, relationships, and overall existence. Through a reflective journey, the essay challenges listeners to examine the hidden forces that influence their desires, values, and pursuit of success. Blending philosophical insights with spiritual perspectives, it uncovers how societal conditioning has trapped us in cycles of self-sacrifice, emotional disconnection, and constant striving for external validation.

With heart, pathos, humor, and insight, twenty renowned writers, performers, athletes, and activists explore what it means to be Native American today. Through a series of essays and poems, these luminaries give voice to their individual experiences while shedding light on the depth and complexity of modern Native American identity, resiliency, and joy.

This series of essays is concerned with authors who stand at "the bloody crossroads where literature and politics meet." Why "bloody"? Because writers' blood has often been shed when they boldly expressed their opinions, and some of their opinions have influenced political leaders to shed the blood of others.

In his analysis of contemporary writers such as Orwell, Solzhenitsyn, and Camus, Podhoretz examines the literary and cultural sweep of the conflict between totalitarianism and the democratic West.

This book contains a series of engaging yet controversial essays by Samuel Butler, the famous Luddite who argued back in the 1860s that machines would one day take over the world and should be destroyed lest civilization as we know it is annihilated. He was a contrarian thinker who claims to have not liked books (though he wrote many) and disdained many aspects of Darwinian evolution, even while he agreed with key points.

Do you hate gambling ads, pre-ripped jeans and pedestrians who walk five abreast? Do you also have a problem with plastic-wrapped fruit, climate-change deniers and take-away sandwiches priced at $14.95? And, most of all, do you think the world would be a better place if people got back their sense of humour? Here's proof you are not alone. Heartfelt and hilarious, serious but sly, Best Wishes is the Encyclopedia of 'Can Do Better'. It's a plea for a better world – one wish at a time.