Essays Social

Es famoso el pesimismo de Schopenhauer, pero también su intachable honestidad. Para él, la filosofía tenía un fin específico: evitar que el ser humano le tema a la muerte. Estos Ensayos selectos agrupan los temas y territorios que más le interesaron: conocimiento, muerte, destino, arte.

Is it smart to skip your annual physical? Should you put your trust in medical research? Is "low T" an actual disease? This book will examine these questions and more you've always wondered about in a collection of 50 essays on the medicine. The Doctor Will See You Now is a quirky and eclectic collection of short essays that explore evolving patient-physician relationship and reporting on medicine; famous doctors and notorious patients; surprising hospital practices and the future of healthcare; medical research, ethics, drugs, and money; and the brave new world of neurology.

Wang Xiaobo's Pleasure of Thinking is an essay collection as riotous as it is contemplative. Between rollicking anecdotes about living between the East and West and serious musings on the intellectual situations at home and abroad, Xiaobo examines modern life with the levity missing from so much of today's politico-cultural discourse.

The conversation about masculinity, patriarchy, and misogyny has never been so prominent or heated. Alarmed by a new generation of angry, broken young men, genderqueer writer Jacob Tobia sets out to explore what’s going on and comes to a shocking conclusion: Emotionally and spiritually speaking, men and boys may be the ones suffering the most under the gender binary right now.

Imagine you could give an essay entitled "How to Make Me Come" to a past, present or future sex partner, free of judgment or repercussion. What would you want them to know? In this book inspired by Emma Koenig's wildly popular website, a diverse collective of women do just that. Emma Koenig was inspired to answer this question after a truly frustrating sexual experience with a partner. As she says, "THE SIMPLEST VERSION OF THIS STORY DEVOID OF ALL IDENTIFYING DETAILS: He thought I had an orgasm. I hadn't."

Jesus an anarchist? That doesn't sound like the Jesus preached by the political establishment, mega church pastors, or even most small town ministers. Nevertheless, Jesus spoke about the Kingdom of God that makes all other political loyalties inconsequential.

At twelve years old, Elamin Abdelmahmoud emigrates with his family from his native Sudan to Kingston, Ontario, arguably one of the most homogenous cities in North America. At the airport, he’s handed his Blackness like a passport, and realizes that he needs to learn what this identity means in a new country. In his debut collection of essays, Abdelmahmoud gives full voice to each and every one of these conflicting selves.

Namita Gokhale and Malashri Lal, who brought us In Search of Sita: Revisiting Mythology, now present an anthology on the mysterious Radha, the epitome of love, who defies all conventional codes yet transcends social prohibitions through the power of the spiritual and the sensual, the sacred and the erotic. Finding Radha is the first of its kind: a collection of poetry, prose, and translation that enter the historical as well as the artistic dimensions of the eternal romance of Radha and Krishna.

Based on the NPR series of the same name, This I Believe features 80 Americans—from the famous to the unknown—completing the thought that begins with the book's title. The pieces that make up the program compel listeners to re-think not only what and how they have arrived at their own personal beliefs, but also the extent to which they share them with others.

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.

The digital revolution has been corrupted. What began as a celebration of freedom has become a machine for monitoring and control. What began as history’s greatest dream of enlightenment has been twisted into an anti-intellectual nightmare of indoctrination. In 12 essays, several already well-known but newly revised in this volume, Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger stakes out a hard-headed position in favor of the ideals of the digital revolution.

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.

Culto della giovinezza, idolatria dell'intelligenza, ossessione della crescita economica, tirannia della moda: sono alcuni dei miti di oggi che Umberto Galimberti passa in rassegna per smontarli e denunciarne la natura ingannevole, mostrando come i falsi miti siano in realtà "idee malate", non avvertite come tali, e quindi tanto più capaci di diffondere i loro effetti nefasti senza trovare la minima resistenza. Sono i miti del nostro tempo, le idee che più di altre ci pervadono e ci plasmano come individui e come società.

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.

When Nina Sharma meets Quincy while hitching a ride to a friend’s Fourth of July barbecue, she spots a favorite book, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, in the back seat of his cramped car, and senses a sadness from him that’s all too familiar to her. She is immediately intrigued—who is this man? In The Way You Make Me Feel, Sharma chronicles her and Quincy’s love story, and in doing so, examines how their Black and Asian relationship becomes the lens through which she moves through and understands the world.

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.

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 perceptive, compelling essay, Katharine Murphy offers a profile of Anthony Albanese in motion – a piece about character, the balance of forces, and the mood of the nation. Are Albanese and his party up for change? Are Australians up for it? What does the new prime minister embody, if anything? Has the centre of the polity shifted, with the success of the Teals and the Greens? Where could – and should – the new government be ambitious?

Twenty-seven-year-old Nell Stevens was determined to write a novel, but life kept getting in the way. Then came a game-changing opportunity: she won a fellowship that would let her spend three months, all expenses paid, anywhere in the world to research and write a book. Would she choose a glittering metropolis, a romantic village, an exotic paradise? Not exactly. Nell chose Bleaker Island, a snowy, windswept pile of rock in the Falklands. There, in a guesthouse where she would be the only guest, she could finally rid herself of distractions and write.

Griffith paints an inspiring yet practical picture of empowered local communities acting collectively when it comes to renewable energy, and benefiting financially. He considers both equity and security – an end to dependence on foreign oil, for instance. He explores the rejuvenation of regional Australia, as well as the rise of a new populist movement driven by Australian women. And he explodes once and for all the trees v. jobs binary. This is an electrifying essay about building a better world, one community at a time.