Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. The photo above of Susan Sontag was taken by Peter Hujar in Comments 3 You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
Peter Parsons says:. November 15, at pm. Stephanie says:. November 25, at pm. July 4, at am. Leave a Reply Name required Email required Message. Wordpress Hashcash needs javascript to work, but your browser has javascript disabled. Your comment will be queued in Akismet! We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! Archive All posts by date. The young author begins to lose touch with the dreams of her youth and her own identity.
She feels alienated living with her mother in Depression-era Manhattan. She elopes young with an outdoorsman and after a few writings of drab, uninspiring New York she disappears completely. She is never heard from again. Her words and her story linger, her ideals failing to match any sort of fantastic reality she created at a younger but more complete age.
The essay gives you the feeling that this shouldn't have happened, that time reversed and something that was being built up collapsed too soon. Sometimes kids are really smart. But without the support they need, world weighs them down instead of props them up.
Apparently the two men had a correspondence. Within the essay critique, Doty offers a personal narrative as well. It is about physical desire. Actually, Whitman may be offering everything that he can offer. Doty wraps up with an interesting passage from Whitman where he describes dripping blood, and offers it to the reader.
There is never satisfaction, never wholeness. In this constant offering, be it manifest as a physical means for spiritual completion, there can never be completeness. Farther Away Jonathan Franzen This essay took me a while to warm up to. Jonathan Franzen starts out talking about his preparations for his trip to a small island in the Atlantic Ocean.
It takes him a while to get there as it is not just a flight away from mainland Chile but another flight away from a small island to this even smaller island Masfuera. The author is not a very outdoorsy guy. In fact he is more of a literature scholar.
He is going to remove himself from society and think about things. He brings a copy of Robinson Crusoe with him. Franzen features vivid descriptions of his adventures and disappointments. But it is when he starts philosophically musing that it gets interesting. He even states that he is uncomfortable until he has the opportunity to settle down and read Robinson Crusoe. Also, the author had been good friends with the late David Foster Wallace.
This gives him some additional food for thought as he tries to understand his late friend's existential malaise. In his grieving thoughts Franzen tries to diagnose the problems of modern life the wore away at his friend. It is not about what makes us happy but about what gives us a fulfilling connection to reality Franzen analyzes Robinson Crusoe--it gave its readers a chance to detach and wonder what they would do in such far removed situations. With modernity came the opportunity to take risks, and Robinson Crusoe gave people a chance to do so in their own solitude aka to take a risk without actually taking the risk.
One must choose to suspend disbelief when picking up a novel--an attitude of departure, often for pleasure. But the novel has become outmoded by movies, TV shows, video games, and consequently disappeared to an over-saturation of sources of fiction.
Invasive like a weed, the fiction of the novel has epidemically overrun the whole world. Franzen tries to neatly tie up his distant musings by connecting them to the world he left and ambitiously ends with a theory about the current state of the internet. The possible versions of self that were once mapped out in novels as various different characters doing different things, though, may now be mapped onto the "world.
Creation Myth Malcolm Gladwell A re-examination of the mythos that surrounds innovation. Gladwell breaks down the history leading up to Apple's unprecedented ubiquity. He breaks it down into a three-step process: the first wave of computer scientists and researchers create the functional technology. It is complicated and esoteric. This is the stage of origins. Then comes Xerox and their bulky yet promising super-computers. This is the next and middle stage in the integration of intelligence technology.
It is the stage where things get made. Some people, including Jobs himself, say Xerox could have done so much more had they taken their products a step further. Gladwell argues that they couldn't have taken it a step further--that their large, bulky computers were their ultimate offering to a sequence of technological adaptation.
We get direct manipulation of the desktop and one-button mouses at this stage. This is the stage where the technology enters the hands of the people.
Overall, this essay is a nice brief history of modern computer technology. The point? I guess that would be that in a corporate world there are limits to innovation.
There may be a creative head of a company but innovation is up to the innovators. Don Peter Hessler Dr. Don Keeps it Real. Don owns a pharmacy in rural Colorado and he does it like any small town business ought to be. He is not a corporate caricature but rather a small town hero. If you do business with him, it is personal. This is what a real community is.
I do not know what America is aiming for nowadays but it is not anything that awards the small town hero like this. The reliable go-to guy who holds the town fabric together is a helpless victim to corporate enterprise and its idealistic big sister, global trade. Don keeps it together despite this.
Don's business is Dr. Don's business, and it is also his life. And the life of Dr. Don is the life of a kind of man that is a pillar, an invisible pillar not seen anymore in any American town.
As long as there is a CVS taking up every little niche of America, who needs 'em? A place like CVS, like any well branded corp, is about anonymity. Who cares who goes in and who cares who goes out? Don is not CVS. Don cares. Objects of Affection Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough A nice glance at the objects we own and their capacity to hold memories.
Their endurance in the physical world can often be more constant than our fleeting experiences. They can even hold pieces of our identity lost somewhere along the way. Getting Schooled Garret Keizer Another essay about teaching.
Keizer's tone rings of authority from experience. He talks about the difficulty of getting his message across to high school students and the gap of relating to them across several generations--especially on getting them to read and think. Even though I'm fuzzy on the reference, I walked away fully convinced: "Carthage must be destroyed.
I don't know much about menopause so this was sort of enlightening. How Doctors Die Ken Murray Outlaw Jose Antonio Vargas The focus of Yang's piece is about the "Bamboo Ceiling," the highest rung of achievement an Asian American can reach in the U. The limit is usually drawn right before the echelons of leadership. Yang throws out some numbers, like how 9 of the Fortune are Asian Americans. By the looks of it one might think there is some racial profiling going on.
And surely there is. But there is a deeper reason the Bamboo Ceiling is so hard to break. Filial piety. One of the high school students Yang interviews says he feels like he skipped a generation.
His parents rent a flat in New York City and he has earned the Ivy League degree but something is still missing. It's not uncommon for and Asian-American to feel compelled to get the highest test scores, the best ranks, but all this success is on paper and while surely it is one way to improve one's intelligence it also skips a beat--or a whole rhythm section--that is the realm of socialization.
Coming to American and finding success is one thing, but how relevant is a whole generation of, say, Korean-Americans who have passed the most difficult exams and placed themselves in the most intelligent research programs if they have little to no ability to break out from under the umbrella of white man's leadership? What more are they but a marginal community, albeit a fairly hard-working one? Yang asks these question and the answer, it turns out, is in the art of pick-up. Well, not entirely.
But this is one of the investigations Yang delves into. And this is what it comes down to when you stop and wonder why Asian-Americans face a wall in the workforce just short of the first step of leadership. But working in the business world is one thing. Once you break it down, the X-factor is about taking risks. But being a self-identifying individual is different. Yang offers his own story on finding his own identity The answer, he finds, is in daring to be different and not seeking meaning through achieving scholarships and pieces of paper, even if they are handed to you by Harvard.
An American identity for someone who is Asian-American ought to come from doing something that is distinctly different, which is much harder to do than it is to talk about. Dec 07, Andrew Bertaina rated it really liked it. Per usual, let's do this by the individual essays as opposed to the collective. It's probably a step below and perhaps a step above the Anyhow, the best american essays are always worth a look.
This particular iteration is notable for its introduction, a slight shot at the creative writing model and a call to good old time essaying, and its lack of duds. Not everything is exceptional, but they are often quite good. In particular Order: High: 1.
Duh-Boring-An essay on boredom. It sadden Per usual, let's do this by the individual essays as opposed to the collective. It saddens me deeply that I didn't think of it first. You Owe Me-An essay about cancerous children in a writing group.
Queue tears followed by me trying to cover it up when my wife asks. The Crazy State of Psychiatry-An essay about the usefulness of meds as well as their prevalance in treating symptoms and why.
Don-A profile of a unique pharmacisit in Colorado. Ostensibly it serves as a nice reminder that it's not always possible to pigeon hole people. Who are you and what are you doing here-One of those essays that reminds you that, barring a belife in reincarnation, what we do here is important because we're only doing it once. Getting Schooled-An essay about the rigors of being a public school teacher. Outlaw-Everyone already read this. It's written by Antonio Vargas when he admitted to being an illegal immigrant, which btw, get with it America, immigration is good.
Middle: 8. The Good Short Life-An essay written by a man with a terminal disease. A Beauty-A reflection on beauty, particularly attractive people, written through the prism of a friendship with a very good looking man. Paper Tigers-Written about the need of people from Asian cultures to take on, or reject certain white social constructs in order to succeed.
Killing my Body to save my mind-Written by Lauren Slater about her extreme weight gain after taking Zyprexa to ward off depression. The Bitch is Back-An essay about menopause. I am getting old. The Accidental Universe-An essay from Harper's about the origins and shifting beliefs about the nature of the universe.
Hint: multiverse concepts are strange. This should be higher. Vanishing Act-This should probably be higher. Though, to be fair, it's hard not to be jealous of a girl that publishes at the age of That said, when she flames out due to financial troubles and societal norms you feel kind of bad for her. Creation Myth-Okay, Malcom Gladwell can be insufferable due to his social-psychological book of the month typeness, but he does churn out an interesting piece about the rise of engineers in Silicon Valley.
How Doctors Die-Hint: they know when they are going to go. It will be one of the important health care questions of the next twenty years. Humanism-I wanted to like this more than I did. It still should probably be higher. It's a mixture of the Renaissance thought and current technological advances. Yeah, it should be higher. Other Women-This is a pretty good essay by Francine Prose about feminism.
Insatiable-This has to do with desire, and Whitman, and Bram Stoker, but it didn't grab me. Objects of Affection-This should be higher. It's an essay about the effect of growing up in poverty on the way you related to objects.
Eh; Jun 04, V. Ten years later Anastas' arguments against the American ideal of self-reliance seem prescient. I leave you with two quotes from the essay: "The plague of devices that keep us staring into the shallow puddle of our dopamine reactions, caressing our touchscreens for another fix of our own importance? That's right: it all started with Emerson's "Self-Reliance.
Emerson tips the scales in favor of his own confessional, and any hope he might have raised for creating a balance to the self's divinity is lost. Ever since, we've been misreading him, or at least misapplying him. A special guest editor, a leading writer in the field, then chooses the best twenty or so pieces to publish.
This unique system has made the Best American series the most respected — and most popular — of its kind. Essays Nonfiction. Kindle Book Release date: October 2, Availability can change throughout the month based on the library's budget. You can still place a hold on the title, and your hold will be automatically filled as soon as the title is available again.
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