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40 Best Essays of All Time (Including Links & Writing Tips)

I wanted to improve my writing skills. I thought that reading the forty best essays of all time would bring me closer to my goal.

I had little money (buying forty collections of essays was out of the question) so I’ve found them online instead. I’ve hacked through piles of them, and finally, I’ve found the great ones. Now I want to share the whole list with you (with the addition of my notes about writing). Each item on the list has a direct link to the essay, so please click away and indulge yourself. Also, next to each essay, there’s an image of the book that contains the original work.

About this essay list:

Reading essays is like indulging in candy; once you start, it’s hard to stop. I sought out essays that were not only well-crafted but also impactful. These pieces genuinely shifted my perspective. Whether you’re diving in for enjoyment or to hone your writing, these essays promise to leave an imprint. It’s fascinating how an essay can resonate with you, and even if details fade, its essence remains. I haven’t ranked them in any way; they’re all stellar. Skim through, explore the summaries, and pick up some writing tips along the way. For more essay gems, consider “Best American Essays” by Joyce Carol Oates or “101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think” curated by Brianna Wiest.

40 Best Essays of All Time (With Links And Writing Tips)

1. david sedaris – laugh, kookaburra.

A great family drama takes place against the backdrop of the Australian wilderness. And the Kookaburra laughs… This is one of the top essays of the lot. It’s a great mixture of family reminiscences, travel writing, and advice on what’s most important in life. You’ll also learn an awful lot about the curious culture of the Aussies.

Writing tips from the essay:

• Use analogies (you can make it funny or dramatic to achieve a better effect): “Don’t be afraid,” the waiter said, and he talked to the kookaburra in a soothing, respectful voice, the way you might to a child with a switchblade in his hand”.
• You can touch a few cognate stories in one piece of writing . Reveal the layers gradually. Intertwine them and arrange for a grand finale where everything is finally clear.
• Be on the side of the reader. Become their friend and tell the story naturally, like around the dinner table.
• Use short, punchy sentences. Tell only as much as is required to make your point vivid.
• Conjure sentences that create actual feelings: “I had on a sweater and a jacket, but they weren’t quite enough, and I shivered as we walked toward the body, and saw that it was a . . . what, exactly?”
• You may ask a few tough questions in a row to provoke interest and let the reader think.

2. Charles D’Ambrosio – Documents

Do you think your life punches you in the face all too often? After reading this essay, you will change your mind. Reading about loss and hardships often makes us sad at first, but then enables us to feel grateful for our lives . D’Ambrosio shares his documents (poems, letters) that had a major impact on his life, and brilliantly shows how not to let go of the past.

• The most powerful stories are about your family and the childhood moments that shaped your life.
• You don’t need to build up tension and pussyfoot around the crux of the matter. Instead, surprise the reader by telling it like it is: “The poem was an allegory about his desire to leave our family.” Or: “My father had three sons. I’m the eldest; Danny, the youngest, killed himself sixteen years ago”.
• You can use real documents and quotes from your family and friends. It makes it so much more personal and relatable.
• Don’t cringe before the long sentence if you know it’s a strong one.
• At the end of the essay, you may come back to the first theme to close the circuit.
• Using slightly poetic language is acceptable, as long as it improves the story.

3. E. B. White – Once more to the lake

What does it mean to be a father? Can you see your younger self, reflected in your child? This beautiful essay tells the story of the author, his son, and their traditional stay at a placid lake hidden within the forests of Maine. This place of nature is filled with sunshine and childhood memories. It also provides for one of the greatest meditations on nature and the passing of time.

• Use sophisticated language, but not at the expense of readability.
• Use vivid language to trigger the mirror neurons in the reader’s brain: “I took along my son, who had never had any fresh water up his nose and who had seen lily pads only from train windows”.
• It’s important to mention universal feelings that are rarely talked about (it helps to create a bond between two minds): “You remember one thing, and that suddenly reminds you of another thing. I guess I remembered clearest of all the early mornings when the lake was cool and motionless”.
• Animate the inanimate: “this constant and trustworthy body of water”.
• Mentioning tales of yore is a good way to add some mystery and timelessness to your piece.
• Using double, or even triple “and” in one sentence is fine. It can make the sentence sing.

4. Zadie Smith – Fail Better

Aspiring writers feel tremendous pressure to perform. The daily quota of words often turns out to be nothing more than gibberish. What then? Also, should the writer please the reader or should she be fully independent? What does it mean to be a writer, anyway? This essay is an attempt to answer these questions, but its contents are not only meant for scribblers. Within it, you’ll find some great notes about literary criticism, how we treat art , and the responsibility of the reader.

• A perfect novel ? There’s no such thing.
• The novel always reflects the inner world of the writer. That’s why we’re fascinated with writers.
• Writing is not simply about craftsmanship, but about taking your reader to the unknown lands. In the words of Christopher Hitchens: “Your ideal authors ought to pull you from the foundering of your previous existence, not smilingly guide you into a friendly and peaceable harbor.”
• Style comes from your unique personality and the perception of the world. It takes time to develop it.
• Never try to tell it all. “All” can never be put into language. Take a part of it and tell it the best you can.
• Avoid being cliché. Try to infuse new life into your writing .
• Writing is about your way of being. It’s your game. Paradoxically, if you try to please everyone, your writing will become less appealing. You’ll lose the interest of the readers. This rule doesn’t apply in the business world where you have to write for a specific person (a target audience).
• As a reader, you have responsibilities too. According to the critics, every thirty years, there’s just a handful of great novels. Maybe it’s true. But there’s also an element of personal connection between the reader and the writer. That’s why for one person a novel is a marvel, while for the other, nothing special at all. That’s why you have to search and find the author who will touch you.

5. Virginia Woolf – Death of the Moth

Amid an ordinary day, sitting in a room of her own, Virginia Woolf tells about the epic struggle for survival and the evanescence of life. This short essay is truly powerful. In the beginning, the atmosphere is happy. Life is in full force. And then, suddenly, it fades away. This sense of melancholy would mark the last years of Woolf’s life.

• The melody of language… A good sentence is like music: “Moths that fly by day are not properly to be called moths; they do not excite that pleasant sense of dark autumn nights and ivy-blossom which the commonest yellow- underwing asleep in the shadow of the curtain never fails to rouse in us”.
• You can show the grandest in the mundane (for example, the moth at your window and the drama of life and death).
• Using simple comparisons makes the style more lucid: “Being intent on other matters I watched these futile attempts for a time without thinking, unconsciously waiting for him to resume his flight, as one waits for a machine, that has stopped momentarily, to start again without considering the reason of its failure”.

6. Meghan Daum – My Misspent Youth

Many of us, at some point or another, dream about living in New York. Meghan Daum’s take on the subject differs slightly from what you might expect. There’s no glamour, no Broadway shows, and no fancy restaurants. Instead, there’s the sullen reality of living in one of the most expensive cities in the world. You’ll get all the juicy details about credit cards, overdue payments, and scrambling for survival. It’s a word of warning. But it’s also a great story about shattered fantasies of living in a big city. Word on the street is: “You ain’t promised mañana in the rotten manzana.”

• You can paint a picture of your former self. What did that person believe in? What kind of world did he or she live in?
• “The day that turned your life around” is a good theme you may use in a story. Memories of a special day are filled with emotions. Strong emotions often breed strong writing.
• Use cultural references and relevant slang to create a context for your story.
• You can tell all the details of the story, even if in some people’s eyes you’ll look like the dumbest motherfucker that ever lived. It adds to the originality.
• Say it in a new way: “In this mindset, the dollars spent, like the mechanics of a machine no one bothers to understand, become an abstraction, an intangible avenue toward self-expression, a mere vehicle of style”.
• You can mix your personal story with the zeitgeist or the ethos of the time.

7. Roger Ebert – Go Gentle Into That Good Night

Probably the greatest film critic of all time, Roger Ebert, tells us not to rage against the dying of the light. This essay is full of courage, erudition, and humanism. From it, we learn about what it means to be dying (Hitchens’ “Mortality” is another great work on that theme). But there’s so much more. It’s a great celebration of life too. It’s about not giving up, and sticking to your principles until the very end. It brings to mind the famous scene from Dead Poets Society where John Keating (Robin Williams) tells his students: “Carpe, carpe diem, seize the day boys, make your lives extraordinary”.

• Start with a powerful sentence: “I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear.”
• Use quotes to prove your point -”‘Ask someone how they feel about death’, he said, ‘and they’ll tell you everyone’s gonna die’. Ask them, ‘In the next 30 seconds?’ No, no, no, that’s not gonna happen”.
• Admit the basic truths about reality in a childlike way (especially after pondering quantum physics) – “I believe my wristwatch exists, and even when I am unconscious, it is ticking all the same. You have to start somewhere”.
• Let other thinkers prove your point. Use quotes and ideas from your favorite authors and friends.

8. George Orwell – Shooting an Elephant

Even after one reading, you’ll remember this one for years. The story, set in British Burma, is about shooting an elephant (it’s not for the squeamish). It’s also the most powerful denunciation of colonialism ever put into writing. Orwell, apparently a free representative of British rule, feels to be nothing more than a puppet succumbing to the whim of the mob.

• The first sentence is the most important one: “In Moulmein, in Lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people — the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me”.
• You can use just the first paragraph to set the stage for the whole piece of prose.
• Use beautiful language that stirs the imagination: “I remember that it was a cloudy, stuffy morning at the beginning of the rains.” Or: “I watched him beating his bunch of grass against his knees, with that preoccupied grandmotherly air that elephants have.”
• If you’ve ever been to war, you will have a story to tell: “(Never tell me, by the way, that the dead look peaceful. Most of the corpses I have seen looked devilish.)”
• Use simple words, and admit the sad truth only you can perceive: “They did not like me, but with the magical rifle in my hands I was momentarily worth watching”.
• Share words of wisdom to add texture to the writing: “I perceived at this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his freedom that he destroys.”
• I highly recommend reading everything written by Orwell, especially if you’re looking for the best essay collections on Amazon or Goodreads.

9. George Orwell – A Hanging

It’s just another day in Burma – time to hang a man. Without much ado, Orwell recounts the grim reality of taking another person’s life. A man is taken from his cage and in a few minutes, he’s going to be hanged. The most horrible thing is the normality of it. It’s a powerful story about human nature. Also, there’s an extraordinary incident with the dog, but I won’t get ahead of myself.

• Create brilliant, yet short descriptions of characters: “He was a Hindu, a puny wisp of a man, with a shaven head and vague liquid eyes. He had a thick, sprouting mustache, absurdly too big for his body, rather like the mustache of a comic man on the films”.
• Understand and share the felt presence of a unique experience: “It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man”.
• Make your readers hear the sound that will stay with them forever: “And then when the noose was fixed, the prisoner began crying out on his god. It was a high, reiterated cry of “Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram!”
• Make the ending original by refusing the tendency to seek closure or summing it up.

10. Christopher Hitchens – Assassins of The Mind

In one of the greatest essays written in defense of free speech, Christopher Hitchens shares many examples of how modern media kneel to the explicit threats of violence posed by Islamic extremists. He recounts the story of his friend, Salman Rushdie, author of Satanic Verses who, for many years, had to watch over his shoulder because of the fatwa of Ayatollah Khomeini. With his usual wit, Hitchens shares various examples of people who died because of their opinions and of editors who refuse to publish anything related to Islam because of fear (and it was written long before the Charlie Hebdo massacre). After reading the essay, you realize that freedom of expression is one of the most precious things we have and that we have to fight for it. I highly recommend all essay collections penned by Hitchens, especially the ones written for Vanity Fair.

• Assume that the readers will know the cultural references. When they do, their self-esteem goes up – they are a part of an insider group.
• When proving your point, give a variety of real-life examples from eclectic sources. Leave no room for ambiguity or vagueness. Research and overall knowledge are essential here.
• Use italics to emphasize a specific word or phrase (here I use the underlining): “We live now in a climate where every publisher and editor and politician has to weigh in advance the possibility of violent Muslim reprisal. In consequence, several things have not happened.”
• Think about how to make it sound more original: “So there is now a hidden partner in our cultural and academic and publishing and the broadcasting world: a shadowy figure that has, uninvited, drawn up a chair to the table.”

11. Christopher Hitchens – The New Commandments

It’s high time to shatter the tablets and amend the biblical rules of conduct. Watch, as Christopher Hitchens slays one commandment after the other on moral, as well as historical grounds. For example, did you know that there are many versions of the divine law dictated by God to Moses which you can find in the Bible? Aren’t we thus empowered to write our version of a proper moral code? If you approach it with an open mind, this essay may change the way you think about the Bible and religion.

• Take the iconoclastic approach. Have a party on the hallowed soil.
• Use humor to undermine orthodox ideas (it seems to be the best way to deal with an established authority).
• Use sarcasm and irony when appropriate (or not): “Nobody is opposed to a day of rest. The international Communist movement got its start by proclaiming a strike for an eight-hour day on May 1, 1886, against Christian employers who used child labor seven days a week”.
• Defeat God on legal grounds: “Wise lawmakers know that it is a mistake to promulgate legislation that is impossible to obey”.
• Be ruthless in the logic of your argument. Provide evidence.

12. Phillip Lopate – Against Joie de Vivre

While reading this fantastic essay, this quote from Slavoj Žižek kept coming back to me: “I think that the only life of deep satisfaction is a life of eternal struggle, especially struggle with oneself. If you want to remain happy, just remain stupid. Authentic masters are never happy; happiness is a category of slaves”. I can bear the onus of happiness or joie de vivre for some time. But this force enables me to get free and wallow in the sweet feelings of melancholy and nostalgia. By reading this work of Lopate, you’ll enter into the world of an intelligent man who finds most social rituals a drag. It’s worth exploring.

• Go against the grain. Be flamboyant and controversial (if you can handle it).
• Treat the paragraph like a group of thoughts on one theme. Next paragraph, next theme.
• Use references to other artists to set the context and enrich the prose: “These sunny little canvases with their talented innocence, the third-generation spirit of Montmartre, bore testimony to a love of life so unbending as to leave an impression of rigid narrow-mindedness as extreme as any Savonarola. Their rejection of sorrow was total”.
• Capture the emotions in life that are universal, yet remain unspoken.
• Don’t be afraid to share your intimate experiences.

13. Philip Larkin – The Pleasure Principle

This piece comes from the Required Writing collection of personal essays. Larkin argues that reading in verse should be a source of intimate pleasure – not a medley of unintelligible thoughts that only the author can (or can’t?) decipher. It’s a sobering take on modern poetry and a great call to action for all those involved in it. Well worth a read.

• Write about complicated ideas (such as poetry) simply. You can change how people look at things if you express yourself enough.
• Go boldly. The reader wants a bold writer: “We seem to be producing a new kind of bad poetry, not the old kind that tries to move the reader and fails, but one that does not even try”.
• Play with words and sentence length. Create music: “It is time some of you playboys realized, says the judge, that reading a poem is hard work. Fourteen days in stir. Next case”.
• Persuade the reader to take action. Here, direct language is the most effective.

14. Sigmund Freud – Thoughts for the Times on War and Death

This essay reveals Freud’s disillusionment with the whole project of Western civilization. How the peaceful European countries could engage in a war that would eventually cost over 17 million lives? What stirs people to kill each other? Is it their nature, or are they puppets of imperial forces with agendas of their own? From the perspective of time, this work by Freud doesn’t seem to be fully accurate. Even so, it’s well worth your time.

• Commence with long words derived from Latin. Get grandiloquent, make your argument incontrovertible, and leave your audience discombobulated.
• Use unending sentences, so that the reader feels confused, yet impressed.
• Say it well: “In this way, he enjoyed the blue sea and the grey; the beauty of snow-covered mountains and green meadowlands; the magic of northern forests and the splendor of southern vegetation; the mood evoked by landscapes that recall great historical events, and the silence of untouched nature”.
• Human nature is a subject that never gets dry.

15. Zadie Smith – Some Notes on Attunement

“You are privy to a great becoming, but you recognize nothing” – Francis Dolarhyde. This one is about the elusiveness of change occurring within you. For Zadie, it was hard to attune to the vibes of Joni Mitchell – especially her Blue album. But eventually, she grew up to appreciate her genius, and all the other things changed as well. This top essay is all about the relationship between humans, and art. We shouldn’t like art because we’re supposed to. We should like it because it has an instantaneous, emotional effect on us. Although, according to Stansfield (Gary Oldman) in Léon, liking Beethoven is rather mandatory.

• Build an expectation of what’s coming: “The first time I heard her I didn’t hear her at all”.
• Don’t be afraid of repetition if it feels good.
• Psychedelic drugs let you appreciate things you never appreciated.
• Intertwine a personal journey with philosophical musings.
• Show rather than tell: “My friends pitied their eyes. The same look the faithful give you as you hand them back their “literature” and close the door in their faces”.
• Let the poets speak for you: “That time is past, / And all its aching joys are now no
• more, / And all its dizzy raptures”.
• By voicing your anxieties, you can heal the anxieties of the reader. In that way, you say: “I’m just like you. I’m your friend in this struggle”.
• Admit your flaws to make your persona more relatable.

16. Annie Dillard – Total Eclipse

My imagination was always stirred by the scene of the solar eclipse in Pharaoh, by Boleslaw Prus. I wondered about the shock of the disoriented crowd when they saw how their ruler could switch off the light. Getting immersed in this essay by Annie Dillard has a similar effect. It produces amazement and some kind of primeval fear. It’s not only the environment that changes; it’s your mind and the perception of the world. After the eclipse, nothing is going to be the same again.

• Yet again, the power of the first sentence draws you in: “It had been like dying, that sliding down the mountain pass”.
• Don’t miss the extraordinary scene. Then describe it: “Up in the sky, like a crater from some distant cataclysm, was a hollow ring”.
• Use colloquial language. Write as you talk. Short sentences often win.
• Contrast the numinous with the mundane to enthrall the reader.

17. Édouard Levé – When I Look at a Strawberry, I Think of a Tongue

This suicidally beautiful essay will teach you a lot about the appreciation of life and the struggle with mental illness. It’s a collection of personal, apparently unrelated thoughts that show us the rich interior of the author. You look at the real-time thoughts of another person, and then recognize the same patterns within yourself… It sounds like a confession of a person who’s about to take their life, and it’s striking in its originality.

• Use the stream-of-consciousness technique and put random thoughts on paper. Then, polish them: “I have attempted suicide once, I’ve been tempted four times to attempt it”.
• Place the treasure deep within the story: “When I look at a strawberry, I think of a tongue, when I lick one, of a kiss”.
• Don’t worry about what people might think. The more you expose, the more powerful the writing. Readers also take part in the great drama. They experience universal emotions that mostly stay inside.  You can translate them into writing.

18. Gloria E. Anzaldúa – How to Tame a Wild Tongue

Anzaldúa, who was born in south Texas, had to struggle to find her true identity. She was American, but her culture was grounded in Mexico. In this way, she and her people were not fully respected in either of the countries. This essay is an account of her journey of becoming the ambassador of the Chicano (Mexican-American) culture. It’s full of anecdotes, interesting references, and different shades of Spanish. It’s a window into a new cultural dimension that you’ve never experienced before.

• If your mother tongue is not English, but you write in English, use some of your unique homeland vocabulary.
• You come from a rich cultural heritage. You can share it with people who never heard about it, and are not even looking for it, but it is of immense value to them when they discover it.
• Never forget about your identity. It is precious. It is a part of who you are. Even if you migrate, try to preserve it. Use it to your best advantage and become the voice of other people in the same situation.
• Tell them what’s really on your mind: “So if you want to hurt me, talk badly about my language. Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity – I am my language”.

19. Kurt Vonnegut – Dispatch From A Man Without a Country

In terms of style, this essay is flawless. It’s simple, conversational, humorous, and yet, full of wisdom. And when Vonnegut becomes a teacher and draws an axis of “beginning – end”, and, “good fortune – bad fortune” to explain literature, it becomes outright hilarious. It’s hard to find an author with such a down-to-earth approach. He doesn’t need to get intellectual to prove a point. And the point could be summed up by the quote from Great Expectations – “On the Rampage, Pip, and off the Rampage, Pip – such is Life!”

• Start with a curious question: “Do you know what a twerp is?”
• Surprise your readers with uncanny analogies: “I am from a family of artists. Here I am, making a living in the arts. It has not been a rebellion. It’s as though I had taken over the family Esso station.”
• Use your natural language without too many special effects. In time, the style will crystalize.
• An amusing lesson in writing from Mr. Vonnegut: “Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college”.
• You can put actual images or vignettes between the paragraphs to illustrate something.

20. Mary Ruefle – On Fear

Most psychologists and gurus agree that fear is the greatest enemy of success or any creative activity. It’s programmed into our minds to keep us away from imaginary harm. Mary Ruefle takes on this basic human emotion with flair. She explores fear from so many angles (especially in the world of poetry-writing) that at the end of this personal essay, you will look at it, dissect it, untangle it, and hopefully be able to say “f**k you” the next time your brain is trying to stop you.

• Research your subject thoroughly. Ask people, have interviews, get expert opinions, and gather as much information as possible. Then scavenge through the fields of data, and pull out the golden bits that will let your prose shine.
• Use powerful quotes to add color to your story: “The poet who embarks on the creation of the poem (as I know by experience), begins with the aimless sensation of a hunter about to embark on a night hunt through the remotest of forests. Unaccountable dread stirs in his heart”. – Lorca.
• Writing advice from the essay: “One of the fears a young writer has is not being able to write as well as he or she wants to, the fear of not being able to sound like X or Y, a favorite author. But out of fear, hopefully, is born a young writer’s voice”.

21. Susan Sontag – Against Interpretation

In this highly intellectual essay, Sontag fights for art and its interpretation. It’s a great lesson, especially for critics and interpreters who endlessly chew on works that simply defy interpretation. Why don’t we just leave the art alone? I always hated it when at school they asked me: “What did the author have in mind when he did X or Y?” Iēsous Pantocrator! Hell if I know! I will judge it through my subjective experience!

• Leave the art alone: “Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities”.
• When you have something really important to say, style matters less.
• There’s no use in creating a second meaning or inviting interpretation of our art. Just leave it be and let it speak for itself.

22. Nora Ephron – A Few Words About Breasts

This is a heartwarming, coming-of-age story about a young girl who waits in vain for her breasts to grow. It’s simply a humorous and pleasurable read. The size of breasts is a big deal for women. If you’re a man, you may peek into the mind of a woman and learn many interesting things. If you’re a woman, maybe you’ll be able to relate and at last, be at peace with your bosom.

• Touch an interesting subject and establish a strong connection with the readers (in that case, women with small breasts). Let your personality shine through the written piece. If you are lighthearted, show it.
• Use hyphens to create an impression of real talk: “My house was full of apples and peaches and milk and homemade chocolate chip cookies – which were nice, and good for you, but-not-right-before-dinner-or-you’ll-spoil-your-appetite.”
• Use present tense when you tell a story to add more life to it.
• Share the pronounced, memorable traits of characters: “A previous girlfriend named Solange, who was famous throughout Beverly Hills High School for having no pigment in her right eyebrow, had knitted them for him (angora dice)”.

23. Carl Sagan – Does Truth Matter – Science, Pseudoscience, and Civilization

Carl Sagan was one of the greatest proponents of skepticism, and an author of numerous books, including one of my all-time favorites – The Demon-Haunted World . He was also a renowned physicist and the host of the fantastic Cosmos: A Personal Voyage series, which inspired a whole generation to uncover the mysteries of the cosmos. He was also a dedicated weed smoker – clearly ahead of his time. The essay that you’re about to read is a crystallization of his views about true science, and why you should check the evidence before believing in UFOs or similar sorts of crap.

• Tell people the brutal truth they need to hear. Be the one who spells it out for them.
• Give a multitude of examples to prove your point. Giving hard facts helps to establish trust with the readers and show the veracity of your arguments.
• Recommend a good book that will change your reader’s minds – How We Know What Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life

24. Paul Graham – How To Do What You Love

How To Do What You Love should be read by every college student and young adult. The Internet is flooded with a large number of articles and videos that are supposed to tell you what to do with your life. Most of them are worthless, but this one is different. It’s sincere, and there’s no hidden agenda behind it. There’s so much we take for granted – what we study, where we work, what we do in our free time… Surely we have another two hundred years to figure it out, right? Life’s too short to be so naïve. Please, read the essay and let it help you gain fulfillment from your work.

• Ask simple, yet thought-provoking questions (especially at the beginning of the paragraph) to engage the reader: “How much are you supposed to like what you do?”
• Let the readers question their basic assumptions: “Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like”.
• If you’re writing for a younger audience, you can act as a mentor. It’s beneficial for younger people to read a few words of advice from a person with experience.

25. John Jeremiah Sullivan – Mister Lytle

A young, aspiring writer is about to become a nurse of a fading writer – Mister Lytle (Andrew Nelson Lytle), and there will be trouble. This essay by Sullivan is probably my favorite one from the whole list. The amount of beautiful sentences it contains is just overwhelming. But that’s just a part of its charm. It also takes you to the Old South which has an incredible atmosphere. It’s grim and tawny but you want to stay there for a while.

• Short, distinct sentences are often the most powerful ones: “He had a deathbed, in other words. He didn’t go suddenly”.
• Stay consistent with the mood of the story. When reading Mister Lytle you are immersed in that southern, forsaken, gloomy world, and it’s a pleasure.
• The spectacular language that captures it all: “His French was superb, but his accent in English was best—that extinct mid-Southern, land-grant pioneer speech, with its tinges of the abandoned Celtic urban Northeast (“boned” for burned) and its raw gentility”.
• This essay is just too good. You have to read it.

26. Joan Didion – On Self Respect

Normally, with that title, you would expect some straightforward advice about how to improve your character and get on with your goddamn life – but not from Joan Didion. From the very beginning, you can feel the depth of her thinking, and the unmistakable style of a true woman who’s been hurt. You can learn more from this essay than from whole books about self-improvement . It reminds me of the scene from True Detective, where Frank Semyon tells Ray Velcoro to “own it” after he realizes he killed the wrong man all these years ago. I guess we all have to “own it”, recognize our mistakes, and move forward sometimes.

• Share your moral advice: “Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs”.
• It’s worth exploring the subject further from a different angle. It doesn’t matter how many people have already written on self-respect or self-reliance – you can still write passionately about it.
• Whatever happens, you must take responsibility for it. Brave the storms of discontent.

27. Susan Sontag – Notes on Camp

I’ve never read anything so thorough and lucid about an artistic current. After reading this essay, you will know what camp is. But not only that – you will learn about so many artists you’ve never heard of. You will follow their traces and go to places where you’ve never been before. You will vastly increase your appreciation of art. It’s interesting how something written as a list could be so amazing. All the listicles we usually see on the web simply cannot compare with it.

• Talking about artistic sensibilities is a tough job. When you read the essay, you will see how much research, thought and raw intellect came into it. But that’s one of the reasons why people still read it today, even though it was written in 1964.
• You can choose an unorthodox way of expression in the medium for which you produce. For example, Notes on Camp is a listicle – one of the most popular content formats on the web. But in the olden days, it was uncommon to see it in print form.
• Just think about what is camp: “And third among the great creative sensibilities is Camp: the sensibility of failed seriousness, of the theatricalization of experience. Camp refuses both the harmonies of traditional seriousness and the risks of fully identifying with extreme states of feeling”.

28. Ralph Waldo Emerson – Self-Reliance

That’s the oldest one from the lot. Written in 1841, it still inspires generations of people. It will let you understand what it means to be self-made. It contains some of the most memorable quotes of all time. I don’t know why, but this one especially touched me: “Every true man is a cause, a country, and an age; requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully to accomplish his design, and posterity seems to follow his steps as a train of clients”. Now isn’t it purely individualistic, American thought? Emerson told me (and he will tell you) to do something amazing with my life. The language it contains is a bit archaic, but that just adds to the weight of the argument. You can consider it to be a meeting with a great philosopher who shaped the ethos of the modern United States.

• You can start with a powerful poem that will set the stage for your work.
• Be free in your creative flow. Do not wait for the approval of others: “What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness”.
• Use rhetorical questions to strengthen your argument: “I hear a preacher announce for his text and topic the expediency of one of the institutions of his church. Do I not know beforehand that not possibly say a new and spontaneous word?”

29. David Foster Wallace – Consider The Lobster

When you want simple field notes about a food festival, you needn’t send there the formidable David Foster Wallace. He sees right through the hypocrisy and cruelty behind killing hundreds of thousands of innocent lobsters – by boiling them alive. This essay uncovers some of the worst traits of modern American people. There are no apologies or hedging one’s bets. There’s just plain truth that stabs you in the eye like a lobster claw. After reading this essay, you may reconsider the whole animal-eating business.

• When it’s important, say it plainly and stagger the reader: “[Lobsters] survive right up until they’re boiled. Most of us have been in supermarkets or restaurants that feature tanks of live lobster, from which you can pick out your supper while it watches you point”.
• In your writing, put exact quotes of the people you’ve been interviewing (including slang and grammatical errors). It makes it more vivid, and interesting.
• You can use humor in serious situations to make your story grotesque.
• Use captions to expound on interesting points of your essay.

30. David Foster Wallace – The Nature of the Fun

The famous novelist and author of the most powerful commencement speech ever done is going to tell you about the joys and sorrows of writing a work of fiction. It’s like taking care of a mutant child that constantly oozes smelly liquids. But you love that child and you want others to love it too. It’s a very humorous account of what it means to be an author. If you ever plan to write a novel, you should read that one. And the story about the Chinese farmer is just priceless.

• Base your point on a chimerical analogy. Here, the writer’s unfinished work is a “hideously damaged infant”.
• Even in expository writing, you may share an interesting story to keep things lively.
• Share your true emotions (even when you think they won’t interest anyone). Often, that’s exactly what will interest the reader.
• Read the whole essay for marvelous advice on writing fiction.

31. Margaret Atwood – Attitude

This is not an essay per se, but I included it on the list for the sake of variety. It was delivered as a commencement speech at The University of Toronto, and it’s about keeping the right attitude. Soon after leaving university, most graduates have to forget about safety, parties, and travel and start a new life – one filled with a painful routine that will last until they drop. Atwood says that you don’t have to accept that. You can choose how you react to everything that happens to you (and you don’t have to stay in that dead-end job for the rest of your days).

• At times, we are all too eager to persuade, but the strongest persuasion is not forceful. It’s subtle. It speaks to the heart. It affects you gradually.
• You may be tempted to talk about a subject by first stating what it is not, rather than what it is. Try to avoid that.
• Simple advice for writers (and life in general): “When faced with the inevitable, you always have a choice. You may not be able to alter reality, but you can alter your attitude towards it”.

32. Jo Ann Beard – The Fourth State of Matter

Read that one as soon as possible. It’s one of the most masterful and impactful essays you’ll ever read. It’s like a good horror – a slow build-up, and then your jaw drops to the ground. To summarize the story would be to spoil it, so I recommend that you just dig in and devour this essay in one sitting. It’s a perfect example of “show, don’t tell” writing, where the actions of characters are enough to create the right effect. No need for flowery adjectives here.

• The best story you will tell is going to come from your personal experience.
• Use mysteries that will nag the reader. For example, at the beginning of the essay, we learn about the “vanished husband” but there’s no explanation. We have to keep reading to get the answer.
• Explain it in simple terms: “You’ve got your solid, your liquid, your gas, and then your plasma”. Why complicate?

33. Terence McKenna – Tryptamine Hallucinogens and Consciousness

To me, Terence McKenna was one of the most interesting thinkers of the twentieth century. His many lectures (now available on YouTube) attracted millions of people who suspect that consciousness holds secrets yet to be unveiled. McKenna consumed psychedelic drugs for most of his life and it shows (in a positive way). Many people consider him a looney, and a hippie, but he was so much more than that. He dared to go into the abyss of his psyche and come back to tell the tale. He also wrote many books (the most famous being Food Of The Gods ), built a huge botanical garden in Hawaii , lived with shamans, and was a connoisseur of all things enigmatic and obscure. Take a look at this essay, and learn more about the explorations of the subconscious mind.

• Become the original thinker, but remember that it may require extraordinary measures: “I call myself an explorer rather than a scientist because the area that I’m looking at contains insufficient data to support even the dream of being a science”.
• Learn new words every day to make your thoughts lucid.
• Come up with the most outlandish ideas to push the envelope of what’s possible. Don’t take things for granted or become intellectually lazy. Question everything.

34. Eudora Welty – The Little Store

By reading this little-known essay, you will be transported into the world of the old American South. It’s a remembrance of trips to the little store in a little town. It’s warm and straightforward, and when you read it, you feel like a child once more. All these beautiful memories live inside of us. They lay somewhere deep in our minds, hidden from sight. The work by Eudora Welty is an attempt to uncover some of them and let you get reacquainted with some smells and tastes of the past.

• When you’re from the South, flaunt it. It’s still good old English but sometimes it sounds so foreign. I can hear the Southern accent too: “There were almost tangible smells – licorice recently sucked in a child’s cheek, dill-pickle brine that had leaked through a paper sack in a fresh trail across the wooden floor, ammonia-loaded ice that had been hoisted from wet Croker sacks and slammed into the icebox with its sweet butter at the door, and perhaps the smell of still-untrapped mice”.
• Yet again, never forget your roots.
• Childhood stories can be the most powerful ones. You can write about how they shaped you.

35. John McPhee – The Search for Marvin Gardens

The Search for Marvin Gardens contains many layers of meaning. It’s a story about a Monopoly championship, but also, it’s the author’s search for the lost streets visible on the board of the famous board game. It also presents a historical perspective on the rise and fall of civilizations, and on Atlantic City, which once was a lively place, and then, slowly declined, the streets filled with dirt and broken windows.

• There’s nothing like irony: “A sign- ‘Slow, Children at Play’- has been bent backward by an automobile”.
• Telling the story in apparently unrelated fragments is sometimes better than telling the whole thing in a logical order.
• Creativity is everything. The best writing may come just from connecting two ideas and mixing them to achieve a great effect. Shush! The muse is whispering.

36. Maxine Hong Kingston – No Name Woman

A dead body at the bottom of the well makes for a beautiful literary device. The first line of Orhan Pamuk’s novel My Name Is Red delivers it perfectly: “I am nothing but a corpse now, a body at the bottom of a well”. There’s something creepy about the idea of the well. Just think about the “It puts the lotion in the basket” scene from The Silence of the Lambs. In the first paragraph of Kingston’s essay, we learn about a suicide committed by uncommon means of jumping into the well. But this time it’s a real story. Who was this woman? Why did she do it? Read the essay.

• Mysterious death always gets attention. The macabre details are like daiquiris on a hot day – you savor them – you don’t let them spill.
• One sentence can speak volumes: “But the rare urge west had fixed upon our family, and so my aunt crossed boundaries not delineated in space”.
• It’s interesting to write about cultural differences – especially if you have the relevant experience. Something normal for us is unthinkable for others. Show this different world.
• The subject of sex is never boring.

37. Joan Didion – On Keeping A Notebook

Slouching Towards Bethlehem is one of the most famous collections of essays of all time. In it, you will find a curious piece called On Keeping A Notebook. It’s not only a meditation about keeping a journal. It’s also Didion’s reconciliation with her past self. After reading it, you will seriously reconsider your life’s choices and look at your life from a wider perspective.

• When you write things down in your journal, be more specific – unless you want to write a deep essay about it years later.
• Use the beauty of the language to relate to the past: “I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be; one of them, a seventeen-year-old, presents little threat, although it would be of some interest to me to know again what it feels like to sit on a river levee drinking vodka-and-orange-juice and listening to Les Paul and Mary Ford and their echoes sing ‘How High the Moon’ on the car radio”.
• Drop some brand names if you want to feel posh.

38. Joan Didion – Goodbye To All That

This one touched me because I also lived in New York City for a while. I don’t know why, but stories about life in NYC are so often full of charm and this eerie-melancholy-jazz feeling. They are powerful. They go like this: “There was a hard blizzard in NYC. As the sound of sirens faded, Tony descended into the dark world of hustlers and pimps.” That’s pulp literature but in the context of NYC, it always sounds cool. Anyway, this essay is amazing in too many ways. You just have to read it.

• Talk about New York City. They will read it.
• Talk about the human experience: “It did occur to me to call the desk and ask that the air conditioner be turned off, I never called, because I did not know how much to tip whoever might come—was anyone ever so young?”
• Look back at your life and reexamine it. Draw lessons from it.

39. George Orwell – Reflections on Gandhi

George Orwell could see things as they were. No exaggeration, no romanticism – just facts. He recognized totalitarianism and communism for what they were and shared his worries through books like 1984 and Animal Farm . He took the same sober approach when dealing with saints and sages. Today, we regard Gandhi as one of the greatest political leaders of the twentieth century – and rightfully so. But did you know that when asked about the Jews during World War II, Gandhi said that they should commit collective suicide and that it: “would have aroused the world and the people of Germany to Hitler’s violence.” He also recommended utter pacifism in 1942, during the Japanese invasion, even though he knew it would cost millions of lives. But overall he was a good guy. Read the essay and broaden your perspective on the Bapu of the Indian Nation.

• Share a philosophical thought that stops the reader for a moment: “No doubt alcohol, tobacco, and so forth are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid”.
• Be straightforward in your writing – no mannerisms, no attempts to create ‘style’, and no invocations of the numinous – unless you feel the mystical vibe.

40. George Orwell – Politics and the English Language

Let Mr. Orwell give you some writing tips. Written in 1946, this essay is still one of the most helpful documents on writing in English. Orwell was probably the first person who exposed the deliberate vagueness of political language. He was very serious about it and I admire his efforts to slay all unclear sentences (including ones written by distinguished professors). But it’s good to make it humorous too from time to time. My favorite examples of that would be the immortal Soft Language sketch by George Carlin or the “Romans Go Home” scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Overall, it’s a great essay filled with examples from many written materials. It’s a must-read for any writer.

• Listen to the master: “This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose.” Do something about it.
• This essay is all about writing better, so go to the source if you want the goodies.

Other Essays You May Find Interesting

The list that I’ve prepared is by no means complete. The literary world is full of exciting essays and you’ll never know which one is going to change your life. I’ve found reading essays very rewarding because sometimes, a single one means more than reading a whole book. It’s almost like wandering around and peeking into the minds of the greatest writers and thinkers that ever lived. To make this list more comprehensive, below I included more essays you may find interesting.

Oliver Sacks – On Libraries

One of the greatest contributors to the knowledge about the human mind, Oliver Sacks meditates on the value of libraries and his love of books.

Noam Chomsky – The Responsibility of Intellectuals

Chomsky did probably more than anyone else to define the role of the intelligentsia in the modern world . There is a war of ideas over there – good and bad – intellectuals are going to be those who ought to be fighting for the former.

Sam Harris – The Riddle of The Gun

Sam Harris, now a famous philosopher and neuroscientist, takes on the problem of gun control in the United States. His thoughts are clear of prejudice. After reading this, you’ll appreciate the value of logical discourse overheated, irrational debate that more often than not has real implications on policy.

Tim Ferriss – Some Practical Thoughts on Suicide

This piece was written as a blog post , but it’s worth your time. The author of the NYT bestseller The 4-Hour Workweek shares an emotional story about how he almost killed himself, and what can you do to save yourself or your friends from suicide.

Edward Said – Reflections on Exile

The life of Edward Said was a truly fascinating one. Born in Jerusalem, he lived between Palestine and Egypt and finally settled down in the United States, where he completed his most famous work – Orientalism. In this essay, he shares his thoughts about what it means to be in exile.

Richard Feynman – It’s as Simple as One, Two, Three…

Richard Feynman is one of the most interesting minds of the twentieth century. He was a brilliant physicist, but also an undeniably great communicator of science, an artist, and a traveler. By reading this essay, you can observe his thought process when he tries to figure out what affects our perception of time. It’s a truly fascinating read.

Rabindranath Tagore – The Religion of The Forest

I like to think about Tagore as my spiritual Friend. His poems are just marvelous. They are like some of the Persian verses that praise love, nature, and the unity of all things. By reading this short essay, you will learn a lot about Indian philosophy and its relation to its Western counterpart.

Richard Dawkins – Letter To His 10-Year-Old Daughter

Every father should be able to articulate his philosophy of life to his children. With this letter that’s similar to what you find in the Paris Review essays , the famed atheist and defender of reason, Richard Dawkins, does exactly that. It’s beautifully written and stresses the importance of looking at evidence when we’re trying to make sense of the world.

Albert Camus – The Minotaur (or, The Stop In Oran)

Each person requires a period of solitude – a period when one’s able to gather thoughts and make sense of life. There are many places where you may attempt to find quietude. Albert Camus tells about his favorite one.

Koty Neelis – 21 Incredible Life Lessons From Anthony Bourdain

I included it as the last one because it’s not really an essay, but I just had to put it somewhere. In this listicle, you’ll find the 21 most original thoughts of the high-profile cook, writer, and TV host, Anthony Bourdain. Some of them are shocking, others are funny, but they’re all worth checking out.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca – On the Shortness of Life

It’s similar to the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam because it praises life. Seneca shares some of his stoic philosophy and tells you not to waste your time on stupidities. Drink! – for once dead you shall never return.

Bertrand Russell – In Praise of Idleness

This old essay is a must-read for modern humans. We are so preoccupied with our work, our phones, and all the media input we drown in our business. Bertrand Russell tells you to chill out a bit – maybe it will do you some good.

James Baldwin – Stranger in the Village

It’s an essay on the author’s experiences as an African-American in a Swiss village, exploring race, identity, and alienation while highlighting the complexities of racial dynamics and the quest for belonging.

Bonus – More writing tips from two great books

The mission to improve my writing skills took me further than just going through the essays. I’ve come across some great books on writing too. I highly recommend you read them in their entirety. They’re written beautifully and contain lots of useful knowledge. Below you’ll find random (but useful) notes that I took from The Sense of Style and On Writing.

The Sense of Style – By Steven Pinker

• Style manuals are full of inconsistencies. Following their advice might not be the best idea. They might make your prose boring.
• Grammarians from all eras condemn students for not knowing grammar. But it just evolves. It cannot be rigid.
• “Nothing worth learning can be taught” – Oscar Wilde. It’s hard to learn to write from a manual – you have to read, write, and analyze.
• Good writing makes you imagine things and feel them for yourself – use word pictures.
• Don’t fear using voluptuous words.
• Phonesthetics – or how the words sound.
• Use parallel language (consistency of tense).
• Good writing finishes strong.
• Write to someone. Never write for no one in mind. Try to show people your view of the world.
• Don’t tell everything you are going to say in summary (signposting) – be logical, but be conversational.
• Don’t be pompous.
• Don’t use quotation marks where they don’t “belong”. Be confident about your style.
• Don’t hedge your claims (research first, and then tell it like it is).
• Avoid clichés and meta-concepts (concepts about concepts). Be more straightforward!
• Not prevention – but prevents or prevented – don’t use dead nouns.
• Be more vivid while using your mother tongue – don’t use passive where it’s not needed. Direct the reader’s gaze to something in the world.
• The curse of knowledge – the reader doesn’t know what you know – beware of that.
• Explain technical terms.
• Use examples when you explain a difficult term.
• If you ever say “I think I understand this” it probably means you don’t.
• It’s better to underestimate the lingo of your readers than to overestimate it.
• Functional fixedness – if we know some object (or idea) well, we tend to see it in terms of usage, not just as an object.
• Use concrete language instead of an abstraction.
• Show your work to people before you publish (get feedback!).
• Wait for a few days and then revise, revise, revise. Think about clarity and the sound of sentences. Then show it to someone. Then revise one more time. Then publish (if it’s to be serious work).
• Look at it from the perspective of other people.
• Omit needless words.
• Put the heaviest words at the end of the sentence.
• It’s good to use the passive, but only when appropriate.
• Check all text for cohesion. Make sure that the sentences flow gently.
• In expository work, go from general to more specific. But in journalism start from the big news and then give more details.
• Use the paragraph break to give the reader a moment to take a breath.
• Use the verb instead of a noun (make it more active) – not “cancellation”, but “canceled”. But after you introduce the action, you can refer to it with a noun.
• Avoid too many negations.
• If you write about why something is so, don’t spend too much time writing about why it is not.

On Writing Well – By William Zinsser

• Writing is a craft. You need to sit down every day and practice your craft.
• You should re-write and polish your prose a lot.
• Throw out all the clutter. Don’t keep it because you like it. Aim for readability.
• Look at the best examples of English literature . There’s hardly any needless garbage there.
• Use shorter expressions. Don’t add extra words that don’t bring any value to your work.
• Don’t use pompous language. Use simple language and say plainly what’s going on (“because” equals “because”).
• The media and politics are full of cluttered prose (because it helps them to cover up for their mistakes).
• You can’t add style to your work (and especially, don’t add fancy words to create an illusion of style). That will look fake. You need to develop a style.
• Write in the “I” mode. Write to a friend or just for yourself. Show your personality. There is a person behind the writing.
• Choose your words carefully. Use the dictionary to learn different shades of meaning.
• Remember about phonology. Make music with words .
• The lead is essential. Pull the reader in. Otherwise, your article is dead.
• You don’t have to make the final judgment on any topic. Just pick the right angle.
• Do your research. Not just obvious research, but a deep one.
• When it’s time to stop, stop. And finish strong. Think about the last sentence. Surprise them.
• Use quotations. Ask people. Get them talking.
• If you write about travel, it must be significant to the reader. Don’t bother with the obvious. Choose your words with special care. Avoid travel clichés at all costs. Don’t tell that the sand was white and there were rocks on the beach. Look for the right detail.
• If you want to learn how to write about art, travel, science, etc. – read the best examples available. Learn from the masters.
• Concentrate on one big idea (“Let’s not go peeing down both legs”).
• “The reader has to feel that the writer is feeling good.”
• One very helpful question: “What is the piece really about?” (Not just “What the piece is about?”)

Now immerse yourself in the world of essays

By reading the essays from the list above, you’ll become a better writer , a better reader, but also a better person. An essay is a special form of writing. It is the only literary form that I know of that is an absolute requirement for career or educational advancement. Nowadays, you can use an AI essay writer or an AI essay generator that will get the writing done for you, but if you have personal integrity and strong moral principles, avoid doing this at all costs. For me as a writer, the effect of these authors’ masterpieces is often deeply personal. You won’t be able to find the beautiful thoughts they contain in any other literary form. I hope you enjoy the read and that it will inspire you to do your writing. This list is only an attempt to share some of the best essays available online. Next up, you may want to check the list of magazines and websites that accept personal essays .

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Read this week's magazine

The Top 10 Essays Since 1950

Robert Atwan, the founder of The Best American Essays series, picks the 10 best essays of the postwar period. Links to the essays are provided when available.

Fortunately, when I worked with Joyce Carol Oates on The Best American Essays of the Century (that’s the last century, by the way), we weren’t restricted to ten selections. So to make my list of the top ten essays since 1950 less impossible, I decided to exclude all the great examples of New Journalism--Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Michael Herr, and many others can be reserved for another list. I also decided to include only American writers, so such outstanding English-language essayists as Chris Arthur and Tim Robinson are missing, though they have appeared in The Best American Essays series. And I selected essays , not essayists . A list of the top ten essayists since 1950 would feature some different writers.

To my mind, the best essays are deeply personal (that doesn’t necessarily mean autobiographical) and deeply engaged with issues and ideas. And the best essays show that the name of the genre is also a verb, so they demonstrate a mind in process--reflecting, trying-out, essaying.

James Baldwin, "Notes of a Native Son" (originally appeared in Harper’s , 1955)

“I had never thought of myself as an essayist,” wrote James Baldwin, who was finishing his novel Giovanni’s Room while he worked on what would become one of the great American essays. Against a violent historical background, Baldwin recalls his deeply troubled relationship with his father and explores his growing awareness of himself as a black American. Some today may question the relevance of the essay in our brave new “post-racial” world, though Baldwin considered the essay still relevant in 1984 and, had he lived to see it, the election of Barak Obama may not have changed his mind. However you view the racial politics, the prose is undeniably hypnotic, beautifully modulated and yet full of urgency. Langston Hughes nailed it when he described Baldwin’s “illuminating intensity.” The essay was collected in Notes of a Native Son courageously (at the time) published by Beacon Press in 1955.

Norman Mailer, "The White Negro" (originally appeared in Dissent , 1957)

An essay that packed an enormous wallop at the time may make some of us cringe today with its hyperbolic dialectics and hyperventilated metaphysics. But Mailer’s attempt to define the “hipster”–in what reads in part like a prose version of Ginsberg’s “Howl”–is suddenly relevant again, as new essays keep appearing with a similar definitional purpose, though no one would mistake Mailer’s hipster (“a philosophical psychopath”) for the ones we now find in Mailer’s old Brooklyn neighborhoods. Odd, how terms can bounce back into life with an entirely different set of connotations. What might Mailer call the new hipsters? Squares?

Read the essay here .

Susan Sontag, "Notes on 'Camp'" (originally appeared in Partisan Review , 1964)

Like Mailer’s “White Negro,” Sontag’s groundbreaking essay was an ambitious attempt to define a modern sensibility, in this case “camp,” a word that was then almost exclusively associated with the gay world. I was familiar with it as an undergraduate, hearing it used often by a set of friends, department store window decorators in Manhattan. Before I heard Sontag—thirty-one, glamorous, dressed entirely in black-- read the essay on publication at a Partisan Review gathering, I had simply interpreted “campy” as an exaggerated style or over-the-top behavior. But after Sontag unpacked the concept, with the help of Oscar Wilde, I began to see the cultural world in a different light. “The whole point of camp,” she writes, “is to dethrone the serious.” Her essay, collected in Against Interpretation (1966), is not in itself an example of camp.

John McPhee, "The Search for Marvin Gardens" (originally appeared in The New Yorker , 1972)

“Go. I roll the dice—a six and a two. Through the air I move my token, the flatiron, to Vermont Avenue, where dog packs range.” And so we move, in this brilliantly conceived essay, from a series of Monopoly games to a decaying Atlantic City, the once renowned resort town that inspired America’s most popular board game. As the games progress and as properties are rapidly snapped up, McPhee juxtaposes the well-known sites on the board—Atlantic Avenue, Park Place—with actual visits to their crumbling locations. He goes to jail, not just in the game but in fact, portraying what life has now become in a city that in better days was a Boardwalk Empire. At essay’s end, he finds the elusive Marvin Gardens. The essay was collected in Pieces of the Frame (1975).

Read the essay here (subscription required).

Joan Didion, "The White Album" (originally appeared in New West , 1979)

Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, and the Black Panthers, a recording session with Jim Morrison and the Doors, the San Francisco State riots, the Manson murders—all of these, and much more, figure prominently in Didion’s brilliant mosaic distillation (or phantasmagoric album) of California life in the late 1960s. Yet despite a cast of characters larger than most Hollywood epics, “The White Album” is a highly personal essay, right down to Didion’s report of her psychiatric tests as an outpatient in a Santa Monica hospital in the summer of 1968. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” the essay famously begins, and as it progresses nervously through cuts and flashes of reportage, with transcripts, interviews, and testimonies, we realize that all of our stories are questionable, “the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.” Portions of the essay appeared in installments in 1968-69 but it wasn’t until 1979 that Didion published the complete essay in New West magazine; it then became the lead essay of her book, The White Album (1979).

Annie Dillard, "Total Eclipse" (originally appeared in Antaeus , 1982)

In her introduction to The Best American Essays 1988 , Annie Dillard claims that “The essay can do everything a poem can do, and everything a short story can do—everything but fake it.” Her essay “Total Eclipse” easily makes her case for the imaginative power of a genre that is still undervalued as a branch of imaginative literature. “Total Eclipse” has it all—the climactic intensity of short fiction, the interwoven imagery of poetry, and the meditative dynamics of the personal essay: “This was the universe about which we have read so much and never before felt: the universe as a clockwork of loose spheres flung at stupefying, unauthorized speeds.” The essay, which first appeared in Antaeus in 1982 was collected in Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982), a slim volume that ranks among the best essay collections of the past fifty years.

Phillip Lopate, "Against Joie de Vivre" (originally appeared in Ploughshares , 1986)

This is an essay that made me glad I’d started The Best American Essays the year before. I’d been looking for essays that grew out of a vibrant Montaignean spirit—personal essays that were witty, conversational, reflective, confessional, and yet always about something worth discussing. And here was exactly what I’d been looking for. I might have found such writing several decades earlier but in the 80s it was relatively rare; Lopate had found a creative way to insert the old familiar essay into the contemporary world: “Over the years,” Lopate begins, “I have developed a distaste for the spectacle of joie de vivre , the knack of knowing how to live.” He goes on to dissect in comic yet astute detail the rituals of the modern dinner party. The essay was selected by Gay Talese for The Best American Essays 1987 and collected in Against Joie de Vivre in 1989 .

Edward Hoagland, "Heaven and Nature" (originally appeared in Harper’s, 1988)

“The best essayist of my generation,” is how John Updike described Edward Hoagland, who must be one of the most prolific essayists of our time as well. “Essays,” Hoagland wrote, “are how we speak to one another in print—caroming thoughts not merely in order to convey a certain packet of information, but with a special edge or bounce of personal character in a kind of public letter.” I could easily have selected many other Hoagland essays for this list (such as “The Courage of Turtles”), but I’m especially fond of “Heaven and Nature,” which shows Hoagland at his best, balancing the public and private, the well-crafted general observation with the clinching vivid example. The essay, selected by Geoffrey Wolff for The Best American Essays 1989 and collected in Heart’s Desire (1988), is an unforgettable meditation not so much on suicide as on how we remarkably manage to stay alive.

Jo Ann Beard, "The Fourth State of Matter" (originally appeared in The New Yorker , 1996)

A question for nonfiction writing students: When writing a true story based on actual events, how does the narrator create dramatic tension when most readers can be expected to know what happens in the end? To see how skillfully this can be done turn to Jo Ann Beard’s astonishing personal story about a graduate student’s murderous rampage on the University of Iowa campus in 1991. “Plasma is the fourth state of matter,” writes Beard, who worked in the U of I’s physics department at the time of the incident, “You’ve got your solid, your liquid, your gas, and there’s your plasma. In outer space there’s the plasmasphere and the plasmapause.” Besides plasma, in this emotion-packed essay you will find entangled in all the tension a lovable, dying collie, invasive squirrels, an estranged husband, the seriously disturbed gunman, and his victims, one of them among the author’s dearest friends. Selected by Ian Frazier for The Best American Essays 1997 , the essay was collected in Beard’s award-winning volume, The Boys of My Youth (1998).

David Foster Wallace, "Consider the Lobster" (originally appeared in Gourmet , 2004)

They may at first look like magazine articles—those factually-driven, expansive pieces on the Illinois State Fair, a luxury cruise ship, the adult video awards, or John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign—but once you uncover the disguise and get inside them you are in the midst of essayistic genius. One of David Foster Wallace’s shortest and most essayistic is his “coverage” of the annual Maine Lobster Festival, “Consider the Lobster.” The Festival becomes much more than an occasion to observe “the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker” in action as Wallace poses an uncomfortable question to readers of the upscale food magazine: “Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?” Don’t gloss over the footnotes. Susan Orlean selected the essay for The Best American Essays 2004 and Wallace collected it in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (2005).

Read the essay here . (Note: the electronic version from Gourmet magazine’s archives differs from the essay that appears in The Best American Essays and in his book, Consider the Lobster. )

I wish I could include twenty more essays but these ten in themselves comprise a wonderful and wide-ranging mini-anthology, one that showcases some of the most outstanding literary voices of our time. Readers who’d like to see more of the best essays since 1950 should take a look at The Best American Essays of the Century (2000).

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The 10 Best Essay Collections of the Decade

Ever tried. ever failed. no matter..

Friends, it’s true: the end of the decade approaches. It’s been a difficult, anxiety-provoking, morally compromised decade, but at least it’s been populated by some damn fine literature. We’ll take our silver linings where we can.

So, as is our hallowed duty as a literary and culture website—though with full awareness of the potentially fruitless and endlessly contestable nature of the task—in the coming weeks, we’ll be taking a look at the best and most important (these being not always the same) books of the decade that was. We will do this, of course, by means of a variety of lists. We began with the best debut novels , the best short story collections , the best poetry collections , and the best memoirs of the decade , and we have now reached the fifth list in our series: the best essay collections published in English between 2010 and 2019.

The following books were chosen after much debate (and several rounds of voting) by the Literary Hub staff. Tears were spilled, feelings were hurt, books were re-read. And as you’ll shortly see, we had a hard time choosing just ten—so we’ve also included a list of dissenting opinions, and an even longer list of also-rans. As ever, free to add any of your own favorites that we’ve missed in the comments below.

The Top Ten

Oliver sacks, the mind’s eye (2010).

Toward the end of his life, maybe suspecting or sensing that it was coming to a close, Dr. Oliver Sacks tended to focus his efforts on sweeping intellectual projects like On the Move (a memoir), The River of Consciousness (a hybrid intellectual history), and Hallucinations (a book-length meditation on, what else, hallucinations). But in 2010, he gave us one more classic in the style that first made him famous, a form he revolutionized and brought into the contemporary literary canon: the medical case study as essay. In The Mind’s Eye , Sacks focuses on vision, expanding the notion to embrace not only how we see the world, but also how we map that world onto our brains when our eyes are closed and we’re communing with the deeper recesses of consciousness. Relaying histories of patients and public figures, as well as his own history of ocular cancer (the condition that would eventually spread and contribute to his death), Sacks uses vision as a lens through which to see all of what makes us human, what binds us together, and what keeps us painfully apart. The essays that make up this collection are quintessential Sacks: sensitive, searching, with an expertise that conveys scientific information and experimentation in terms we can not only comprehend, but which also expand how we see life carrying on around us. The case studies of “Stereo Sue,” of the concert pianist Lillian Kalir, and of Howard, the mystery novelist who can no longer read, are highlights of the collection, but each essay is a kind of gem, mined and polished by one of the great storytellers of our era.  –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead (2011)

The American essay was having a moment at the beginning of the decade, and Pulphead was smack in the middle. Without any hard data, I can tell you that this collection of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s magazine features—published primarily in GQ , but also in The Paris Review , and Harper’s —was the only full book of essays most of my literary friends had read since Slouching Towards Bethlehem , and probably one of the only full books of essays they had even heard of.

Well, we all picked a good one. Every essay in Pulphead is brilliant and entertaining, and illuminates some small corner of the American experience—even if it’s just one house, with Sullivan and an aging writer inside (“Mr. Lytle” is in fact a standout in a collection with no filler; fittingly, it won a National Magazine Award and a Pushcart Prize). But what are they about? Oh, Axl Rose, Christian Rock festivals, living around the filming of One Tree Hill , the Tea Party movement, Michael Jackson, Bunny Wailer, the influence of animals, and by god, the Miz (of Real World/Road Rules Challenge fame).

But as Dan Kois has pointed out , what connects these essays, apart from their general tone and excellence, is “their author’s essential curiosity about the world, his eye for the perfect detail, and his great good humor in revealing both his subjects’ and his own foibles.” They are also extremely well written, drawing much from fictional techniques and sentence craft, their literary pleasures so acute and remarkable that James Wood began his review of the collection in The New Yorker with a quiz: “Are the following sentences the beginnings of essays or of short stories?” (It was not a hard quiz, considering the context.)

It’s hard not to feel, reading this collection, like someone reached into your brain, took out the half-baked stuff you talk about with your friends, researched it, lived it, and represented it to you smarter and better and more thoroughly than you ever could. So read it in awe if you must, but read it.  –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives (2013)

Such is the sentence-level virtuosity of Aleksandar Hemon—the Bosnian-American writer, essayist, and critic—that throughout his career he has frequently been compared to the granddaddy of borrowed language prose stylists: Vladimir Nabokov. While it is, of course, objectively remarkable that anyone could write so beautifully in a language they learned in their twenties, what I admire most about Hemon’s work is the way in which he infuses every essay and story and novel with both a deep humanity and a controlled (but never subdued) fury. He can also be damn funny. Hemon grew up in Sarajevo and left in 1992 to study in Chicago, where he almost immediately found himself stranded, forced to watch from afar as his beloved home city was subjected to a relentless four-year bombardment, the longest siege of a capital in the history of modern warfare. This extraordinary memoir-in-essays is many things: it’s a love letter to both the family that raised him and the family he built in exile; it’s a rich, joyous, and complex portrait of a place the 90s made synonymous with war and devastation; and it’s an elegy for the wrenching loss of precious things. There’s an essay about coming of age in Sarajevo and another about why he can’t bring himself to leave Chicago. There are stories about relationships forged and maintained on the soccer pitch or over the chessboard, and stories about neighbors and mentors turned monstrous by ethnic prejudice. As a chorus they sing with insight, wry humor, and unimaginable sorrow. I am not exaggerating when I say that the collection’s devastating final piece, “The Aquarium”—which details his infant daughter’s brain tumor and the agonizing months which led up to her death—remains the most painful essay I have ever read.  –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

Of every essay in my relentlessly earmarked copy of Braiding Sweetgrass , Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s gorgeously rendered argument for why and how we should keep going, there’s one that especially hits home: her account of professor-turned-forester Franz Dolp. When Dolp, several decades ago, revisited the farm that he had once shared with his ex-wife, he found a scene of destruction: The farm’s new owners had razed the land where he had tried to build a life. “I sat among the stumps and the swirling red dust and I cried,” he wrote in his journal.

So many in my generation (and younger) feel this kind of helplessness–and considerable rage–at finding ourselves newly adult in a world where those in power seem determined to abandon or destroy everything that human bodies have always needed to survive: air, water, land. Asking any single book to speak to this helplessness feels unfair, somehow; yet, Braiding Sweetgrass does, by weaving descriptions of indigenous tradition with the environmental sciences in order to show what survival has looked like over the course of many millennia. Kimmerer’s essays describe her personal experience as a Potawotami woman, plant ecologist, and teacher alongside stories of the many ways that humans have lived in relationship to other species. Whether describing Dolp’s work–he left the stumps for a life of forest restoration on the Oregon coast–or the work of others in maple sugar harvesting, creating black ash baskets, or planting a Three Sisters garden of corn, beans, and squash, she brings hope. “In ripe ears and swelling fruit, they counsel us that all gifts are multiplied in relationship,” she writes of the Three Sisters, which all sustain one another as they grow. “This is how the world keeps going.”  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Hilton Als, White Girls (2013)

In a world where we are so often reduced to one essential self, Hilton Als’ breathtaking book of critical essays, White Girls , which meditates on the ways he and other subjects read, project and absorb parts of white femininity, is a radically liberating book. It’s one of the only works of critical thinking that doesn’t ask the reader, its author or anyone he writes about to stoop before the doorframe of complete legibility before entering. Something he also permitted the subjects and readers of his first book, the glorious book-length essay, The Women , a series of riffs and psychological portraits of Dorothy Dean, Owen Dodson, and the author’s own mother, among others. One of the shifts of that book, uncommon at the time, was how it acknowledges the way we inhabit bodies made up of variously gendered influences. To read White Girls now is to experience the utter freedom of this gift and to marvel at Als’ tremendous versatility and intelligence.

He is easily the most diversely talented American critic alive. He can write into genres like pop music and film where being part of an audience is a fantasy happening in the dark. He’s also wired enough to know how the art world builds reputations on the nod of rich white patrons, a significant collision in a time when Jean-Michel Basquiat is America’s most expensive modern artist. Als’ swerving and always moving grip on performance means he’s especially good on describing the effect of art which is volatile and unstable and built on the mingling of made-up concepts and the hard fact of their effect on behavior, such as race. Writing on Flannery O’Connor for instance he alone puts a finger on her “uneasy and unavoidable union between black and white, the sacred and the profane, the shit and the stars.” From Eminem to Richard Pryor, André Leon Talley to Michael Jackson, Als enters the life and work of numerous artists here who turn the fascinations of race and with whiteness into fury and song and describes the complexity of their beauty like his life depended upon it. There are also brief memoirs here that will stop your heart. This is an essential work to understanding American culture.  –John Freeman, Executive Editor

Eula Biss, On Immunity (2014)

We move through the world as if we can protect ourselves from its myriad dangers, exercising what little agency we have in an effort to keep at bay those fears that gather at the edges of any given life: of loss, illness, disaster, death. It is these fears—amplified by the birth of her first child—that Eula Biss confronts in her essential 2014 essay collection, On Immunity . As any great essayist does, Biss moves outward in concentric circles from her own very private view of the world to reveal wider truths, discovering as she does a culture consumed by anxiety at the pervasive toxicity of contemporary life. As Biss interrogates this culture—of privilege, of whiteness—she interrogates herself, questioning the flimsy ways in which we arm ourselves with science or superstition against the impurities of daily existence.

Five years on from its publication, it is dismaying that On Immunity feels as urgent (and necessary) a defense of basic science as ever. Vaccination, we learn, is derived from vacca —for cow—after the 17th-century discovery that a small application of cowpox was often enough to inoculate against the scourge of smallpox, an etymological digression that belies modern conspiratorial fears of Big Pharma and its vaccination agenda. But Biss never scolds or belittles the fears of others, and in her generosity and openness pulls off a neat (and important) trick: insofar as we are of the very world we fear, she seems to be suggesting, we ourselves are impure, have always been so, permeable, vulnerable, yet so much stronger than we think.  –Jonny Diamond, Editor-in-Chief 

Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions (2016)

When Rebecca Solnit’s essay, “Men Explain Things to Me,” was published in 2008, it quickly became a cultural phenomenon unlike almost any other in recent memory, assigning language to a behavior that almost every woman has witnessed—mansplaining—and, in the course of identifying that behavior, spurring a movement, online and offline, to share the ways in which patriarchal arrogance has intersected all our lives. (It would also come to be the titular essay in her collection published in 2014.) The Mother of All Questions follows up on that work and takes it further in order to examine the nature of self-expression—who is afforded it and denied it, what institutions have been put in place to limit it, and what happens when it is employed by women. Solnit has a singular gift for describing and decoding the misogynistic dynamics that govern the world so universally that they can seem invisible and the gendered violence that is so common as to seem unremarkable; this naming is powerful, and it opens space for sharing the stories that shape our lives.

The Mother of All Questions, comprised of essays written between 2014 and 2016, in many ways armed us with some of the tools necessary to survive the gaslighting of the Trump years, in which many of us—and especially women—have continued to hear from those in power that the things we see and hear do not exist and never existed. Solnit also acknowledges that labels like “woman,” and other gendered labels, are identities that are fluid in reality; in reviewing the book for The New Yorker , Moira Donegan suggested that, “One useful working definition of a woman might be ‘someone who experiences misogyny.'” Whichever words we use, Solnit writes in the introduction to the book that “when words break through unspeakability, what was tolerated by a society sometimes becomes intolerable.” This storytelling work has always been vital; it continues to be vital, and in this book, it is brilliantly done.  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends (2017)

The newly minted MacArthur fellow Valeria Luiselli’s four-part (but really six-part) essay  Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions  was inspired by her time spent volunteering at the federal immigration court in New York City, working as an interpreter for undocumented, unaccompanied migrant children who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. Written concurrently with her novel  Lost Children Archive  (a fictional exploration of the same topic), Luiselli’s essay offers a fascinating conceit, the fashioning of an argument from the questions on the government intake form given to these children to process their arrivals. (Aside from the fact that this essay is a heartbreaking masterpiece, this is such a  good  conceit—transforming a cold, reproducible administrative document into highly personal literature.) Luiselli interweaves a grounded discussion of the questionnaire with a narrative of the road trip Luiselli takes with her husband and family, across America, while they (both Mexican citizens) wait for their own Green Card applications to be processed. It is on this trip when Luiselli reflects on the thousands of migrant children mysteriously traveling across the border by themselves. But the real point of the essay is to actually delve into the real stories of some of these children, which are agonizing, as well as to gravely, clearly expose what literally happens, procedural, when they do arrive—from forms to courts, as they’re swallowed by a bureaucratic vortex. Amid all of this, Luiselli also takes on more, exploring the larger contextual relationship between the United States of America and Mexico (as well as other countries in Central America, more broadly) as it has evolved to our current, adverse moment.  Tell Me How It Ends  is so small, but it is so passionate and vigorous: it desperately accomplishes in its less-than-100-pages-of-prose what centuries and miles and endless records of federal bureaucracy have never been able, and have never cared, to do: reverse the dehumanization of Latin American immigrants that occurs once they set foot in this country.  –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Zadie Smith, Feel Free (2018)

In the essay “Meet Justin Bieber!” in Feel Free , Zadie Smith writes that her interest in Justin Bieber is not an interest in the interiority of the singer himself, but in “the idea of the love object”. This essay—in which Smith imagines a meeting between Bieber and the late philosopher Martin Buber (“Bieber and Buber are alternative spellings of the same German surname,” she explains in one of many winning footnotes. “Who am I to ignore these hints from the universe?”). Smith allows that this premise is a bit premise -y: “I know, I know.” Still, the resulting essay is a very funny, very smart, and un-tricky exploration of individuality and true “meeting,” with a dash of late capitalism thrown in for good measure. The melding of high and low culture is the bread and butter of pretty much every prestige publication on the internet these days (and certainly of the Twitter feeds of all “public intellectuals”), but the essays in Smith’s collection don’t feel familiar—perhaps because hers is, as we’ve long known, an uncommon skill. Though I believe Smith could probably write compellingly about anything, she chooses her subjects wisely. She writes with as much electricity about Brexit as the aforementioned Beliebers—and each essay is utterly engrossing. “She contains multitudes, but her point is we all do,” writes Hermione Hoby in her review of the collection in The New Republic . “At the same time, we are, in our endless difference, nobody but ourselves.”  –Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Tressie McMillan Cottom, Thick: And Other Essays (2019)

Tressie McMillan Cottom is an academic who has transcended the ivory tower to become the sort of public intellectual who can easily appear on radio or television talk shows to discuss race, gender, and capitalism. Her collection of essays reflects this duality, blending scholarly work with memoir to create a collection on the black female experience in postmodern America that’s “intersectional analysis with a side of pop culture.” The essays range from an analysis of sexual violence, to populist politics, to social media, but in centering her own experiences throughout, the collection becomes something unlike other pieces of criticism of contemporary culture. In explaining the title, she reflects on what an editor had said about her work: “I was too readable to be academic, too deep to be popular, too country black to be literary, and too naïve to show the rigor of my thinking in the complexity of my prose. I had wanted to create something meaningful that sounded not only like me, but like all of me. It was too thick.” One of the most powerful essays in the book is “Dying to be Competent” which begins with her unpacking the idiocy of LinkedIn (and the myth of meritocracy) and ends with a description of her miscarriage, the mishandling of black woman’s pain, and a condemnation of healthcare bureaucracy. A finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction, Thick confirms McMillan Cottom as one of our most fearless public intellectuals and one of the most vital.  –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Dissenting Opinions

The following books were just barely nudged out of the top ten, but we (or at least one of us) couldn’t let them pass without comment.

Elif Batuman, The Possessed (2010)

In The Possessed Elif Batuman indulges her love of Russian literature and the result is hilarious and remarkable. Each essay of the collection chronicles some adventure or other that she had while in graduate school for Comparative Literature and each is more unpredictable than the next. There’s the time a “well-known 20th-centuryist” gave a graduate student the finger; and the time when Batuman ended up living in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, for a summer; and the time that she convinced herself Tolstoy was murdered and spent the length of the Tolstoy Conference in Yasnaya Polyana considering clues and motives. Rich in historic detail about Russian authors and literature and thoughtfully constructed, each essay is an amalgam of critical analysis, cultural criticism, and serious contemplation of big ideas like that of identity, intellectual legacy, and authorship. With wit and a serpentine-like shape to her narratives, Batuman adopts a form reminiscent of a Socratic discourse, setting up questions at the beginning of her essays and then following digressions that more or less entreat the reader to synthesize the answer for herself. The digressions are always amusing and arguably the backbone of the collection, relaying absurd anecdotes with foreign scholars or awkward, surreal encounters with Eastern European strangers. Central also to the collection are Batuman’s intellectual asides where she entertains a theory—like the “problem of the person”: the inability to ever wholly capture one’s character—that ultimately layer the book’s themes. “You are certainly my most entertaining student,” a professor said to Batuman. But she is also curious and enthusiastic and reflective and so knowledgeable that she might even convince you (she has me!) that you too love Russian literature as much as she does. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist (2014)

Roxane Gay’s now-classic essay collection is a book that will make you laugh, think, cry, and then wonder, how can cultural criticism be this fun? My favorite essays in the book include Gay’s musings on competitive Scrabble, her stranded-in-academia dispatches, and her joyous film and television criticism, but given the breadth of topics Roxane Gay can discuss in an entertaining manner, there’s something for everyone in this one. This book is accessible because feminism itself should be accessible – Roxane Gay is as likely to draw inspiration from YA novels, or middle-brow shows about friendship, as she is to introduce concepts from the academic world, and if there’s anyone I trust to bridge the gap between high culture, low culture, and pop culture, it’s the Goddess of Twitter. I used to host a book club dedicated to radical reads, and this was one of the first picks for the club; a week after the book club met, I spied a few of the attendees meeting in the café of the bookstore, and found out that they had bonded so much over discussing  Bad Feminist  that they couldn’t wait for the next meeting of the book club to keep discussing politics and intersectionality, and that, in a nutshell, is the power of Roxane. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Rivka Galchen, Little Labors (2016)

Generally, I find stories about the trials and tribulations of child-having to be of limited appeal—useful, maybe, insofar as they offer validation that other people have also endured the bizarre realities of living with a tiny human, but otherwise liable to drift into the musings of parents thrilled at the simple fact of their own fecundity, as if they were the first ones to figure the process out (or not). But Little Labors is not simply an essay collection about motherhood, perhaps because Galchen initially “didn’t want to write about” her new baby—mostly, she writes, “because I had never been interested in babies, or mothers; in fact, those subjects had seemed perfectly not interesting to me.” Like many new mothers, though, Galchen soon discovered her baby—which she refers to sometimes as “the puma”—to be a preoccupying thought, demanding to be written about. Galchen’s interest isn’t just in her own progeny, but in babies in literature (“Literature has more dogs than babies, and also more abortions”), The Pillow Book , the eleventh-century collection of musings by Sei Shōnagon, and writers who are mothers. There are sections that made me laugh out loud, like when Galchen continually finds herself in an elevator with a neighbor who never fails to remark on the puma’s size. There are also deeper, darker musings, like the realization that the baby means “that it’s not permissible to die. There are days when this does not feel good.” It is a slim collection that I happened to read at the perfect time, and it remains one of my favorites of the decade. –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Charlie Fox, This Young Monster (2017)

On social media as in his writing, British art critic Charlie Fox rejects lucidity for allusion and doesn’t quite answer the Twitter textbox’s persistent question: “What’s happening?” These days, it’s hard to tell.  This Young Monster  (2017), Fox’s first book,was published a few months after Donald Trump’s election, and at one point Fox takes a swipe at a man he judges “direct from a nightmare and just a repulsive fucking goon.” Fox doesn’t linger on politics, though, since most of the monsters he looks at “embody otherness and make it into art, ripping any conventional idea of beauty to shreds and replacing it with something weird and troubling of their own invention.”

If clichés are loathed because they conform to what philosopher Georges Bataille called “the common measure,” then monsters are rebellious non-sequiturs, comedic or horrific derailments from a classical ideal. Perverts in the most literal sense, monsters have gone astray from some “proper” course. The book’s nine chapters, which are about a specific monster or type of monster, are full of callbacks to familiar and lesser-known media. Fox cites visual art, film, songs, and books with the screwy buoyancy of a savant. Take one of his essays, “Spook House,” framed as a stage play with two principal characters, Klaus (“an intoxicated young skinhead vampire”) and Hermione (“a teen sorceress with green skin and jet-black hair” who looks more like The Wicked Witch than her namesake). The chorus is a troupe of trick-or-treaters. Using the filmmaker Cameron Jamie as a starting point, the rest is free association on gothic decadence and Detroit and L.A. as cities of the dead. All the while, Klaus quotes from  Artforum ,  Dazed & Confused , and  Time Out. It’s a technical feat that makes fictionalized dialogue a conveyor belt for cultural criticism.

In Fox’s imagination, David Bowie and the Hydra coexist alongside Peter Pan, Dennis Hopper, and the maenads. Fox’s book reaches for the monster’s mask, not really to peel it off but to feel and smell the rubber schnoz, to know how it’s made before making sure it’s still snugly set. With a stylistic blend of arthouse suavity and B-movie chic,  This Young Monster considers how monsters in culture are made. Aren’t the scariest things made in post-production? Isn’t the creature just duplicity, like a looping choir or a dubbed scream? –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Elena Passarello, Animals Strike Curious Poses (2017)

Elena Passarello’s collection of essays Animals Strike Curious Poses picks out infamous animals and grants them the voice, narrative, and history they deserve. Not only is a collection like this relevant during the sixth extinction but it is an ambitious historical and anthropological undertaking, which Passarello has tackled with thorough research and a playful tone that rather than compromise her subject, complicates and humanizes it. Passarello’s intention is to investigate the role of animals across the span of human civilization and in doing so, to construct a timeline of humanity as told through people’s interactions with said animals. “Of all the images that make our world, animal images are particularly buried inside us,” Passarello writes in her first essay, to introduce us to the object of the book and also to the oldest of her chosen characters: Yuka, a 39,000-year-old mummified woolly mammoth discovered in the Siberian permafrost in 2010. It was an occasion so remarkable and so unfathomable given the span of human civilization that Passarello says of Yuka: “Since language is epically younger than both thought and experience, ‘woolly mammoth’ means, to a human brain, something more like time.” The essay ends with a character placing a hand on a cave drawing of a woolly mammoth, accompanied by a phrase which encapsulates the author’s vision for the book: “And he becomes the mammoth so he can envision the mammoth.” In Passarello’s hands the imagined boundaries between the animal, natural, and human world disintegrate and what emerges is a cohesive if baffling integrated history of life. With the accuracy and tenacity of a journalist and the spirit of a storyteller, Elena Passarello has assembled a modern bestiary worthy of contemplation and awe. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias (2019)

Esmé Weijun Wang’s collection of essays is a kaleidoscopic look at mental health and the lives affected by the schizophrenias. Each essay takes on a different aspect of the topic, but you’ll want to read them together for a holistic perspective. Esmé Weijun Wang generously begins The Collected Schizophrenias by acknowledging the stereotype, “Schizophrenia terrifies. It is the archetypal disorder of lunacy.” From there, she walks us through the technical language, breaks down the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual ( DSM-5 )’s clinical definition. And then she gets very personal, telling us about how she came to her own diagnosis and the way it’s touched her daily life (her relationships, her ideas about motherhood). Esmé Weijun Wang is uniquely situated to write about this topic. As a former lab researcher at Stanford, she turns a precise, analytical eye to her experience while simultaneously unfolding everything with great patience for her reader. Throughout, she brilliantly dissects the language around mental health. (On saying “a person living with bipolar disorder” instead of using “bipolar” as the sole subject: “…we are not our diseases. We are instead individuals with disorders and malfunctions. Our conditions lie over us like smallpox blankets; we are one thing and the illness is another.”) She pinpoints the ways she arms herself against anticipated reactions to the schizophrenias: high fashion, having attended an Ivy League institution. In a particularly piercing essay, she traces mental illness back through her family tree. She also places her story within more mainstream cultural contexts, calling on groundbreaking exposés about the dangerous of institutionalization and depictions of mental illness in television and film (like the infamous Slender Man case, in which two young girls stab their best friend because an invented Internet figure told them to). At once intimate and far-reaching, The Collected Schizophrenias is an informative and important (and let’s not forget artful) work. I’ve never read a collection quite so beautifully-written and laid-bare as this. –Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Ross Gay, The Book of Delights (2019)

When Ross Gay began writing what would become The Book of Delights, he envisioned it as a project of daily essays, each focused on a moment or point of delight in his day. This plan quickly disintegrated; on day four, he skipped his self-imposed assignment and decided to “in honor and love, delight in blowing it off.” (Clearly, “blowing it off” is a relative term here, as he still produced the book.) Ross Gay is a generous teacher of how to live, and this moment of reveling in self-compassion is one lesson among many in The Book of Delights , which wanders from moments of connection with strangers to a shade of “red I don’t think I actually have words for,” a text from a friend reading “I love you breadfruit,” and “the sun like a guiding hand on my back, saying everything is possible. Everything .”

Gay does not linger on any one subject for long, creating the sense that delight is a product not of extenuating circumstances, but of our attention; his attunement to the possibilities of a single day, and awareness of all the small moments that produce delight, are a model for life amid the warring factions of the attention economy. These small moments range from the physical–hugging a stranger, transplanting fig cuttings–to the spiritual and philosophical, giving the impression of sitting beside Gay in his garden as he thinks out loud in real time. It’s a privilege to listen. –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Honorable Mentions

A selection of other books that we seriously considered for both lists—just to be extra about it (and because decisions are hard).

Terry Castle, The Professor and Other Writings (2010) · Joyce Carol Oates, In Rough Country (2010) · Geoff Dyer, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (2011) · Christopher Hitchens, Arguably (2011) ·  Roberto Bolaño, tr. Natasha Wimmer, Between Parentheses (2011) · Dubravka Ugresic, tr. David Williams, Karaoke Culture (2011) · Tom Bissell, Magic Hours (2012)  · Kevin Young, The Grey Album (2012) · William H. Gass, Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts (2012) · Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey (2012) · Herta Müller, tr. Geoffrey Mulligan, Cristina and Her Double (2013) · Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams (2014)  · Meghan Daum, The Unspeakable (2014)  · Daphne Merkin, The Fame Lunches (2014)  · Charles D’Ambrosio, Loitering (2015) · Wendy Walters, Multiply/Divide (2015) · Colm Tóibín, On Elizabeth Bishop (2015) ·  Renee Gladman, Calamities (2016)  · Jesmyn Ward, ed. The Fire This Time (2016)  · Lindy West, Shrill (2016)  · Mary Oliver, Upstream (2016)  · Emily Witt, Future Sex (2016)  · Olivia Laing, The Lonely City (2016)  · Mark Greif, Against Everything (2016)  · Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood (2017)  · Sarah Gerard, Sunshine State (2017)  · Jim Harrison, A Really Big Lunch (2017)  · J.M. Coetzee, Late Essays: 2006-2017 (2017) · Melissa Febos, Abandon Me (2017)  · Louise Glück, American Originality (2017)  · Joan Didion, South and West (2017)  · Tom McCarthy, Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish (2017)  · Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can’t Kill Us Until they Kill Us (2017)  · Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power (2017)  ·  Samantha Irby, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life (2017)  · Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel (2018)  · Alice Bolin, Dead Girls (2018)  · Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here? (2018)  · Lorrie Moore, See What Can Be Done (2018)  · Maggie O’Farrell, I Am I Am I Am (2018)  · Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race (2018)  · Rachel Cusk, Coventry (2019)  · Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror (2019)  · Emily Bernard, Black is the Body (2019)  · Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard (2019)  · Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations (2019)  ·  Rachel Munroe, Savage Appetites (2019)  · Robert A. Caro,  Working  (2019) · Arundhati Roy, My Seditious Heart (2019).

Emily Temple

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Make Lists, Not War

The meta-lists website, best essays of all time – ranked.

A reader suggested I create a meta-list of the best essays of all time, so I did.  I found over 12 best essays lists and several essay anthologies and combined the essays into one meta-list.  The meta-list below includes every essay that was on at least two of the original source lists. They are organized by rank, that is, with the essays on the most lists at the top. To see the same list organized chronologically, go HERE .

Note 1:  Some of the essays are actually chapters from books.  In such cases, I have identified the source book.

Note 2: Some of the essays are book-length, such as Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own .  One book listed as an essay by two listers – Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet – is also regularly categorized as a work of fiction.

On 11 lists James Baldwin – Notes of a Native Son (1955)

On 6 lists George Orwell – Shooting an Elephant (1936) E.B. White – Once More to the Lake (1941) Joan Didion – Goodbye To All That (1968)

On 5 lists Joan Didion – On Keeping A Notebook (1968) Annie Dillard – Total Eclipse (1982) Jo Ann Beard – The Fourth State of Matter (1996) David Foster Wallace – A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again (1996)

On 4 lists William Hazlitt – On the Pleasure of Hating (1823) Ralph Waldo Emerson – Self-Reliance (1841) Virginia Woolf – A Room of One’s Own (1928) Virginia Woolf – The Death of a Moth (1942) George Orwell – Such, Such Were the Joys (1952) Joan Didion – In Bed (1968) Amy Tan – Mother Tongue (1991) David Foster Wallace – Consider The Lobster (2005)

On 3 lists Jonathan Swift – A Modest Proposal  (1729) Virginia Woolf – Street Haunting: A London Adventure (1930) John McPhee – The Search for Marvin Gardens (1972) Joan Didion – The White Album (1968-1978) Eudora Welty – The Little Store (1978) Phillip Lopate – Against Joie de Vivre (1989)

On 2 lists Sei Shonagon – Hateful Things (from The Pillow Book ) (1002) Yoshida Kenko – Essays in Idleness (1332) Michel de Montaigne – On Some Verses of Virgil (1580) Robert Burton – Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) John Milton – Areopagitica  (1644) William Hazlitt – On Going a Journey (1822) Charles Lamb – The Superannuated Man (1823) Henry David Thoreau – Civil Disobedience (1849) Henry David Thoreau – Where I Lived, and What I Lived For (from  Walden ) (1854) Henry David Thoreau – Economy (from  Walden ) (1854) Henry David Thoreau – Walking (1861) Robert Louis Stevenson – The Lantern-Bearers (1888) Zora Neale Hurston – How It Feels to Be Colored Me (1928) George Orwell – A Hanging (1931) Junichiro Tanizaki – In Praise of Shadows (1933) Fernando Pessoa – The Book of Disquiet (1935) James Agee and Walker Evans – Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) Simone Weil – On Human Personality (1943) M.F.K. Fisher – The Flaw (1943) Vladimir Nabokov – Speak, Memory (1951, revised 1966) Mary McCarthy – Artists in Uniform: A Story (1953) E.B. White – Goodbye to Forty-Eighth Street (1957) Martin Luther King, Jr. – Letter from Birmingham Jail (1963) Joseph Mitchell – Joe Gould’s Secret (1964) Susan Sontag – Against Interpretation (1966) Edward Hoagland – The Courage of Turtles (1970) Annie Dillard – Seeing (from  Pilgrim at Tinker Creek ) (1974) Maxine Hong Kingston – No Name Woman (from The Woman Warrior ) (1976) Roland Barthes – Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1982) Annie Dillard – Living Like Weasels (1982) Gloria E. Anzaldúa – How to Tame a Wild Tongue (1987) Italo Calvino – Exactitude (1988) Richard Rodriguez – Late Victorians (1990) David Wojnarowicz – Being Queer in America: A Journal of Disintegration (1991) Seymour Krim – To My Brothers & Sisters in the Failure Business (1991) Anne Carson – The Anthropology of Water (1995) Susan Sontag – Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) Etel Adnan – In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country (2005) Paul LaFarge – Destroy All Monsters (2006) Brian Doyle – Joyas Voladoras (2012)

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The 25 Greatest Essay Collections of All Time

Today marks the release of Aleksandar Hemon’s excellent book of personal essays, The Book of My Lives , which we loved, and which we’re convinced deserves a place in the literary canon. To that end, we were inspired to put together our list of the greatest essay collections of all time, from the classic to the contemporary, from the personal to the critical. In making our choices, we’ve steered away from posthumous omnibuses (Michel de Montaigne’s Complete Essays , the collected Orwell, etc.) and multi-author compilations, and given what might be undue weight to our favorite writers (as one does). After the jump, our picks for the 25 greatest essay collections of all time. Feel free to disagree with us, praise our intellect, or create an entirely new list in the comments.

The Book of My Lives , Aleksandar Hemon

Hemon’s memoir in essays is in turns wryly hilarious, intellectually searching, and deeply troubling. It’s the life story of a fascinating, quietly brilliant man, and it reads as such. For fans of chess and ill-advised theme parties and growing up more than once.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem , Joan Didion

Well, obviously. Didion’s extraordinary book of essays, expertly surveying both her native California in the 1960s and her own internal landscape with clear eyes and one eyebrow raised ever so slightly. This collection, her first, helped establish the idea of journalism as art, and continues to put wind in the sails of many writers after her, hoping to move in that Didion direction.

Pulphead , John Jeremiah Sullivan

This was one of those books that this writer deemed required reading for all immediate family and friends. Sullivan’s sharply observed essays take us from Christian rock festivals to underground caves to his own home, and introduce us to 19-century geniuses, imagined professors and Axl Rose. Smart, curious, and humane, this is everything an essay collection should be.

The Boys of My Youth , Jo Ann Beard

Another memoir-in-essays, or perhaps just a collection of personal narratives, Jo Ann Beard’s award-winning volume is a masterpiece. Not only does it include the luminous, emotionally destructive “The Fourth State of the Matter,” which we’ve already implored you to read , but also the incredible “Bulldozing the Baby,” which takes on a smaller tragedy: a three-year-old Beard’s separation from her doll Hal. “The gorgeous thing about Hal,” she tells us, “was that not only was he my friend, he was also my slave. I made the majority of our decisions, including the bathtub one, which in retrospect was the beginning of the end.”

Consider the Lobster , David Foster Wallace

This one’s another “duh” moment, at least if you’re a fan of the literary essay. One of the most brilliant essayists of all time, Wallace pushes the boundaries (of the form, of our patience, of his own brain) and comes back with a classic collection of writing on everything from John Updike to, well, lobsters. You’ll laugh out loud right before you rethink your whole life. And then repeat.

Notes of a Native Son , James Baldwin

Baldwin’s most influential work is a witty, passionate portrait of black life and social change in America in the 1940s and early 1950s. His essays, like so many of the greats’, are both incisive social critiques and rigorous investigations into the self, told with a perfect tension between humor and righteous fury.

Naked , David Sedaris

His essays often read more like short stories than they do social criticism (though there’s a healthy, if perhaps implied, dose of that slippery subject), but no one makes us laugh harder or longer. A genius of the form.

Against Interpretation , Susan Sontag

This collection, Sontag’s first, is a dazzling feat of intellectualism. Her essays dissect not only art but the way we think about art, imploring us to “reveal the sensuous surface of art without mucking about in it.” It also contains the brilliant “Notes on ‘Camp,'” one of our all-time favorites.

The Common Reader , Virginia Woolf

Woolf is a literary giant for a reason — she was as incisive and brilliant a critic as she was a novelist. These witty essays, written for the common reader (“He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously. He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others. Above all, he is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole- a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing”), are as illuminating and engrossing as they were when they were written.

Teaching a Stone to Talk , Annie Dillard

This is Dillard’s only book of essays, but boy is it a blazingly good one. The slender volume, filled with examinations of nature both human and not, is deft of thought and tongue, and well worth anyone’s time. As the Chicago Sun-Times ‘s Edward Abbey gushed, “This little book is haloed and informed throughout by Dillard’s distinctive passion and intensity, a sort of intellectual radiance that reminds me both Thoreau and Emily Dickinson.”

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man , Henry Louis Gates Jr.

In this eloquent volume of essays, all but one of which were originally published in the New Yorker , Gates argues against the notion of the singularly representable “black man,” preferring to represent him in a myriad of diverse profiles, from James Baldwin to Colin Powell. Humane, incisive, and satisfyingly journalistic, Gates cobbles together the ultimate portrait of the 20th-century African-American male by refusing to cobble it together, and raises important questions about race and identity even as he entertains.

Otherwise Known As the Human Condition , Geoff Dyer

This book of essays, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in the year of its publication, covers 25 years of the uncategorizable, inimitable Geoff Dyer’s work — casually erudite and yet liable to fascinate anyone wandering in the door, witty and breathing and full of truth. As Sam Lipsyte said, “You read Dyer for his caustic wit, of course, his exquisite and perceptive crankiness, and his deep and exciting intellectual connections, but from these enthralling rants and cultural investigations there finally emerges another Dyer, a generous seeker of human feeling and experience, a man perhaps closer than he thinks to what he believes his hero Camus achieved: ‘a heart free of bitterness.'”

Art and Ardor , Cynthia Ozick

Look, Cynthia Ozick is a genius. One of David Foster Wallace’s favorite writers, and one of ours, Ozick has no less than seven essay collections to her name, and we could have chosen any one of them, each sharper and more perfectly self-conscious than the last. This one, however, includes her stunner “A Drugstore in Winter,” which was chosen by Joyce Carol Oates for The Best American Essays of the Century , so we’ll go with it.

No More Nice Girls , Ellen Willis

The venerable Ellen Willis was the first pop music critic for The New Yorker , and a rollicking anti-authoritarian, feminist, all-around bad-ass woman who had a hell of a way with words. This collection examines the women’s movement, the plight of the aging radical, race relations, cultural politics, drugs, and Picasso. Among other things.

The War Against Cliché , Martin Amis

As you know if you’ve ever heard him talk , Martin Amis is not only a notorious grouch but a sharp critical mind, particularly when it comes to literature. That quality is on full display in this collection, which spans nearly 30 years and twice as many subjects, from Vladimir Nabokov (his hero) to chess to writing about sex. Love him or hate him, there’s no denying that he’s a brilliant old grump.

Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories From History and the Arts , Clive James

James’s collection is a strange beast, not like any other essay collection on this list but its own breed. An encyclopedia of modern culture, the book collects 110 new biographical essays, which provide more than enough room for James to flex his formidable intellect and curiosity, as he wanders off on tangents, anecdotes, and cultural criticism. It’s not the only who’s who you need, but it’s a who’s who you need.

I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman , Nora Ephron

Oh Nora, we miss you. Again, we could have picked any of her collections here — candid, hilarious, and willing to give it to you straight, she’s like a best friend and mentor in one, only much more interesting than any of either you’ve ever had.

Arguably , Christopher Hitchens

No matter what you think of his politics (or his rhetorical strategies), there’s no denying that Christopher Hitchens was one of the most brilliant minds — and one of the most brilliant debaters — of the century. In this collection, packed with cultural commentary, literary journalism, and political writing, he is at his liveliest, his funniest, his exactingly wittiest. He’s also just as caustic as ever.

The Solace of Open Spaces , Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich is a poet, and in this collection, you’ll know it. In 1976, she moved to Wyoming and became a cowherd, and nearly a decade later, she published this lovely, funny set of essays about rural life in the American West.”Keenly observed the world is transformed,” she writes. “The landscape is engorged with detail, every movement on it chillingly sharp. The air between people is charged. Days unfold, bathed in their own music. Nights become hallucinatory; dreams, prescient.”

The Braindead Megaphone , George Saunders

Saunders may be the man of the moment, but he’s been at work for a long while, and not only on his celebrated short stories. His single collection of essays applies the same humor and deliciously slant view to the real world — which manages to display nearly as much absurdity as one of his trademark stories.

Against Joie de Vivre , Phillip Lopate

“Over the years,” the title essay begins, “I have developed a distaste for the spectacle of joie de vivre , the knack of knowing how to live.” Lopate goes on to dissect, in pleasantly sardonic terms, the modern dinner party. Smart and thought-provoking throughout (and not as crotchety as all that), this collection is conversational but weighty, something to be discussed at length with friends at your next — oh well, you know.

Sex and the River Styx , Edward Hoagland

Edward Hoagland, who John Updike deemed “the best essayist of my generation,” has a long and storied career and a fat bibliography, so we hesitate to choose such a recent installment in the writer’s canon. Then again, Garrison Keillor thinks it’s his best yet , so perhaps we’re not far off. Hoagland is a great nature writer (name checked by many as the modern Thoreau) but in truth, he’s just as fascinated by humanity, musing that “human nature is interstitial with nature, and not to be shunned by a naturalist.” Elegant and thoughtful, Hoagland may warn us that he’s heading towards the River Styx, but we’ll hang on to him a while longer.

Changing My Mind , Zadie Smith

Smith may be best known for her novels (and she should be), but to our eyes she is also emerging as an excellent essayist in her own right, passionate and thoughtful. Plus, any essay collection that talks about Barack Obama via Pygmalion is a winner in our book.

My Misspent Youth , Meghan Daum

Like so many other writers on this list, Daum dives head first into the culture and comes up with meat in her mouth. Her voice is fresh and her narratives daring, honest and endlessly entertaining.

The White Album , Joan Didion

Yes, Joan Didion is on this list twice, because Joan Didion is the master of the modern essay, tearing at our assumptions and building our world in brisk, clever strokes. Deal.

Essay: The World’s Biggest Crisis Is the End of Scarcity

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The World’s Biggest Crisis Is the End of Scarcity

How our era of plenty has created the global problems that plague us today..

• United States

Imagine an alien observer, sent undercover to Earth every half-century, to account for the status of human life on the planet. What would she convey to her extraterrestrial colleagues about 2024?

This article is adapted from The Taming of Scarcity and the Problems of Plenty: Rethinking International Relations and American Grand Strategy in a New Era , Francis J. Gavin, Routledge, 106 pp., $16.95, March 2024.

Before taking her trip, she would peruse her previous reports, noting a few things. In 1974, the world’s leading democratic power, the United States, was in geopolitical retreat and domestic disarray, while the authoritarian Soviet Union appeared increasingly powerful. The most populated state in the world, a Mao Zedong-led China, possessed an economy barely above subsistence level, while the second most populous nation, India, was scarcely better. The global economy suffered from both inflation and slow growth, marked by a chaotic international monetary and financial system. Wars or the threat of wars, both civil and interstate, were ever present in every part of the globe. Nuclear Armageddon hung like a sword of Damocles over the planet.

1974’s report, however, was absolutely Pollyannaish compared to 1924’s. One horrific world war had concluded while laying the seeds for another even more murderous. Imperialism shaped the international order, as a significant percentage of the world’s population was ruled or exploited by European capitals thousands of miles away. A steep economic depression had just ended but was only a precursor to a far deeper, more devastating financial collapse a few years later. Racism, misogyny, and intolerance were the norm. This, however, was paradise compared to the previous chronicle. 1874’s report pointed out that global life expectancy was only 30 and that few living people had not, at some point in their life, been visited by personal and communal violence, deadly disease, misrule and misgovernance, and the threat of famine and disaster. Each preceding half-century report was, in fact, more dire than the last.

The soup line in New York City, circa 1929. Bettman Archives/via Getty Images

Seen from this historical perspective, the alien could send a positively glowing report back home. In 2024, famine and illiteracy have been dramatically reduced, and life expectancy has more than doubled over the past century. Unimaginable volumes of wealth are generated; staggering amounts of information are available to ordinary people, instantaneously; and transformative new labor and lifesaving technologies are created every day. Genocide is rare; tolerance, not prejudice, is increasingly a shared norm; formal colonialism has been thrown on the dustbin of history; and economic recessions are unlikely to turn into crippling depressions.

Most importantly, the incentives for states to fully mobilize their societies to pursue total wars of conquest—perhaps the most pervasive and frightening aspect of world politics in her past chronicles—have all but disappeared. Indeed, states are now expected to protect and provide benefits to their citizens, instead of simply using them as military fodder to vanquish foes and seize land. Ideas and innovation, not territory, are the sources of power in this new world.

In short, the world has made unimaginable progress in taming the steep challenges of scarcity that had plagued humanity for millennia and had been one of the core drivers of total wars for plunder, empire, and conquest. But the success in creating a more prosperous, informed, and secure world for humanity has, unexpectedly, generated a whole new set of planetary challenges that, if not resolved, threatens disaster, if not human extinction.

The remarkable progress in generating unimaginable levels of wealth, information, and security has created the new, more vexing, and arguably more dangerous problems of plenty—unexpected and potentially catastrophic challenges that were created, ironically, by humanity’s impressive efforts to tame scarcity.

Drone to Yacht, an exclusive delivery service, drops a bag of food to boats near Ibiza on Aug. 24, 2021. Jaime Reina/AFP via Getty Images

Five revolutionary shifts were key in creating our present era of plenty. First, an unexpected and voluntary demographic compression unfolded in the developed world, with birth rates falling precipitously while life expectancy markedly expanded; as median ages increased and population growth slowed, the need to conquer additional territory abated. Second, an economic-technological revolution emerged that massively improved agricultural yields and the availability of food, dramatically boosted industrial productivity, and transformed finance capitalism, while improving transportation, housing, and health, and making accessible, affordable fuel bountiful. Third, an information revolution took place, whereby increased literacy and technological change significantly expanded the amount of access to knowledge about the world. Fourth, leaders of the developed world created domestic and international governing institutions and practices, which, among other benefits, generated far greater domestic stability and socio-economic well-being, eliminated great depressions, and provided increased personal as well as collective security, creating a political order that prized order, sovereignty, and, in time, human rights. Finally, ground-breaking new military capabilities, especially thermonuclear weapons, prohibitively increased the costs and risks of great-power wars of conquest.

These revolutions combined to reduce the shadow of famine, disease, and misery that had long fallen upon the human experience, massively increasing total wealth and information while weakening core drivers of territorial expansion, immeasurably improving the quality of life in the developed world. Populations stabilized and aged; food, resources, and markets became more abundant; and disintermediated flows of information exploded.

So what exactly are the problems of plenty? The current world order produces great material output, generated by increasing global exchange, but distributing it fairly among and between populations is contentious. This enormous prosperity generated by the burgeoning trade and industrial prowess has spawned grave risks of climate, ecological, migratory, and public-health catastrophes. The emergence of new technologies, developed largely in the private sector, has solved innumerable problems, while also creating frightening new ones. Surprisingly, an unlimited amount of data and information, no longer intermediated by legacy institutions, generates different though equally fraught dangers as scarce information controlled by religious institutions or the state.

The Relentless Growth of Degrowth Economics

Europe’s push to abandon capitalism is motivated by optimism about politics—and pessimism about everything else.

The Hidden History of the World’s Top Offshore Cryptocurrency Tax Haven

The Bahamas represents how global capitalism can go very right, and very wrong, at exactly the same time.

The 1970s Weren’t What You Think

Yes, fiscal and monetary policy seemed stuck for too long in expansionary mode. But the era also saw the rebalancing of the world economy.

As Jonathan S. Blake and Nils Gilman point out in their forthcoming book, Children of a Modest Star , the list of threats to human welfare, life, and the planet itself generated by plenty is daunting: “climate change, pandemic diseases, stratospheric ozone depletion, atmospheric aerosol loading, space junk, growing antibiotic resistance, biodiversity loss, anthropogenic genetic disruptions, declining soil health, upended nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, freshwater depletion, ocean acidification, oceanic plastics—and maybe even emerging technologies with terraforming potential, like bioengineering and artificial intelligence.”

A key feature of the age of plenty is the extraordinary ability to move massive quantities of ideas, money, goods, and especially people around the world quickly, irrespective of borders and territory. But this revolution in transmission does not simply enable good citizens and products to move around the world: unwanted agents—from pathogens to terrorists to bad ideas—can also move far more quickly and effortlessly, often with devastating consequences. Expectations have also been dramatically raised while left unmet. While the age of abundance has promoted tolerance and radical individuality, it has also undermined social cohesion and weakened the sense of common purpose needed to confront these challenges. Governing norms and institutions developed to successfully tame scarcity have been exposed as ill-suited to confront contemporary challenges, generating a crisis of political legitimacy and stoking polarization.

Families arrive to board a train at Kramatorsk central station as they flee Kramatorsk, in the Donbas region of Ukraine on April 4, 2022. Fadel Senna/AFP via Getty Images

In an era of plenty where empire, plunder, and conquest make little sense, how should we understand the current turmoil in world politics, marked by atrocities in the Middle East, Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, and the deepening tensions between the world’s two most powerful states, China and the United States? Why are the leading powers seemingly focused on issues that resonated in the world of scarcity, particularly great-power rivalry and war, while offering inadequate responses to the pressing issues generated by a world of plenty? There are many reasons, but three stand out.

First, Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine is the exception that proves the rule, revealing the dangers of strategic decisions based on outdated assumptions about conquest. From a narrow national-interest perspective, a desire to control the Donbas made some sense in 1900, when its abundant coal, wheat, defense in depth, and pliant population added to Russia’s power in a world shaped by scarcity and where empire and conquest were the norm. Today, in an age when food and fuel are historically cheap and abundant, land less valuable, conquered territories much more difficult to subdue, alternative grand strategies far more promising, and the world both aghast by and willing to punish Russia for its violations of the norms of sovereignty and human rights, even a successful conquest of Ukraine was unlikely to make Russia much more powerful in the long run. There are many important differences between America’s disastrous post-9/11 wars in the greater Middle East and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Both, however, reflect poor grand-strategic decisions based on profound misreadings of the nature of power and the incentives of the contemporary international system, misunderstanding the increased difficulty and decreased payoff for using force to conquer territories or subdue uncooperative populations in the age of plenty.

Second, it is important to recognize that there are many causes of war and conflict beyond plunder and imperial conquest. In particular, we must distinguish between the imperial conquest of the past—or an expansive, often unlimited impulse to add territory and colonies—and irredentism, or the finite desire of a state to reclaim territory it believes it has unfairly lost. The most dangerous places in the world—Kashmir, the Korean Peninsula, the Middle East, and the Taiwan Strait—are often where states are willing to fight, at great cost, to regain territory they believe is naturally and historically their own. While they may seem similar, imperial conquest and irredentism are driven by significantly different factors and forces, are shaped by different cost-benefit calculations, and demand different grand-strategic responses.

Whether China’s ambitions to take Taiwan is an example of irredentism or the desire for global domination is a critical question. Regardless of China’s ultimate goal, however, the changing circumstances wrought by the age of plenty make the return of an imperial, ever-expanding Eurasian empire similar to Napoleonic France, Nazi Germany, imperial Japan, or Stalin’s Soviet Union very unlikely. Unlike states and empires during the age of scarcity, China has no reason to fear being conquered, nor, even if it wanted to, could it easily invade, occupy, and take over neighbors like India, Japan, and Southeast Asian states, especially if a future successful takeover of Taiwan generated widespread military balancing and nuclear proliferation in the region. In the age of plenty, China might soon discover that the cost-benefit ratio of conquest has been completely inverted over the past century. Even if Beijing wished to pursue imperial conquest, it is hard to imagine how it could succeed, and, if it tried, it would risk its own defeat and collapse.

Finally, it often takes some time—sometimes decades—for people, institutions, and states to understand when their environment and circumstances have changed and to update their assumptions, conceptual lenses, and policy practices accordingly. Millenia of conquest, empire, and violent revolutions—and governing institutions built to deal with those crises—have left deep scars and unchallenged assumptions, and states, leaders, and populations have been slow to recognize the profound changes in demographics, technology, economics, and socio-cultural realities that have done much to tame scarcity while abetting the problems of plenty.

This myopia can come at a steep cost. Today’s leaders may share the characteristics of their tragic predecessors on the eve of World War I. Faced with a rapidly changing world and global phenomena they do not understand, they fall back on their long-held, unspoken, and often unexamined beliefs about how the world should work, as opposed to trying to better understand how the world does work. As terrifying as the problems of scarcity and the geopolitical behaviors they unleash can be, at least they are familiar. Leading powers and their leaders and institutions understand how to play the great-power political game that dominated the past. The problems of plenty, and the solutions required, are unfamiliar, disorienting, and vexing. Yet a melting planet, mass migrations, another even more lethal pandemic, destabilizing new technologies, and the cancers of inequality, deep polarization, and sociocultural fragmentation and alienation threaten the United States and the planet far more than the kind of expanding industrial, mobilized Eurasian hegemon that plagued the first half of the 20th century.

An IBM computer center that processes agricultural data to produce projected figures for farming, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, circa 1973. Alan Band/ Getty Images Archive

How would our alien friend end her report? She would point out that the institutions, practices, theories, and policies that successfully tamed scarcity—and that dominated current debates—were woefully ill-suited to meet the problems of plenty. The costs of failing to update core, often unspoken assumptions about how the world works and what matters would be highlighted, and that by preparing for the last war, Earth might tragically and unnecessarily get it. Her report would chide the thinkers and statesmen of 2024 for obsessing over the return of great-power competition and regurgitating the works of geopolitical thinkers like Mahan and Mackinder in order to control oceans and land that, if the problems of plenty are not confronted, may be dying and uninhabitable before long.

Visiting the planet every half-century has made her, unlike her Earth friends, an optimist. Humankind never goes the easy way around, and given the stakes, they could easily mess up—by starting World War III or being unprepared for a more lethal pandemic than COVID-19, unrestrained artificial intelligence, or the deadly consequences of the climate crisis. She reminds herself, and wishes the citizens of the planet could remember, that few living in 1974, 1924, or 1874 could have imagined the extraordinary progress earthlings have made since. Which, perhaps against her better judgment, gives her hope that she will get to visit in 2074 and be impressed once again.

Francis J. Gavin is the Giovanni Agnelli distinguished professor and the director of the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at SAIS-Johns Hopkins University. This essay is adapted from his most recent book, The Taming of Scarcity and the Problems of Plenty: Rethinking International Relations and American Grand Strategy in a New Era .

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Longreads Best of 2020: Essays

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All through December, we’re featuring Longreads’ Best of 2020. This year, our editors picked and featured hundreds of beautifully written and poignant essays published on the web. Because of the wide range of writing across many topics and themes, it was a challenge to sift through them all over the past several weeks to compile a definitive Best of Essays list. As I shortlisted stories, I realized there could be many different versions of this list, but, in the end, these eight reads really spoke to me.

If you like these, you can  sign up to receive our weekly email every Friday .

Mississippi: A Poem, in Days (Kiese Makeba Laymon, Vanity Fair )

Kiese Makeba Laymon was on a book tour when the pandemic hit in the U.S. In this stunner of a piece that unfolds over 14 days, the author writes on fear, racism, death, and home amid a moment of awakening. We follow along on the journey, from event to event in Ohio and West Virginia, with Laymon’s observations and thoughts interspersed with daily COVID-19 death counts and the latest words or orders from Donald Trump and Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves. It’s a powerful meditation, one that will stop you in your tracks.

We are awakened, I want to believe. 75 miles from the armed confederate statue in Oxford, Emmett Till’s childish body was destroyed. 70 miles from that armed confederate statue, Fannie Lou Hamer was nearly beaten to death. 160 miles from that armed confederate statue, Medgar Evers was murdered as he enters his home. 80 miles from that armed confederate statue, Martin Luther King was murdered in Memphis. It took way too much Black death to get here. I am wandering around the spiritual consequences of materially progressing at the expense of Black death. I want to be courageous. I wonder, though, when courage becomes contagious—when courage is credentialized, subsidized, and incentivized—if it is still courage at all. Today, as I prepare to push send, and I lather my hands in sanitizer, it feels a bit too much like cowardice. Maybe I’ll wait to send tomorrow. Maybe I won’t send at all. The Lafayette County Board of Supervisors, a group of white men, unanimously vote to keep the armed confederate monument in the middle of Oxford, the town where I live, teach, and write. Humiliation, agony, and death, are what I feel. It could all be so much worse, is what the worst of white folks want us to recite.

Molly (Blake Butler, The Volta )

December’s special issue of The Volta is dedicated to the late poet Molly Brodak, and Brodak’s husband, Blake Butler, writes an incredibly moving essay to remember and honor her. In “Molly,” he weaves an intimate portrait of his late wife — and the details, textures, and expanse of their relationship –with so much love and care. Grab a tissue before sitting down to read it.

Making her laugh made me feel alive, like I’d really accomplished something. She wanted to laugh, I think, despite a widening parcel in her telling her that laughter in a world like ours was for fools. When I think the sound of it now, it reminds me of a bird trapped in a ballroom, looking for anywhere to land.

But there was always something still there underneath that, shredding its pasture—parts of her so dark and displaced I cannot find them anywhere touching the rest of how she was. The story, like all stories, holds no true shape. And that’s exactly what it wants—the pain—it wants more blank to feed the pain with, to fill the space up. It wants us all.

Then, in her poem, “Horse and Cart,” one of the last she ever wrote: “I can’t even imagine a horse / anymore. / That we sat on their spines / and yanked their mouths around.” The gears of her mind, as she grew tired, wore down even these good times, seeking further ways to break them up, send her away.

I Cry for the Mountains: A Legacy Lost (Dave Daley, Chico Enterprise-Record )

California experienced another unprecedented wildfire season this year; a number of fire complexes burned throughout the state, including the massive North Complex Fire that started in August and burned in Northern California’s Plumas and Butte counties. Rancher Dave Daley offers a devastating account of the destruction of his family’s cattle range in Plumas National Forest, and a passionate plea to legislators and regulators to ultimately listen to the land and the locals when it comes to forest management. Daley originally posted this account on Facebook; his followers recommended that the Chico Enterprise-Record  reprint it for a wider audience.

I cry for the forest, the trees and streams, and the horrible deaths suffered by the wildlife and our cattle. The suffering was unimaginable. When you find groups of cows and their baby calves tumbled in a ravine trying to escape, burned almost beyond recognition or a fawn and small calf side by side as if hoping to protect one another, you try not to wretch. You only pray death was swift. Worse, in searing memory, cows with their hooves, udder and even legs burned off still alive who had to be euthanized. A doe lying in the ashes with three fawns, not all hers I bet. And you are glad they can stand and move, even with a limp, because you really cannot imagine any more death today.

For those of you on the right blaming the left and California, these are National Forest lands that are “managed” by the feds. They have failed miserably over the past 50 years. Smokey the Bear was the cruelest joke ever played on the western landscape, a decades long campaign to prevent forest fires has resulted in mega-fires of a scope we’ve never seen. Thanks, Smokey.

I get frustrated with experts and consultants who drive by and “know just what to do.” For 35 years I have attended conferences, given presentations and listened. What I have learned is solutions are local and specific. What happens in one watershed in Plumas or Butte County may be entirely different in the Lassen National Forest just next door. But experts of all kinds are glad to tell you how to do it. “Let’s prescribe graze, use virtual fences, change your timing, change your genetics.” Prescribe graze the forest and canyons? Yea. Right. They don’t know what they don’t know but they will take the honorarium anyway and have a great dinner on your dime. The locals and land rarely benefit.

How My Mother and I Became Chinese Propaganda (Jiayang Fa n , The New Yorker )

Jiayang Fan pens a masterful piece of personal history, on her mother and their relationship, identity, family, propaganda and social media, and chronic illness (her mother has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS) . Fan recounts her struggle to help her mother get hospital care during New York’s COVID-19 crisis, all while going viral and facing threats on social media, calling her a criminal and a traitor to China. She tells a complicated and very personal story, one of loyalty and love, with strength and eloquence.

My mother has always knelt at the altar of  mianzi , an aspiration of which A.L.S. makes a spectacular mockery. You may think it’s embarrassing to slur your speech and limp, but wait until you are being spoon-fed and pushed around in a wheelchair—all of which will seem trivial once you can no longer wash or wipe yourself. The progress of the disease is a forced march toward the vanishing point of  mianzi . When my mother was first given her diagnosis, she became obsessed with the idea of why—why her, why now, and, above all, why an illness that would subject her to the kind of public humiliation she feared more than death itself. When she could still operate her first-generation iPad, my mother gave me a contact list of everyone she was still in touch with in China, and told me that, except for her siblings, no one must know of her affliction. Such self-imposed isolation seemed like madness to me, but she preferred to cut friends out of her life rather than admit to the indignity of her compromised state. Her body’s insurrection, my mother believes, is her punishment for her prideful strivings in America.

At the beginning of the pandemic, I had read that a virus is neither dead nor alive, and replicates only in the shelter of a host organism. I began to think of “Jiayang Fan” as viral not in a social-media sense but in a biological one; the calamitous state of the world and certain random mutations in the story had made it unexpectedly contagious. My original posts had served their purpose; now they were serving the purposes of others. I had unwittingly bred a potent piece of propaganda.

The Promise That Tested My Parents Until the End (Christopher Solomon, GQ )

Don’t you ever put me in one of those places,  she said. Don’t put  me  in one of those places,  my father replied.

Christopher Solomon’s parents made a pledge to one another. But what did that actually look like over time, especially when his father became sick? What does unconditional love and devotion look like in our own lives? Solomon writes an honest and heartbreaking essay on love, aging, and marriage — in sickness and in health.

In time what was imperceptible in him became noticeable, and then what was noticeable became something worse. The landscape of my father changed, the coastline eroded. There was less of him, until the old map of my father no longer fit the man before us. It has been 20 years now since he was diagnosed, and sometimes it is hard to remember a time that he was not sick. His speech became a gargle of consonants. The dementia took most of his mind. His body curled in on itself—shrinking, reducing, as if he were becoming an infant again. Despite this, for years he still played the piano, every day, and nearly as well as ever—the mysteryland of the brain permitting this freedom even as body, and mind, crumbled around him. My mother would sing along from the kitchen, as she always had. And then one day, after I arrive home, my mother sounds more concerned than usual.  He has stopped playing the piano,  she says. This seems to worry her more than anything else.

Finally, exhausted, she relents. She drives to visit a nearby nursing home. Afterward she cries in the parking lot. She cries for what she sees there. She cries at the prospect of breaking the Promise. She cries because even though almost nothing remains of her husband—even though he is the cause of her sleepless nights and her tendinitis and her bruises and her anger—in 55 years she rarely has been apart from him. She loves even the scrap of him that remains. He is half of the story they share, of the red VW Beetle and the sunstruck Italian patios and the singalongs and the three towheaded children. As long as he is here, their story, however unlikely, is not yet over. She cries because the end of him is the end of a possibility. And I think, not for the first time, how little I still know about love.

Kamala Harris, Mass Incarceration and Me (Reginald Dwayne Betts, The New York Times Magazine )

“The prosecutor’s job, unlike the defense attorney’s or judge’s, is to do justice. What does that mean when you are asked by some to dole out retribution measured in years served, but blamed by others for the damage incarceration can do?” In this nuanced reported essay about mass incarceration in the U.S., Reginald Dwayne Betts reveals “our contradictory impulses” around crime, punishment, and the justice system. And he knows these impulses well, as both a felon and a son to a woman who was raped by a Black man.

But I know that on the other end of our prison sentences was always someone weeping. During the middle of Harris’s presidential campaign, a friend referred me to a woman with a story about Senator Harris that she felt I needed to hear. Years ago, this woman’s sister had been missing for days, and the police had done little. Happenstance gave this woman an audience with then-Attorney General Harris. A coordinated multicity search followed. The sister had been murdered; her body was found in a ravine. The woman told me that “Kamala understands the politics of victimization as well as anyone who has been in the system, which is that this kind of case — a 50-year-old Black woman gone missing or found dead — ordinarily does not get any resources put toward it.” They caught the man who murdered her sister, and he was sentenced to 131 years. I think about the man who assaulted my mother, a serial rapist, because his case makes me struggle with questions of violence and vengeance and justice. And I stop thinking about it. I am inconsistent. I want my friends out, but I know there is no one who can convince me that this man shouldn’t spend the rest of his life in prison.

Safe at Home in Los Angeles (Lynell George, High Country News )

Lynell George’s beautiful read exemplifies what I love about writing on place and home. A native of Los Angeles, George builds and shapes a complex L.A. in her piece: a “city of contradictions,” an elusive, ever-shifting place “built on either impermanence or illusion.” It’s a sensory and richly textured portrait of a vast place, looking at Los Angeles through a sort of kaleidoscope lens of gentrification, nature, and the pandemic lockdown.

Los Angeles has long been a contested domain — both as territory (from the Indigenous Tongva onward) and as emblem. Boosters, speculators and swindlers have had their way not just with the land but with the very image of Los Angeles. The city grew, like an opportunistic vine. It couldn’t just  be . It had to be bigger than life, better than perfect. Even within my lifetime, popular culture has conjured a vision of Los Angeles that is sleight-of-hand, a trick of light, brutally at odds with the lived experience. Los Angeles, by its sprawling nature, absolutely resists oversimplification. This, despite its frustrations, irritants and absurdities, is precisely why I remain here.

Those stories of place, the Los Angeles of my childhood and adolescence and young adulthood — the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s — couldn’t be told until we began to tell them. Until we steadied and raised our voices. Until we made our way through gatekeepers, and most significantly until we were of age and of mind to turn our attention to a shifting definition of the West (or  El Norte ), one that included stories of migration and immigration, of protest, of underemployment, of struggle, and of love and resilience despite disappointment, and in the ways in which we tend to the physical environment, to conserve against drought or be mindful of energy use and emissions. We must tend to the region’s various topographies in narrative. It’s imperative. Or they will be lost. As a chronicler, my responsibility is to try and tell an honest story. True to its roots. Even now, even in this quiet moment in the city, we must remember its cacophony, its music.

My Mustache, My Self (Wesley Morris, The New York Times Magazine )

This essay from Wesley Morris on growing a mustache during the pandemic is about so much more than quarantine-grown facial hair — it’s a brilliant and vulnerable piece on masculinity and race, one in which Morris reflects on becoming himself and considers and celebrates his Blackness.

The mustache had certainly conjoined me to a past I was flattered to be associated with, however superficially. But there were implications. During the later stages of the movement, a mustached man opened himself up to charges of white appeasement and Uncle Tom-ism. Not because of the mustache, obviously, but because of the approach of the sort of person who would choose to wear one. Such a person might not have been considered radical enough, down enough, Black enough. The civil rights mustache was strategically tolerant. It didn’t advocate burning anything down. It ran for office — and sometimes it won. It was establishmentarian, compromising and eventually, come the infernos at the close of the 1960s, it fell out of fashion, in part because it felt out of step with the urgency of the moment.

The Black-power salute is not a casual gesture. It’s weaponry. You aim that arm and fire. I aimed mine in solidarity — with white people instead of at a system they personify. And that didn’t feel quite right. But how would I know? I had never done a Black-power salute. It always seemed like more Blackness than I’ve needed, maybe more than I had. I’m not Black-power Black. I’ve always been milder, more apprehensive than that. I was practically born with a mustache.

Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Cheri has been an editor at Longreads since 2014. She's currently based in the San Francisco Bay Area. More by Cheri Lucas Rowlands

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my application essays by Rona W. '23

try not to cringe

October 27, 2019

• in Admissions ,

It’s been four years since I applied to MIT, and while I’ve been irrevocably changed in many ways (my meme game has improved exponentially), I am sadly still 5’2″. That’s 157 cm, for the 95.7% of humans who don’t reside in America.

Autumn came late this year; the leaves are only now ripening. The sky is full-bellied with sunshine. Still, we’re on the verge of November, and I’m reminiscing about my own early action application. Here’s what I wrote about, and what I would change if I could do it all over again. Of course, this is only one approach to the essays. The most important thing is to be true to yourself.

• We know you lead a busy life, full of activities, many of which are required of you. Tell us about something you do simply for the pleasure of it. (100 words or fewer)

I wrote this essay about K-pop. However, before I wrote about K-pop, I considered writing about a myriad of other things. I posted to College Confidential, asking which topic would best showcase my abilities, and promptly got roasted for trying to turn this essay into another opportunity to humblebrag. Lesson learned. It’s actually okay to do things for fun, guys.

I still love K-pop; however, I could also see current-me writing an essay about memes or naps. I didn’t truly appreciate the value of either of these things until I got to college.

• Although you may not yet know what you want to major in, which department or program at MIT appeals to you and why? (100 words or fewer)

I initially misunderstood this question and wrote about wanting to help out with the Harvard-MIT Math Tournament, which I participated in during high school. Then my dad was like, “I’m pretty sure they mean an  academic  program,” and I wrote a new essay, which you can read below:

With passion for both English and mathematics, I’m drawn to MIT’s unique writing department, which offers both creative and science writing. I’m particularly interested in 21W.742[J] Writing about Race and 21W.032 Science Writing and New Media. In my own work, I examine an Asian-American narrative often marginalized in the media; these courses would allow me to explore new ways of bringing visibility to this identity. In addition, I want to study the roles writing can play outside of literature and learn how I can meld my interests to do something that will make an impact.

In retrospect, this essay could’ve focused more on why I particularly wanted to study at  MIT . I didn’t look at the course catalog too carefully. I simply pulled the titles of some classes that sounded interesting and relevant. Perhaps similar courses are offered at other schools; I should’ve researched more about what made MIT unique. (Current-me can confirm MIT does have a pretty kick-ass writing department.)

• At MIT, we bring people together to better the lives of others. MIT students work to improve their communities in different ways, from tackling the world’s biggest challenges to being a good friend. Describe one way in which you have contributed to your community, whether in your family, the classroom, your neighborhood, etc. (200-250 words)

I wrote about organizing my school’s Harvard-MIT Math Tournament team and about starting an online writing mentorship program. Current-me wants to be obnoxious and point out that leading is not necessarily the same as contributing, but to seventeen-year-old Rona, these examples were the most obvious ones to write about, even if they weren’t truly the most impactful. Still, I cared a lot about these initiatives, had fun carrying them out, and saw their effects ripple through the communities I was part of. Maybe that’s all that matters.

• Describe the world you come from; for example, your family, clubs, school, community, city, or town. How has that world shaped your dreams and aspirations? (200-250 words)

For this one, I wrote about slam poetry:

The stage lights burst open, blinding and white. I trembled. I was at the citywide poetry slam, Verselandia, about to perform in front of hundreds.  Earlier in the month, I had qualified through my high school’s contest, which I had signed up for because, “Hey, there might be free cookies!” (There were not.) At the time, I didn’t know much about spoken word besides from street performers (this was downtown Portland, after all). But I practiced in front of my mirror, my friends, and my faithful stuffed animals. Ultimately, I’d placed first at school. At Verselandia, I watched others perform about abuse, racism, and feminism. A few talked about their LGBTQ+ identities; one addressed bisexual erasure, which I could personally relate to. Slowly, I realized that writing didn’t serve just as a cathartic outlet; it could startle others into empathy and create awareness.  At the slam, I delivered lines like “ Your heritage is more than an exotic enigma. ” Afterwards, several Chinese-American classmates told me they could relate. I realized that my writing had the power to give these experiences visibility, which in turn might help erase damaging yet common preconceptions about my ethnicity. As a Portland Youth Poet Ambassador, I have opportunities to not only promote creative writing, but also advocate for social equality. Through poetry, I want to depict not only a narrative from a person of color, but also a narrative of a queer person of color–a perspective almost completely obsolete in the media.

In my opinion, this essay doesn’t do a great job of answering the actual question; it doesn’t provide a good sense of what Portland is like, or how it has shaped me. In retrospect, the coolest part of doing slam poetry was the opportunity to see Portland outside of the upper-middle-class suburban bubble I resided in. Through poetry, I met kids from all over the city. Each one of them had something to say: sometimes devastating, sometimes uplifting, but always astonishing. I wish I had focused more on that.

• Tell us about the most significant challenge you’ve faced or something important that didn’t go according to plan. How did you manage the situation? (200-250 words)

I had a lot of trouble with this essay, because I wasn’t sure if I could write about a personal family issue. I fretted. Maybe it was oversharing; maybe I should stick with a safe topic, like failing my driver’s ed test or not having a prom date. Ultimately, though, I took the risk, and I don’t regret it.

If you’re applying to college this year, my best advice is to be yourself . It’s overused, I know, and whether or not any of us even have a self is a discussion for another blog post. But the application process is an opportunity to reflect upon the last several years of your life; don’t squander it by writing what you think someone else might want to hear. Also, being genuine seems way less stressful.

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Essay on Earth

500 words essay on earth.

The earth is the planet that we live on and it is the fifth-largest planet. It is positioned in third place from the Sun. This essay on earth will help you learn all about it in detail. Our earth is the only planet that can sustain humans and other living species. The vital substances such as air, water, and land make it possible.

All About Essay on Earth

The rocks make up the earth that has been around for billions of years. Similarly, water also makes up the earth. In fact, water covers 70% of the surface. It includes the oceans that you see, the rivers, the sea and more.

Thus, the remaining 30% is covered with land. The earth moves around the sun in an orbit and takes around 364 days plus 6 hours to complete one round around it. Thus, we refer to it as a year.

Just like revolution, the earth also rotates on its axis within 24 hours that we refer to as a solar day. When rotation is happening, some of the places on the planet face the sun while the others hide from it.

As a result, we get day and night. There are three layers on the earth which we know as the core, mantle and crust. The core is the centre of the earth that is usually very hot. Further, we have the crust that is the outer layer. Finally, between the core and crust, we have the mantle i.e. the middle part.

The layer that we live on is the outer one with the rocks. Earth is home to not just humans but millions of other plants and species. The water and air on the earth make it possible for life to sustain. As the earth is the only livable planet, we must protect it at all costs.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

There is No Planet B

The human impact on the planet earth is very dangerous. Through this essay on earth, we wish to make people aware of protecting the earth. There is no balance with nature as human activities are hampering the earth.

Needless to say, we are responsible for the climate crisis that is happening right now. Climate change is getting worse and we need to start getting serious about it. It has a direct impact on our food, air, education, water, and more.

The rising temperature and natural disasters are clear warning signs. Therefore, we need to come together to save the earth and leave a better planet for our future generations.

Being ignorant is not an option anymore. We must spread awareness about the crisis and take preventive measures to protect the earth. We must all plant more trees and avoid using non-biodegradable products.

Further, it is vital to choose sustainable options and use reusable alternatives. We must save the earth to save our future. There is no Planet B and we must start acting like it accordingly.

Conclusion of Essay on Earth

All in all, we must work together to plant more trees and avoid using plastic. It is also important to limit the use of non-renewable resources to give our future generations a better planet.

FAQ on Essay on Earth

Question 1: What is the earth for kids?

Answer 1: Earth is the third farthest planet from the sun. It is bright and bluish in appearance when we see it from outer space. Water covers 70% of the earth while land covers 30%. Moreover, the earth is the only planet that can sustain life.

Question 2: How can we protect the earth?

Answer 2: We can protect the earth by limiting the use of non-renewable resources. Further, we must not waste water and avoid using plastic.

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How To Answer MIT's 2023/24 Application Essays: Tips & Insights

What's New in 2023/24

What Are MIT's Essay Prompts?

Short Answer Questions

General Guidelines

The MIT essays are crucial to your application, offering a window into your character and aspirations. Highlight your unique experiences, challenges faced, and lessons learned. Approach these essays with authenticity, genuine introspection, and a focus on how you align with MIT's ethos. Ensure your essays resonate with MIT's pioneering spirit, showcasing not just your academic excellence but also your potential contributions to the MIT community. Our expert review services and consultations are here to guide and support you in this journey.

What did MIT students write their college application essays about?

MIT’s 2023/24 Essay Updates: What's Changed?

Securing a place at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) , with its acceptance rate of approximately 4% , is an extraordinary feat. In the realm of elite college admissions, your essays are instrumental in illuminating your unique journey and alignment with MIT's ethos.

Each academic year, top-tier institutions like MIT meticulously refine their application process to ensure they gain a holistic understanding of their prospective students. For the 2023/24 admissions cycle, MIT has introduced several significant modifications to its essay questions .

The first notable change is the introduction of a prompt that asks applicants to select their desired field of study from a drop-down list and elaborate on why this field at MIT appeals to them. This change underscores MIT's commitment to understanding applicants' academic passions and reasons for choosing MIT as their ideal educational destination.

While the second question remains consistent, focusing on personal activities pursued for pleasure, the third question has been reworded for clarity. It now emphasizes the world the applicant hails from — its opportunities, experiences, and challenges, and its influence on their aspirations. This revision showcases MIT's interest in understanding applicants’ diverse backgrounds and experiences.

The fourth question has evolved to spotlight collaboration, not just in the context of community contributions but also in terms of mutual learning. Although rooted in understanding how applicants handle unexpected challenges, the fifth question now emphasizes the lessons derived from such experiences.

These updates reflect MIT's continuous efforts to evolve its admissions strategy, emphasizing the diverse experiences, aspirations, and values that applicants would infuse into its vibrant academic community.

What Are MIT’s Essay Prompts for 2023/24?

For the 2023/24 application cycle, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has meticulously crafted specific essay prompts to understand its applicants better. These prompts explore your academic inclinations, personal narratives, collaborative experiences, and resilience in facing challenges. Applicants will need to answer all five questions, with responses ranging from 100 to 200 words each, through the MyMIT application portal .

Short Answer Essay Questions

MIT's short answer questions provide insights into your academic interests, personal pursuits, background, and experiences.

• Field of Study : What field of study appeals to you the most right now? (Note: Applicants select from a drop-down list.) Tell us more about why this field of study at MIT appeals to you.
• Pleasure Activities : We know you lead a busy life, full of activities, many of which are required of you. Tell us about something you do simply for the pleasure of it.
• Personal Background : How has the world you come from—including your opportunities, experiences, and challenges — shaped your dreams and aspirations?
• Collaborative Experiences : MIT brings people with diverse backgrounds together to collaborate, from tackling the world’s biggest challenges to lending a helping hand. Describe one way you have collaborated with others to learn from them, with them, or contribute to your community together.
• Unexpected Challenges : How did you manage a situation or challenge that you didn’t expect? What did you learn from it?

With an acceptance rate of around 4% , MIT's application process is highly competitive. These prompts give applicants a golden opportunity to highlight their academic passions, personal growth, collaborative spirit, and the unique perspectives they'll introduce to the MIT community.

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How to Answer MIT’s Essay Questions?

What field of study appeals to you the most right now (note: applicants select from a drop-down list.) tell us more about why this field of study at mit appeals to you., - 100 to 200 words.

MIT, at its core, is an institution that thrives on innovation, research, and pushing the boundaries of knowledge. This prompt aims to understand your academic inclinations, passions, and how they align with MIT's offerings . It's an opportunity to showcase your intellectual curiosity and eagerness to delve deep into a specific field at one of the world's premier institutions.

Choosing Your Field

Begin by reflecting on:

• Your academic interests and passions
• Courses or projects that have particularly resonated with you
• Articulating the appeal of the field of study you selected from the drop-down list
• Future aspirations and how they align with the chosen field

Once you've identified your desired field of study, delve into:

• Why this field intrigues you : Is it the challenges it presents, its potential impact on society, or personal experiences that have drawn you to it?
• MIT's Unique Offerings : Research specific courses, professors, research opportunities, or facilities at MIT that make it the ideal place to pursue this field.
• Future Aspirations : How does studying this field at MIT align with your long-term goals, be it in research, entrepreneurship, or any other endeavor?

Being Specific and Demonstrative

Avoid generic statements. Instead, demonstrate your genuine interest by mentioning specific courses, labs, professors, or projects at MIT that align with your interests. Showcase your understanding of the field and how MIT's offerings stand out.

• "As someone deeply fascinated by quantum mechanics, the research being done at MIT's Center for Theoretical Physics, especially under Prof. XYZ, aligns perfectly with my aspirations. The blend of theoretical understanding and practical applications offered by MIT's courses would provide the ideal foundation for my goal of contributing to quantum computing solutions."
• "Biomedical engineering at MIT stands out due to its interdisciplinary approach. The opportunity to work at the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES) and collaborate with experts from various fields is precisely the kind of environment I seek to develop solutions for pressing medical challenges."

MIT's first prompt is your chance to demonstrate your academic interests and your understanding of what MIT offers in your chosen field. It's about showcasing your passion for the subject, awareness of MIT's unique strengths, and a vision for your future . Approach this essay with thorough research, genuine enthusiasm, and a clear understanding of why MIT is the best place to delve deep into your chosen field.

We know you lead a busy life, full of activities, many of which are required of you. Tell us about something you do simply for the pleasure of it.

MIT is keen on understanding the multifaceted nature of its applicants. Beyond academic achievements and extracurricular commitments, this prompt seeks to uncover what genuinely brings you joy, relaxation, or fulfillment . It's an opportunity to showcase a side of you that might not be evident in the rest of your application.

Identifying Your Source of Pleasure

Begin by reflecting on activities or moments that bring you genuine happiness. This could be:

• Simple joys like reading a book, cooking a new recipe, or stargazing
• Engaging in hobbies such as photography, gardening, or playing a musical instrument
• Spending quality time with family, pets, or immersing yourself in nature
• Delving into philosophical thoughts, writing poetry, or journaling

Articulating the Significance

Once you've identified your source of pleasure, delve into why it's meaningful:

• Personal Growth : Does this activity offer introspection, relaxation, or a break from routine?
• Skill Development : Perhaps it's a hobby where you've honed a particular skill or discovered a new passion.
• Emotional Connection : Maybe it's an activity that connects you to cherished memories, people, or places.

Being Authentic and Personal

Avoid reiterating activities already mentioned in your application. Focus on personal experiences, feelings, and motivations behind your chosen activity. The aim is to offer a glimpse into your personal life, values, and what truly matters to you.

• "Every Sunday, I bake bread from scratch. The rhythmic kneading, the aroma of fresh bread, and the joy of sharing it with my family transports me to my grandmother's kitchen – a haven of love and warmth."
• "Late at night, I often find myself sketching. It's not about creating a masterpiece but capturing fleeting moments, emotions, and thoughts on paper. It's therapeutic, a silent conversation between my heart and hand."

MIT's second prompt is a canvas for you to paint a picture of your joys and passions. It's about showcasing the activities or moments that offer solace, happiness, or fulfillment. Approach this essay sincerely, detailing the emotions and motivations behind your chosen activity and providing a window into your world beyond academics and obligations .

How has the world you come from — including your opportunities, experiences, and challenges — shaped your dreams and aspirations?

MIT seeks students who are academically driven and deeply influenced by their surroundings and experiences. This prompt aims to understand the interplay between your environment and personal growth, aspirations, and dreams . It's an opportunity to showcase how your unique experiences have molded your ambitions and how you envision channeling them at MIT.

Reflecting on Your Background

Begin by considering:

• The community or environment you grew up in
• Key experiences, opportunities, or challenges that have had a significant impact on your life
• How these factors have influenced your goals and aspirations

Narrating Your Journey

Once you've introspected on your background, focus on:

• Specific anecdotes or experiences that were turning points in your life
• The lessons you've learned from these experiences and how they've shaped your perspective
• How these experiences have influenced your academic and personal aspirations

Connecting to MIT's Environment

Reflect on how your unique background and experiences will contribute to MIT:

• How do your dreams align with MIT's mission and values?
• Are there specific programs or initiatives at MIT that resonate with your journey and aspirations?
• "Growing up in a multicultural neighborhood in NYC exposed me to many cultures and languages. This dynamic environment ignited my passion for urban planning, and I aspire to create inclusive urban spaces. At MIT, I aim to leverage the resources in the Urban Studies and Planning department to bring my vision to life."
• "Having a father who served as a firefighter instilled in me a deep respect for public service and the sacrifices it entails. This inspired my interest in chemical engineering, with a goal to develop advanced safety equipment. MIT's cutting-edge research facilities would be the ideal platform for my endeavors."

MIT's third prompt is about introspection and understanding the symbiotic relationship between your environment and aspirations. It's about showcasing the influences that have shaped you and how you plan to channel them into meaningful contributions at MIT . Approach this essay with authenticity, clarity, and a clear vision of how your unique experiences align with MIT's ethos and offerings.

MIT brings people with diverse backgrounds together to collaborate, from tackling the world’s biggest challenges to lending a helping hand. Describe one way you have collaborated with others to learn from them, with them, or contribute to your community together.

MIT is renowned for its collaborative ethos, where students from varied backgrounds come together to innovate and solve real-world problems. This question seeks to understand your ability to collaborate, learn from diverse perspectives, and contribute to a collective goal .

Identifying Your Collaboration

• Instances where you've worked with individuals from different backgrounds or experiences
• The dynamics of the collaboration — how did you navigate differences, and what was the shared goal?
• The outcomes and impact of this collaboration on you and the broader community

Narrating the Experience

Once you've identified a significant collaboration, delve into:

• The challenges faced and how they were overcome
• The lessons learned and how they have shaped your perspective on teamwork and diversity
• The tangible outcomes, whether it's a project, an event, or a community initiative

Consider how this experience prepares you for MIT's collaborative environment:

• Are there specific groups, clubs, or initiatives at MIT where you see yourself contributing?
• How have your past collaborations equipped you for future teamwork at MIT?
• "Collaborating with international students in my school's Model UN club, I learned the importance of understanding diverse perspectives. Together, we organized a cultural exchange event, bridging gaps and fostering a sense of unity in our community."
• "Volunteering at a local shelter, I worked alongside individuals from different socioeconomic backgrounds. This collaboration taught me the value of empathy and the power of collective effort. Together, we initiated a fundraiser that provided resources for the shelter's expansion."

MIT's fourth prompt is about understanding the power of collaboration in diverse settings. It's about showcasing how you've embraced diversity, learned from it, and contributed to collective goals. Approach this essay with authenticity, clarity, and a clear vision of how your collaborative experiences will enrich the MIT community and your future endeavors.

How did you manage a situation or challenge that you didn’t expect? What did you learn from it?

MIT is interested in your resilience, adaptability, and problem-solving skills . This question seeks to understand how you handle unexpected challenges and what insights you gain from such experiences.

Identifying Your Unexpected Challenge

Reflect on:

• A situation that caught you off-guard or was unforeseen
• The immediate emotions and thoughts you experienced
• The steps you took to address or navigate the situation

Narrating Your Response

Once you've pinpointed the challenge:

• Describe the context and the unexpected challenge succinctly.
• Detail your thought process and actions in response to the challenge.
• Highlight any external support or resources you sought or utilized.

Drawing Lessons and Growth

Conclude by reflecting on the following:

• The insights or lessons you derived from the experience
• How the challenge and your response have influenced your subsequent actions or mindset
• Any skills or perspectives you developed that will be beneficial in future endeavors, especially at MIT
• "While leading a group project on environmental conservation, a key member, responsible for the data analysis, unexpectedly dropped out a week before the deadline. I had to quickly redistribute tasks, manage team morale, and ensure the project's timely completion. This experience taught me the importance of adaptability, clear communication, and contingency planning."
• "During my junior year, I faced a sudden health challenge that required hospitalization, disrupting my academic routine. Navigating this unexpected hurdle, I reached out to teachers for extensions, prioritized my well-being, and sought peer assistance for notes. This ordeal underscored the value of seeking help, being compassionate towards oneself, and the importance of a supportive community."

MIT's fifth prompt offers a window into your character, resilience, and problem-solving abilities. You demonstrate your capacity to adapt, learn, and grow by detailing an unexpected challenge and your response to it. Approach this essay with honesty, introspection, and a focus on personal growth, showcasing how such experiences have prepared you for the rigors and unpredictability of life at MIT .

How Bobby Got Into MIT with Crimson

General Guidelines for Answering MIT's Essay Questions

• Research and Specificity : MIT's essay prompts aim to understand your fit within its innovative and diverse community. Dive deep into MIT's offerings, from courses and professors to clubs and research opportunities. Demonstrating your knowledge about MIT specifics indicates genuine interest and a proactive approach.
• Show Growth and Resilience : MIT values students who can adapt and grow from challenges. When discussing unexpected situations or your background, emphasize the events and lessons learned and how they've shaped your perspective.
• Diversity of Experience : MIT's community thrives on diverse experiences and viewpoints. Highlight how your unique background, challenges, or interests will add a fresh perspective to classroom discussions and group projects.
• Be Authentic : Authenticity is paramount. Write from the heart, focusing on genuine experiences and aspirations. Authentic narratives resonate more than manufactured stories tailored to what you think MIT wants to hear.
• Depth Over Breadth : Given the word constraints, it's essential to delve deep into a few topics rather than skimming over many. This approach offers a richer insight into your character and experiences.
• Narrative Storytelling : Engaging narratives can make your essay memorable. Whether discussing a community project or a personal challenge, a well-told story can convey your character and values effectively.
• Proofread and Revise : Ensure your essays are polished and articulate. Beyond just grammar, your essays should have a logical flow and effectively communicate your thoughts. Feedback from trusted individuals can be invaluable.
• Connect to MIT's Ethos : Always tie your responses back to how you'll contribute to MIT and how MIT's ethos and resources align with your goals. This shows a forward-thinking approach, emphasizing how you see MIT as being instrumental to your personal growth and vocational aspirations.
• Embrace the MIT Spirit : MIT is known for its innovative spirit and problem-solving approach. Use the essays to showcase how you embody these qualities through past experiences or future aspirations.
• Reflect on the Broader Impact : MIT is about improving the world through science, technology, and other fields. Ensure your essays reflect personal growth and how you aim to make a broader impact in your chosen field or community.

MIT's essays are a window into your personality, aspirations, and fit for the institution. By thoughtfully crafting your responses and showcasing your alignment with MIT's values and ethos, you can effectively convey why you'd be a valuable addition to the MIT community.

Final Thoughts

Embarking on the journey to MIT isn't solely about showcasing academic prowess; it's about weaving a narrative that aligns with MIT's pioneering spirit and the admissions committee's values. Your essays provide a unique opportunity to spotlight your character, aspirations, and the distinct contributions you'll bring to the MIT community.

Every MIT aspirant has a unique story waiting to be told. This is your moment to share yours. Approach your essays with authenticity, introspection, and a genuine passion for your narrative.

If you're unsure whether your essay truly captures your essence or stands out amidst the myriad of applications, our essay review service is here to guide you. Our seasoned experts will meticulously review and provide feedback, ensuring your essay resonates with MIT's admissions officers. Explore our  ebook , which features essays from students who secured places at elite institutions for added inspiration.

For those beginning their college application journey, consider booking a free consultation with our experienced college counselors. We're dedicated to guiding you in crafting an application that maximizes your chances of joining the ranks of MIT's innovative thinkers and doers. Your dream of becoming part of the MIT legacy is within reach, and we're here to support you every step of the way.

What Makes Crimson Different

Key Resources & Further Reading

• Everything you need to know about US Application Supplemental Essays
• Acing your College Application Essay: 5 Expert Tips to Make it Stand Out from the Rest
• How to Tackle Every Type of Supplemental Essay
• 2023-24 Common App Essay Prompts
• What are the Most Unusual US College Supplemental Essay Prompts?

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3 Marvelous MIT Essay Examples

What’s covered:, essay example #1 – simply for the pleasure of it, essay example #2 – community, essay example #3 – overcoming challenges.

• Where to Get Feedback on Your MIT Essay  

Sophie Alina , an expert advisor on CollegeVine, provided commentary on this post. Advisors offer one-on-one guidance on everything from essays to test prep to financial aid. If you want help writing your essays or feedback on drafts,  book a consultation with Sophie Alina or another skilled advisor.

MIT is a difficult school to be admitted into; a strong essay is key to a successful application. In this post, we will discuss a few essays that real students submitted to MIT, and outline the essays’ strengths and areas of improvement. (Names and identifying information have been changed, but all other details are preserved). 

Read our MIT essay breakdown  to get a comprehensive overview of this year’s supplemental prompts.

Please note: Looking at examples of real essays students have submitted to colleges can be very beneficial to get inspiration for your essays. You should never copy or plagiarize from these examples when writing your own essays. Colleges can tell when an essay isn’t genuine and will not view students favorably if they plagiarized. 

Prompt: We know you lead a busy life, full of activities, many of which are required of you. Tell us about something you do simply for the pleasure of it. 

After devouring Lewis Carrolls’ masterpiece, my world shifted off its axis. I transformed into Alice, and my favorite place, the playground, became Wonderland. I would gallivant around, marveling at flowers and pestering my parents with questions, murmuring, “Curiouser and curiouser.” If Alice’s “Drink Me” potion was made out of curiosity, I drank liters of it. Alice, along with fairytale retellings like the Land of Stories by Chris Colfer, kickstarted my lifelong love of reading. 

Especially when I was younger, reading brought me solace when the surrounding world was filled with madness (and sadly, not like the fun kind in Alice in Wonderland ). There are so many nonsensical things that happen in the world, from shootings at a movie theater not thirty minutes from my home, to hate crimes targeted towards elderly Asians. Reading can be a magical escape from these problems, an opportunity to clear one’s mind from chaos. 

As I got older, reading remained an escape, but also became a way to see the world and people from a new perspective. I can step into so many different people’s shoes, from a cyborg mechanic ( Cinder ), to a blind girl in WWII’s France (Marie-Laure, All the Light We Cannot See ). Sure, madness is often prevalent in these worlds too, but reading about how these characters deal with it helps me deal with our world’s madness, too. 

Reading also transcends generational gaps, allowing me to connect to my younger siblings through periodic storytimes. Reading is timeless — something I’ll never tire of. 

What This Essay Did Well

This essay is highly detailed and, while it plays off a common idea that reading is an escape, the writer brings in personal examples of why this is so, making the essay more their own. These personal examples often include strong language (e.g. “devoured,” “gallivant,” “pestering” ), which make the imagery more vivid, the writing more interesting. More advanced language can add more nuance to an essay– instead of “ate,” the writer chooses to say “devoured, ” and you can almost see the writer taking the book in almost as quickly as they might polish off a tray of cookies. 

The writer also discusses how reading can not only be a solace from events that seem nonsensical, but a way to understand the madness in these events. By giving two different examples of how this can be so, that seem so varied from each other (the cyborg mechanic and the girl in WWII’s France), the writer creates more depth to this idea. 

What Could be Improved

At the beginning, the writer should consider cutting the introduction paragraph by a line to leave more room for the two major points of the essay in the following paragraphs. Instead of a long sentence about a love of reading being kickstarted, the writer could create a short, powerful sentence to kick off the next two paragraphs. “I was in love with reading.” 

The detail at the end about how reading also transcends generational gaps seems like an add-on that doesn’t connect to the past two ideas– instead, I would suggest that this author expand a little more on the prior two ideas and tie them together at the end. “In this timeless world of reading, I can keep drinking from the well of curiosity. In the pages of a book, I have a space to find out more about the world around me, process its events, and more deeply understand others.”

Prompt: At MIT, we bring people together to better the lives of others. MIT students work to improve their communities in different ways, from tackling the world’s biggest challenges to being a good friend. Describe one way in which you have contributed to your community, whether in your family, the classroom, your neighborhood, etc. (200-250 words)

“Orange throw!”

As I extended my arm to signal properly, the smallest girl on the orange team picked up the ball to throw it back into play. In AYSO, U10 players often lift their back foot when throwing the ball, so I focused my attention there.

Don’t lift it. Keep it down.

It shot straight up. 

My instincts blew the whistle to stop the game. The rulebook is simple: the rule was broken, give it to the other team. But the way she tried, eager to play, eager to learn and try again— I couldn’t punish that. So I made my way over to the sideline to try it myself.

“When we’re throwing it in, we wanna keep our back foot down. Try again!” After demonstrating, I backpedaled a bit and watched her throw again.

Don’t lift it. Keep it down… Ah, it stayed down.

“Nice throw!”

And just like that, we were off again. These short, educational encounters happen multiple times a game. And while they may not be prescribed, they provide so many learning opportunities. These kids, they’re the future of soccer. If they learn the basics, they can achieve greatness.

Every time I step out onto the pitch, that’s what I see: potential. Little Alex may not throw correctly now, but with work, she could become the next Alex Morgan. That’s why, in every soccer game I referee, every new situation I’m thrust into, I strive to see what’s more; I strive to see the potential.

What the Essay Did Well

There is so much imagery in this essay! It’s easy to see the scene in your mind. Through details such as “smallest girl” and describing the team as the “orange,” the reader can more easily picture the scene in their mind. Giving color, size, and other details such as these can make the imagery stronger and the picture clearer in the reader’s mind. 

The writer narrates their thought process through their use of italics, bringing the reader into the mind of the writer. The space for each line of dialogue separates each thought, so that the reader can feel the full emphasis of each line. The mingling of cognitive narration and details about the setting keep the momentum of the essay. 

Through this essay, we learn that this referee is supportive to the members of the youth soccer teams that they are refereeing; instead of seeing the role of referee as punitive (punishing), this writer sees it as a coaching experience. This idea of creating educational encounters as one’s contribution to the community is definitely a great idea to build upon for this essay prompt. 

What Could Be Improved

The contribution to the community is clear because of the emphasis on the coaching aspect of refereeing. However, especially thinking about structure, the author spends about half the essay on a single situation. Limiting this story to a third of the essay could give the writer more space to provide examples of other ways that the author has coached others. The author could have also connected this coaching experience to a mentoring experience in a different context, such as mentoring students at the YMCA,  to create more connections between other extracurriculars and give more weight to this author’s contributions to the community. 

The second to last paragraph ( “And just like that, we were off again…” ) could benefit from another example or two about showing, not telling. The sentence “And while they might not be prescribed, they provide so many learning opportunities” is already clear from the situation that the author has given; the author has already called these “educational encounters” in the prior sentence. Instead of that sentence, the writer could have given another example about a child thanking the writer for a coaching tip, or the expression on a different player’s face when they learned a new skill. 

Additionally, the role of the writer is not immediately clear at the beginning, although it’s suspected that this student is most likely the referee. The writer also provides details about “AYSO” (American Youth Soccer Organization) and “U10,” where they could have simply referred to the games as “youth soccer games” to get the point across that the players are still learning basic skills about throwing the ball in. 

To make all of this clear, the writer could have said “As a referee for youth soccer games, I have seen that players often lift their back foot when throwing the ball, so I focused my attention there.” Acronyms are usually best to be avoided in essays- they can take the reader’s attention away from what is actually happening and lead them to wonder about what the letters in the acronym stand for.

Prompt: Tell us about the most significant challenge you’ve faced or something important that didn’t go according to plan. How did you manage the situation? 

“It’s… unique,” they say. 

I sag, my younger sister’s koala drawing staring at me from the wall. It always seemed like her art ended up praised and framed, while mine ended up in the trash can when I wasn’t looking. In contrast to my sister, art always came as a bit of a struggle for me. My bowls were lopsided and my portraits looked like demons. Many times, I’ve wanted to scream and quit art once and for all. I craved my parents’ validation, a nod of approval or a frame on the wall. 

Eventually, my art improved, and I made some of my favorite projects, from a ceramic haunted house to mushroom salt-and-pepper shakers. Even then, I didn’t get much praise from my parents, but I realized I genuinely loved art. It wasn’t something I enjoyed because of others’ praise; I just liked creating things of my own and the inexplicable thrill of chasing a challenge. Art has taught me to love failing miserably at something to continue it again the next day. If I never endured countless Bob Ross tutorials, I never would’ve made the mountain painting that I hang in my room today; if I never made pottery that blew up (just once!), I wouldn’t have my giant ceramic pie. 

I’m still light years from being an expert, but I’ll never tire of the kick of a challenge. 

The detail about the sister’s koala drawing being framed and praised while this writer’s portraits look like “demons” and bowls “lopsided” draws a nice contrast between the skills of the sister versus those of the writer.  In response to this “Overcoming Challenges” prompt , the author justifies that this is a significant challenge by saying that they “wanted to scream and quit art once and for all” and that they still desired their parents’ approval. 

The writer’s response to the situation— taking more tutorials online, creating many different pots before getting it right– is nicely framed. Many times, students forget to include examples that demonstrate how they respond to the situation, and this writer does a good job of including some of those details. 

The writer seems to emphasize the parents’ approval piece in the first paragraph, but then moves away from that point more to focus on the “thrill of chasing a challenge.” This essay could be improved by focusing a little more on how the writer emotionally moved past not getting that approval “Even then, I didn’t get much praise from my parents, but I finally realized I didn’t need to focus on that. I could focus on my love of art, on the inexplicable thrill of chasing the challenge…” 

Additionally, the sentence that starts with “Eventually, my art improved…” leaves the reader with the ques tion– how? Saying something like “Eventually, after many YouTube tutorials and a few destroyed pots, my art improved” would add detail, without taking away from the sentence about the Bob Ross tutorials and the pot blowing up. 

Where to Get Feedback on Your MIT Essay 

Do you want feedback on your MIT  essays? After rereading your essays countless times, it can be difficult to evaluate your writing objectively. That’s why we created our free Peer Essay Review tool , where you can get a free review of your essay from another student. You can also improve your own writing skills by reviewing other students’ essays. 

If you want a college admissions expert to review your essay, advisors on CollegeVine have helped students refine their writing and submit successful applications to top schools. Find the right advisor for you to improve your chances of getting into your dream school!

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College Essays

For the 2021-2022 admissions cycle, MIT admitted about 4% of applicants. If you want to be one of these lucky few, you'll need to write some killer MIT essays as part of your own Massachusetts Institute of Technology application.

In this article, we'll outline the MIT essay prompts and teach you how to write MIT supplemental essays that will help you stand out from the thousands of other applicants.

What Are the MIT Essays?

Like most major colleges and universities, MIT requires its applicants to submit essay examples as part of your application for admission.

MIT has its own application and doesn't accept the Common Application or the Coalition Application. The MIT essay prompts you'll answer aren't found on any other college's application.

There are four MIT supplemental essays, and you'll need to answer all four (approximately 200 words each) on various aspects of your life: a description of your background, what you do for fun, a way that you contribute to your community, and a challenge that you have faced in your life.

The MIT essay prompts are designed specifically to get to the heart of what makes you you . These essays help the admissions committee get a holistic picture of you as a person, beyond what they can learn from other parts of your application.

2022-2023 MIT Essay Prompts

The MIT supplemental essays are short, and each one addresses a different aspect of your identity and accomplishments.

You'll submit your essays along with an activities list and a self-reported coursework form as Part 2 of your MIT application. MIT structures its application this way because they rely on a uniform application to help them review thousands of applicants in the most straightforward and efficient way possible.

You need to respond to all five of the MIT essay prompts for your application.

Here are the 2022-2023 MIT essay prompts:

We know you lead a busy life, full of activities, many of which are required of you. Tell us about something you do simply for the pleasure of it.

Describe the world you come from (for example, your family, school, community, city, or town). How has that world shaped your dreams and aspirations?

MIT brings people with diverse backgrounds and experiences together to better the lives of others. Our students work to improve their communities in different ways, from tackling the world’s biggest challenges to being a good friend. Describe one way you have collaborated with people who are different from you to contribute to your community.

Tell us about a significant challenge you’ve faced (that you feel comfortable sharing) or something that didn’t go according to plan. How did you manage the situation?

Now that we know what the prompts are, let's learn how to answer them effectively.

MIT Essays, Analyzed

In this section, we'll be looking at each of the five MIT essays in depth.

Remember, every applicant must answer every one of the MIT essay prompts , so you don't get to choose which essay you would like to write. You have to answer all five of the MIT essay prompts (and do so strongly) in order to present the best application possible.

Let's take a look at the five MIT supplemental essay questions and see what the admissions committee wants to hear from each.

MIT Essay Prompt #1

This MIT essay prompt is very broad. The structure of the prompt indicates that the committee is interested in learning about your curiosity inside and outside of the classroom, so don't feel like you have to write about your favorite parts of school.

This MIT essay is your opportunity to show a different side of your personality than the admissions committee will see on the rest of your application. This essay is your chance to show yourself as a well-rounded person who has a variety of different interests and talents.

Choose a specific activity here. You don't need to present a laundry list of activities—simply pick one thing and describe in detail why you enjoy it. You could talk about anything from your love of makeup tutorials on YouTube to the board game nights you have with your family. The key here is to pick something that you're truly passionate about.

Don't feel limited to interests relating to your potential major. MIT's second prompt is all about that, so in this first prompt forget about what the school "wants to read" and be yourself! In fact, describing your experience in or passion for a different field will better show that you're curious and open to new ideas.

MIT Prompt #2

Don't repeat information that the committee can find elsewhere on your application. Take the time to share fun, personal details about yourself.

For instance, do you make awesome, screen-accurate cosplays or have a collection of rock crystals from caving expeditions? Think about what you love to do in your spare time.

Be specific—the committee wants to get a real picture of you as a person. Don't just say that you love to play video games, say exactly which video games you love and why.

MIT wants to know about your community—the friends, family, teammates, etc. who make up your current life. All of those people have affected you in some way—this prompt is your chance to reflect on that influence and expand on it. You can talk about the deep bonds you have and how they have affected you. Showing your relationships to others gives the committee a better idea of how you will fit in on MIT's campus.

All in all, this MIT essay is a great opportunity to have some fun and show off some different aspects of your personality. Let yourself shine!

MIT Prompt #3

This MIT prompt is by far the most specific, so be specific in your answer. Pick one experience that's meaningful to you to discuss here. The prompt doesn't specify that you have to talk about something academic or personal. It can be anything that you've done where you have contributed to any community—your dance troupe, gaming friends, debate team teammates. A community can be anything; it doesn't just refer to your hometown, scholastic or religious community.

The trick to answering this prompt is to find a concrete example and stick to it.

Don't, for instance, say that you try to recycle because the environment is meaningful to you, because it won't sound sincere. Rather, you can talk about why picking up garbage in the park where you played baseball as a child has deeper meaning because you're protecting a place that you've loved for a long time. You should talk about something that is uniquely important to you, not the other thousands of students that are applying to MIT.

Pick something that is really meaningful to you. Your essay should feel sincere. Don't write what you think the committee wants to hear. They'll be more impressed by a meaningful experience that rings true than one that seems artificial or implausible.

MIT Prompt #4

This question sets you up for success: it targets your area of interest but doesn't pigeon-hole you.

This essay is where your formal education will be most important. They want to know what kind of academic life you may lead in college so keep it brief, but allow your excitement for learning to drive these words. You are, after all, applying to MIT—they want to know about your academic side.

You should demonstrate your knowledge of and affinity for MIT in this essay. Don't just say that you admire the MIT engineering program—explain exactly what it is about the engineering program that appeals to you.

You can call out specific professors or classes that are of interest to you. Doing so helps show that you truly want to go to MIT and have done your research.

If you love playing games with kids at the Boys & Girls Club, the third MIT essay prompt is the time to talk about that passion.

MIT Open-Ended Text Box

This is one of the most open-ended options that you'll find on a college application! Here's one last chance for you to let MIT get to know the real you—the you that didn't quite get to come out during the previous four essays.

MIT wants to know exactly who you are, but, just as a word of caution, make sure your answer is appropriate for general audiences.

How to Write a Great MIT Essay

Regardless of which MIT essay prompt you're responding to, you should keep in mind the following tips for how to write a great MIT essay.

#1: Use Your Own Voice

The point of a college essay is for the admissions committee to have the chance to get to know you beyond your test scores, grades, and honors. Your admissions essays are your opportunity to make yourself come alive for the essay readers and to present yourself as a fully fleshed out person.

You should, then, make sure that the person you're presenting in your college essays is yourself. Don't try to emulate what you think the committee wants to hear or try to act like someone you're not.

If you lie or exaggerate, your essay will come across as insincere, which will diminish its effectiveness. Stick to telling real stories about the person you really are, not who you think MIT wants you to be.

You're the star of the show in your MIT essays! Make sure your work reflects who you are as a student and person, not who you think the admissions committee wants you to be.

#2: Avoid Clichés and Overused Phrases

When writing your MIT essays, try to avoid using clichés or overused quotes or phrases.

These include quotations that have been quoted to death and phrases or idioms that are overused in daily life. The college admissions committee has probably seen numerous essays that state, "You miss a hundred percent of the shots you don't take."  Strive for originality.

Similarly, avoid using clichés, which take away from the strength and sincerity of your work.

Your work should be straightforward and authentic.

#3: Check Your Work

It should almost go without saying, but you want to make sure your MIT essays are the strongest example of your work possible. Before you turn in your MIT application, make sure to edit and proofread your essays.

Your work should be free of spelling and grammar errors. Make sure to run your essays through a spelling and grammar check before you submit.

It's a good idea to have someone else read your MIT essays, too. You can seek a second opinion on your work from a parent, teacher, or friend. Ask them whether your work represents you as a student and person. Have them check and make sure you haven't missed any small writing errors. Having a second opinion will help your work be the best it possibly can be.

#4: Demonstrate Your Love for MIT

MIT's five essay prompts are specific to MIT. Keep that in mind as you're answering them, particularly when you attack prompt two.

Show why MIT is your dream school—what aspects of the education and community there are most attractive to you as a student.

MIT receives thousands of applications, from students who have different levels of interest in the university.

The more you can show that you really want to go to MIT, the more the school will be interested in your application. Your passion for MIT may even give you a leg up on other applicants.

What's Next?

Exploring your standardized testing options? Click here for the full list and for strategies on how to get your best ACT score .

Are you happy with your ACT/SAT score, or do you think it should be higher? Learn what a good SAT / ACT score is for your target schools .

Your MIT essays are just one part of your college application process. Check out our guide to applying to college   for a step-by-step breakdown of what you'll need to do.

Hayley Milliman is a former teacher turned writer who blogs about education, history, and technology. When she was a teacher, Hayley's students regularly scored in the 99th percentile thanks to her passion for making topics digestible and accessible. In addition to her work for PrepScholar, Hayley is the author of Museum Hack's Guide to History's Fiercest Females.

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The Parents Who Regret Having Children

N o one regrets having a child, or so it’s said. I’ve heard this logic often, usually after I’m asked if I have children, then, when I say I don’t, if I plan to. I tend to evade the question, as I find that the truth—I have no plans to be a parent—is likely to invite swift dissent. I’ll be told I’ll change my mind, that I’m wrong, and that while I’ll regret not having a child, people don’t regret the obverse. Close family, acquaintances, and total strangers have said this for years; I let it slide, knowing that, at the very least, the last part is a fiction.

It is, unsurprisingly, a challenge to get solid data on the number of parents who regret having children. In 1975, the popular advice columnist Ann Landers asked her readers if, given the chance to do it all over again, they’d have children. Seventy percent said they wouldn’t; this result, though, came from a group of self-selecting respondents. “The hurt, angry and disenchanted” are more inclined to write back than contented people, as Landers observed in a follow-up 1976 column . But in 2013, a Gallup poll asked Americans 45 and older how many kids they’d have if they could go back in time. Seven percent of the respondents with children said zero. And in 2023, a study estimated that up to 5% to 14% of parents in so-called developed countries, including the United States, regret their decision to have children.

These studies align with what I've found in my personal life: While most parents don’t regret having kids, some do. Perhaps in part because I’ve written publicly about choosing not to have children , I’ve had people, especially mothers, confide in me about parental regret, and frequently enough I’ve lost count.

Read More: Why So Many Women Are Waiting Longer to Have Kids

Most of the time—whether I hear it in passing, quickly, from a stranger at a literary event, or late at night from a beloved friend—this kind of revelation arises from a place of anguish. Some of these parents talk about feeling utterly alone, like villains past all imagining. Several have noted that, afraid of being judged, they decline to be candid with their own therapists. If asked what I think, I reply that, from what I’m hearing, they’re not alone. Not at all. I hope it helps; I’m told, at times, it does. It’s a physic to which I’ve devoted my life: asked why I write, I often respond that books, words have provided vital fellowship during spells of harsh isolation, when I thought that solitude and its attendant, life-torquing evils—shame, guilt, the pain of exile—might kill me.

Meanwhile, I’m so often advised that I’ll be a parent that, though I’m sure I won’t, I still prod at this ghost self, trying on its shape, asking what I’d do if I felt obliged to adopt this spectral, alternate life as mine. For here’s the next question people tend to broach if I indicate I don’t plan on having kids: what does my husband think? I find this odd, a little prying—do people think I didn’t discuss this topic with him, at length, long before we pledged to share a life?—but the question also rings the alarm bell of one of my own great fears. If I respond with the truth, that he feels exactly as I do, here’s the usual follow-up: but what if he changes his mind?

Read More: Why I Have Zero Regrets About My Childless Life

I have friends who long for kids, and I know the need to be potent, inarguable, as primal as my desire to go without. I’ve seen parent friends’ faces open with love as they watch their small children sing to living-room karaoke, the adults radiating joy as laughing tots carol and bop. Should my husband’s mind change, I can picture the rift that would open wide, dividing us. Either I’d deprive him of what he needs, or I’d give in, birthing a child I don’t want. Or, and this prospect is painful enough that it hurts to type the words, our lives would have to diverge. No bridge of compromise can quite traverse the rift: as King Solomon knew, there are no half-children.

This fear is so salient that I turned it into a pivotal tension in my upcoming novel, Exhibit : a celebrated photographer and her husband agreed they both don’t want children, but he wakes up one day realizing he does, and powerfully so. She’s certain she ought not be a parent; he’s pining for a child; they love each other very much. Short on joint paths forward, they have no idea what to do next.

Parental regret springs from a range of origins, not all having to do with privation of choice or means. In and before a post- Dobbs U.S., people have given birth against their will. The cost of raising a child runs high; for parents lacking funds and support, dire hardship can result. It’s a lack far too typical in the U.S., where there’s no federally mandated paid parental leave, and families are often priced out of childcare . But this regret isn’t a phenomenon limited to people in grave financial straits, nor to those forced into parenting. Other parents, all through the world, also wish they’d elected otherwise.

In recent months, as I waited for the publication of the novel I worked on for nine years, I kept returning to the plight I’d explored: I hadn’t yet finished wondering what I might do, how I’d live, if. And though I’d heard a range of chronicles of parental regret, as have other friends without kids, the stories were related one-on-one, in private. It’s a taboo subject, one made all the more difficult, punitive, by the ubiquitous belief that people who feel as they do either can’t or ought not exist.

Read More: Does Marriage Really Make People Happier? A Discussion

I’ve also thought about the isolating effect of silence, and what it can cost to live in hiding. I wanted to talk with parents who, if they could go back in time, might make different choices—and who’d also agree to be quoted. It was, again unsurprisingly, hard to find people willing to speak with me on the record about parental regret. I promised to alter the names of each parent I interviewed for this piece. Even so, people were skittish.

“I don't think that everyone is made for children,” says Helen, a high school teacher in her 40s. And telling people that their purpose is to reproduce is destructive, she adds. It’s what she heard growing up: though Helen wanted to take Latin in high school, her mother forced her to enroll in home economics instead. “I don't think I ever decided to have kids. I was pretty much just told that that's what you do. That's what girls are for,” Helen says.

As a result, Helen makes sure to tell her students that having children is an option, one that might not be right for them. She says the same thing to her kids, both girls. “I think that people need to know that just being themselves is enough,” she says.

Read More: Why You Should Think Before Telling Mothers 'They're Only Little Once'

At this point, half an hour into a phone call, Helen has cried, briefly, a couple of times. Now, I’m the one tearing up. I tell Helen I grew up in a predominantly Christian Korean American community. The primacy of having kids is built into the Korean language: I knew most Korean adults only as “the mother of x” or “the father of y.” I might have felt less strange if I’d had a Helen at my high school. While I didn’t quite, at any point, decide against being a parent—I didn’t have to, since I had no inkling of the urge in the first place—I also never heard it said that there might be an alternative.

“And if you thought there was any other way to live, there's something wrong with you,” Helen says.

I ask what she’d do if she had more time to herself. “I would write. I would take walks,” she replies. “I enjoyed writing academic papers. I enjoyed writing them for my master's.” It used to upset her when classes were too easy. Given the chance, she would think for hours without interruption. She’d take up further studies.

And if she could inhabit the person she was before she became a parent? “I would have stopped that pregnancy before it happened.” But that’s the part Helen’s never said to her daughters, who, after all, didn’t ask to be born. She’s hell-bent on raising them well, not taking out any regrets on the girls. “I love them. I just don't love the choice I made.”

Each parent I talk to points out this dividing line: it’s possible to have strong, lasting regrets about a life choice while ferociously loving—and caring for—the fruit of that decision. Paul, a Canadian father of young boys, notes that though he could write a book on everything he resents having lost as a result of becoming a parent, he also would do anything for his kids. Paul’s boys are the loves of his life. Still, overall, fathering has been detrimental to his well-being.

“My body is constantly on standby, waiting for the next disaster,” Paul says. “As an introvert, I also deeply resent having no private time.” He’s fatigued and never at ease, finding all aspects of child-rearing to be stressful. It’s not a problem that would be resolved if he had more caretaking support. “I do have help with the kids from family, and I know if I asked for more help, I'd get it,” he tells me, but he often refuses help because he believes that, as a father, it's his job to take on the brunt of tasks that attend parenting.

Instead, what Paul lacks, in terms of support, is people with whom he can be honest. “I don't have anyone to talk to about parental regret,” he says. He wishes he had more spaces where parents aren't publicly shamed for feeling trapped or stifled. And though he’d felt ambivalent about becoming a father, and it was his husband who first decided he wanted a child, he hasn’t let this initial split in longing drive them apart. With his husband, as with the other people in his life, he's quiet about his regret: “As much as I might feel his desire to be a parent has led me to my decision, that decision was also my own.”

People have asked how I learned that not having kids might be an option. I live in San Francisco, where I’m hardly the only person with no kids—out of the major U.S. cities, San Francisco has the smallest percentage of children —but even so, for some people, having kids can feel so fated that they talk about not having imagined otherwise.

One friend who’s asked this question has told me she felt regret during the first years of her child’s life, but that, as her child got older, the rue left. For other parents, though, the regret proves lasting. Robin, who has adult offspring in their 40s, says that, to this day, if she could reverse time, she would “certainly not have a baby ever, not under any circumstances.” She notes that she’d had no notion of what being a parent can entail. Having grown up in an affluent, cheerful family, she was glad to have children with her husband, figuring that “it all just looked like a romantic, happy road.”

Instead, after electing to be a stay-at-home mother, Robin found herself in what she calls “the domestic gulag,” a life that consisted of being “a chauffeur and an arranger and an appointment setter and a social secretary and a party planner and a chef and a meal planner and a budgeter” and “an emergency nurse and a night nurse and a psychologist and a confidant.”

Robin also, like the other parents I spoke to, felt responsible for raising her children well, teaching them how to lead “good, honorable, happy” lives, striving to instill and model integrity and kindness. It was a daily, 20-year effort all the more crushing since, each morning, waking up, she’d recall the day’s to-do list and know that she didn’t want to do any of it.

Replying to my questions, Robin keeps having to pause to take phone calls from a nurse caring for her ill, elderly aunt. There’s no one else in Robin’s family who’ll fill the role, she says, so it’s up to her to look after her aunt’s well-being. I’m conscious that I’m telling you this because I’m alive to what at least some readers will think about Helen, Paul, and Robin: that the act of admitting to regret ipso facto convicts them as bad, unfit parents. As, that is, evil people. They know it, too, and are as afraid of being recognized as they are intent on telling people what they’re living through—hoping, with a fervor I recognize from my bygone life as an evangelical Christian, to prevent others’ misery.

Hoping to ease others’ solitude, too. Online forums aside, there are almost no spaces where a parent can discuss regret. Some of this is for good reason—no child should have to hear that they’re regretted—but what other human experience is there about which one will probably be judged a monster for having any regret at all?

One problem is that our culture wants just one kind of story about parenting, and it’s a story of “pure joy,” says Yael Goldstein-Love, a writer and psychotherapist in California whose clinical practice focuses on people who are adapting to parenthood. But, Goldstein-Love says, people often experience grief in the transition to being a parent, grief for the life they might have inhabited otherwise. “Part of what makes the grief unspeakable is that there's always a strand of this regret,” she adds.

While Goldstein-Love hasn’t had patients bring it up, she also has friends who confide in her about parental regret. I mention the alacrity with which people can lunge to say that no parent feels regret, that it’s impossible. I ask if, perhaps, this type of remorse poses an existential threat, belying an ideal picture of what we might be to our own parents. Is this an aspect of why people can be so quick to refute the notion that regret can, and does, happen?

Absolutely, she replies: Most people want to believe that our parents felt nothing but delight about raising us. “They never regretted a moment. They never hated us. And that's bullsh-t.” I ask Goldstein-Love what she’d tell parents who wish they had made another choice.

“To the extent that you can, and this is much easier said than done, try not to feel ashamed of this.” It’s tempting, she explains, to judge how we feel about life experiences, asking ourselves, “Does this make me a good person? Does this make me a bad person? Am I doing this right? Am I doing this wrong?”

But feelings aren’t inherently “truly ugly,” Goldstein-Love says. “They just are.” It’s what people make of their feelings that might be “ugly or not.” Some people don’t find joy in parenting, let alone pure joy, “and that’s also fine.” Regret is not itself a threat to a parent’s love for a child, and it can help to admit, even to oneself, that which might feel unspeakable. “I really would encourage people to realize that you are not alone in this feeling,” she says.

I think of the halting conversations I’ve been having with parents, and the difficulty with which people talk about regret. Few choices are less irreversible than deciding to be a parent: once the child is born, a person is here who didn’t previously exist. But I also wonder who’s being served well by a monolithic idea that no one regrets being a parent. Not these parents; not, as some of the people I’ve spoken with have pointed out, any kids who pick up on parental regret and think it can’t happen, except to them. If more people had the support to make reproductive choices based on their own desires and life situations, and if the monolith were spalled in favor of plural narratives that better reflect the complexities of human experience, what then?

I think of the people who have spoken to me about regret and isolation, including those I haven’t yet mentioned—a mother finishing nursing school in Mississippi, a mother of five in Nebraska, and all the privately confiding parents. One parent asks at the end of our conversation, “What have other parents said? Was it the same thing? Was it the same thing as me?”

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She’s still standing — and doing stand-up.

The world’s oldest working woman comic is sharing wild details about her career on the comedy circuit, saying she’s often hit on by amorous audience members who are decades younger than her.

New Yorker D’yan Forest, 89, shared her story in an essay for The Guardian , writing: “One thing that has surprised me is the number of young men who hit on me after a show.

“I might make a joke about being a cougar and they’ll stand outside afterwards, waiting to talk to me,” she cheekily added. “They often ask me out, and it’s not my brain they’re after.”

Forest, who was born in the mid-1930s, spent decades as a singer and actress but didn’t start telling jokes until 2003.

The Manhattanite was inspired to make her fellow New Yorkers laugh again in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, which she saw happen from her apartment window.

“For a year afterwards, nobody wanted to go out or be entertained,” Forest recalled. “It was then that I started to think about comedy. I realized people needed to laugh, to enjoy themselves again, and thought that with a little training I could do it.”

“I took a few classes, tried to work out a routine, and finally plucked up the courage to get up on stage [at the age of 68]. That first time was terrifying. I had no idea what the audience would make of me.”

However, audiences were immediately tickled by the senior citizen, who soon became famed for her naughty brand of humor.

“I talk about ‘not having the energy for 69s,'” the frisky funny woman quipped. “People are surprised to hear an older person talk about sex. I’m more of a puritan in real life, but I have an onstage persona.”

Forest has even appeared at shows alongside comedy legends such as Joan Rivers and Jerry Seinfeld.

And, as she nears the age of 90, her career is still thriving.

In recent years, Forest has headlined an all-woman show at Gotham Comedy Club and appeared on “The Drew Barrymore Show,” where she was presented with the Guinness World Record for Oldest Working Female Comedian in the World.

Meanwhile, Forest still has a similar zest for life off-stage.

Earlier this year she was profiled by The Post after revealing she’s active on the dating app Tinder, where she’s looking for “fun, company and sex.”

“After a show, people young and old come up to me, saying what an inspiration I am,” she enthused in her essay for The Guardian. “They say they want to be as active as me when they reach my age.

“I’m pleased I can show that as an older person, you don’t need to take a back seat in life,” she added.

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What is the largest city in the world? Biggest places by population and area.

About eight billion people live on planet Earth, a milestone that the United Nations estimated we passed on Nov. 15, 2022. It's a stark increase from the world population in 1950, which was 2.5 billion. Still, the U.N. estimates the growth rate is slowing – it'll take approximately 15 years to reach nine billion people.

About 335 million of the world's population lives in the United States, according to recent U.S. Census estimates. And while the U.S. is among the world's most populous countries , its numbers pale in comparison to India and China, which each have over 1.4 billion people.

 What is the largest city in the world?

Here are the top 10 largest cities by population in 2024 according to World Population Review, rounded: 

• Tokyo, Japan - 37.1 million people
• Delhi, India  - 33.8 million people
• Shanghai, China - 29.8 million people
• Dhaka, Bangladesh - 23.9 million people
• São Paulo, Brazil - 22.8 million people
• Cairo, Egypt - 22.6 people
• Mexico City, Mexico - 22.5 million people
• Beijing, China - 22.1 million people
• Mumbai, India - 21.6 million people
• Osaka, Japan - 18.9 million people

What is the largest city in the world by area?

Each country defines a city differently, making a standard measurement for the largest city by area harder to determine.

To combat inconsistency across countries, Demographia created " Urban Areas," a standardized way to measure cities that factors in population density. Using Urban Area as a form of measurement, cities and areas are grouped together so the top 10 largest cities by area are not the individual cities but rather groups of cities within a determined proximity.

Here are the top 10 largest cities in terms of square miles according to the World Population Review, based on reports from Demographia:

• New York-Newark
• Boston-Providence
• Tokyo-Yokohama
• Los Angeles
• Washington-Baltimore 
• Philadelphia
• Dallas-Fort Worth

What state has the lowest population? Top 10 least-populated states

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USA TODAY is exploring the questions you and others ask every day. From "Where is Mount Everest?" to "What is the biggest state in the U.S.?" to "Why do dogs have whiskers?" – we're striving to find answers to the most common questions you ask every day. Head to our Just Curious section to see what else we can answer for you.