Essays

Against Everything is a thought-provoking study and essential guide to the vicissitudes of everyday life under twenty-first-century capitalism. Mar...

Five decades after her debut poetry collection, Firstborn, Louise Glück is a towering figure in American letters. Written with the same probing, an...

The question Are We Human? is both urgent and ancient. Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley offer a multilayered exploration of the intimate relationsh...

Bluets winds its way through depression, divinity, alcohol, and desire, visiting along the way with famous blue figures, including Joni Mitchell, B...

From My Little Pony to the Sex Pistols: An engaging exploration of why we love what we love Katy Perry. Wes Anderson. Coldplay. Star Wars. Hamilton...

The story of the negro in America is the story of America... it is not a very pretty story' James Baldwin's breakthrough essay collection made him ...

In Earth, a planetary scientist and a literary humanist explore what happens when we think of the Earth as an object viewable from space. As a “blu...

This book is about a strange object-strange in part because it is something that we all have been, and that many of us eat. Nicole Walker's Egg rel...

Desert nomads tested their vision by distinguishing a pair of stars. But we have since created more disquieting ways to test the strength of the ey...

When the Sony Walkman debuted in 1979, people were enthralled by the novel experience it offered: immersion in the music of their choice, anytime, ...

The mall near Matthew Newton's childhood home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was one of the state's first enclosed shopping malls. Like all malls in ...

Who ponders the sock? This common object is something people tug on and take off daily with hardly a thought. Unraveling the garment's history, con...

Speed. Bump. Speed. Traffic considers the history and philosophy of roundabouts, speed bumps, the pedestrian mall, and other efforts to manage traf...

The veil can be an instrument of feminist empowerment, and veiled anonymity can confer power to women. Starting from her own marriage ceremony at w...

The sapiens of the sea, whales are the other intelligent, social, and loquacious animal. But they seem to swim away the more people chase after the...

Charles Bukowski was one of our most iconoclastic, raw and riveting writers, one whose stories, poems and novels have left an enduring mark on our ...

Recent years have seen a surge of interest in Marxian political economy and especially Marx's great work Capital. 150 years after the book's origin...

‘We are driving across Oklahoma in early June when we first hear about the waves of children arriving, alone and undocumented, from Mexico and Cent...

Annie Dillard has spent a lifetime examining the world around her with eyes wide open, drinking in all things intensely and relentlessly. Whether o...

An annual publication, The Birthday Book examines emerging challenges and opportunities for Singapore, based on a selected prompt. The number of wr...

Elizabeth Hardwick wrote during the golden age of the American literary essay. For Hardwick, the essay was an imaginative endeavor, a serious form,...

In the nearly fifty essays collected in The Wild Children of William Blake, John Yau explores the careers of a wide range of poets and artists who ...