Essays Social

In January 2017, Donald Trump signed an executive order stopping entry to the United States from seven predominantly Muslim countries and dramatically cutting the number of refugees allowed to resettle in the United States each year. The American people spoke up, with protests, marches, donations, and lawsuits that quickly overturned the order. But the refugee caps remained. In The Displaced, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Viet Thanh Nguyen, himself a refugee, brings together a host of prominent refugee writers to explore and illuminate the refugee experience.

Home is, in effect, the ideological autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka. The two dozen essays that constitute this book were written during a five-year span - a turbulent and critical period for African Americans and Whites. The Cuban Revolution, the Birmingham bombings, Robert Williams’s Monroe Defense movement, the Harlem riots, the assassination of Malcolm X...each changed the way Jones/Baraka looked at America. This progressive change is recorded with honesty, anger, and passion in his writings.

"Everyone is female, and everyone hates it." So begins Andrea Long Chu’s genre-defying investigation into sex and lies, desperate artists and reckless politics, the smothering embrace of gender and the punishing force of desire. Drawing inspiration from a forgotten play by Valerie Solanas - the woman who wrote the SCUM Manifesto and shot Andy Warhol - Chu aims her searing wit and surgical intuition at targets ranging from performance art to psychoanalysis, incels to porn, and even feminists like herself.

After years of ill health, capitalism is now in a critical condition. Growth has given way to stagnation; inequality is leading to instability; and confidence in the money economy has all but evaporated. In How Will Capitalism End?, the acclaimed analyst of contemporary politics and economics Wolfgang Streeck argues the world is about to change.

In 1958, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita was published in the United States to immediate controversy and best-sellerdom. More than 60 years later, this phenomenal novel generates as much buzz as it did when originally published. Central to countless issues at the forefront of our national discourse - art and politics, race and whiteness, gender and power, sexual trauma - Lolita lives on, in an afterlife as blinding as a supernova.

The major social problems of the United States - deteriorating education, lawlessness and crime, homelessness, the collapse of family values, the crisis in medical care - have been produced by well-intended actions of government. That is easy to document. The difficult task is understanding why government is the problem. The power of special interests arising from the concentrated benefits of most government actions and their dispersed costs is only part of the answer.

Le Lagom, c'est l'art de la simplicité à la suédoise. Pas vraiment traduisible, le mot signifie "ni trop, ni trop peu". Anne Thoumieux, journaliste, propose une approche à 360° de ce phénomène de modération tout sauf ennuyeuse qui pourrait bien aider à construire une société meilleure pour demain. Elle étudie le Lagom à travers les différents aspects de notre vie : qu'est-ce qu'éduquer, travailler Lagom ? Recevoir Lagom ? À quoi ressemble la mode, la beauté, le bien-être Lagom ?

A key figure in the Latin American literary renaissance, Octavio Paz focuses here on literature and art, drugs, the murder of God, and ethical and political problems.

In the first part of this acclaimed work, Octavio Paz sets forth his credo as an artist and a poet. Part two deals with themes more specific to the late '60s and '70s, such as the drug experience and modern atheism. In part three, Paz concerns himself with politics and ethics. In no way diminished by time, every chapter in this book is an adventure of the mind.

Dr. Jeanne Safer has dedicated much of her decades-long career in psychotherapy to exploring taboo subjects that we all think about in private but seldom discuss in public. From conflicted sibling relationships to the choice not to have children, Safer's work has always been unflinching in its aim to dive deep into topics that make most of us blush but which are present in all of our lives. In The Golden Condom, Safer turns her sharp and fearless eye to a subject perhaps more universal than any other: love in all its permutations.

The Fable of the Bees—a satirical poem, prose discussion, three essays and six dialogues completed in 1729—exposes human vices but defends them as a necessity within a wealthy society. Mandeville’s bees thrive until they start living by honesty and virtue… then they are impoverished. Mandeville did not play by the rules: he satirized the sins of society but also ridiculed the widespread hypocrisy of deploring these sins whilst reaping their benefits. He and his work were attacked for the rest of the century.

Love, for Emerson, is neither simple nor sweet. It is a force—wild, untamable, and yet profoundly human. In Love, he explores the deep currents that pull us together and push us apart, not with the softness of romance, but with the clarity of a philosopher who sees love as a transformative, even unsettling, experience. It is not just an emotion, but a vital, unpredictable energy that shapes and redefines us. Emerson doesn't idealize love; he insists on its complexity.

Americans are caught up in bulk. We guiltily watch Amazon boxes pile up on the porch, wade through endless reviews to find the perfect product, and crave the comforting indulgence of a chain restaurant. In American Bulk, Emily Mester intertwines cultural critique and personal history to explore how the things we buy, eat, amass, and discard become an intimate part of our lives. With humor and sharp intellect, she reflects on the joys and anxieties of family Costco trips, how a seasonal stint at Ulta Beauty taught her the insidious art of the sale, and what it means to get Mall Sad.

In The Practice of Folklore: Essays Toward a Theory of Tradition, author Simon J. Bronner works with theories of cultural practice to explain the social and psychological need for tradition in everyday life. Bronner proposes a distinctive “praxic” perspective that will answer the pressing philosophical as well as psychological question of why people enjoy repeating themselves. The significance of the keyword practice, he asserts, is the embodiment of a tension between repetition and variation in human behavior.

Fast-talking, warm-hearted, and endlessly rewatchable, Gilmore Girls has bonded real-life mothers and daughters since 2000, when its iconic pilot introduced us to Lorelai, Rory, and their idyllic Connecticut town of Stars Hollow. More than twenty years later, it has become one of the most-streamed TV shows, ever. In an anthology as intimate and quick-witted as Gilmore Girls itself, bestselling author Ann Hood invites fifteen writers to investigate their personal relationships to the show.

Too personal for an almanac, too sophisticated for a domestic history, and too funny and self-doubting for a literary journal, One Man's Meat can best be described as a primer of a countryman's lessons and a timeless recounting of experience that will never go out of style.

For more than a decade, New York University president John Sexton has used baseball to illustrate the elements of a spiritual life in a wildly popular course at NYU. Using great works of baseball literature as well as the actual game’s fantastic moments, its legendary characters, and its routine rituals - from the long-sought triumph of the 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers to the heroic achievements of players like the saintly Christy Mathewson and the sinful Ty Cobb to the loving intimacy of a game of catch between a father and son - Sexton teaches that through the game we can touch the spiritual dimensions of life.

The slippery online ecosystem is the perfect breeding ground for identities: true, false, and in between. The Internet shorthand IRL - "in real life" - now seems naïve. We no longer question the reality of online experiences but the reality of selfhood in the digital age. In The Secret Life, the essayist and novelist Andrew O'Hagan issues three bulletins from the porous border between cyberspace and IRL.

The Stoicism Collection is a collection of 5 essential pieces of stoic philosophy, alongside a biography of Marcus Aurelius, read by an esteemed cast of award-winning narrators. Stoicism is a school of Hellenistic philosophy that flourished in Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome. The Stoics believed that the practice of virtue is enough to achieve eudaimonia: a well-lived life.

Comment se douter qu'un simple Like envoyé depuis nos smartphones mobilise ce qui constituera bientôt la plus vaste infrastructure édifiée par l'homme ? Que cette notification, en traversant les sept couches de fonctionnement d’Internet, voyage autour du monde, empruntant des câbles sous-marins, des antennes téléphoniques et des datacenters implantés jusque dans le cercle arctique ? Le monde "dématérialisé" du numérique, indispensable pour communiquer, travailler et consommer, s'avère bien plus tangible que nous ne voulions le croire.

I forget things too. It makes me sad. Or it makes me the saddest. The sadness is not really about George W. or our American optimism; the sadness lives in the recognition that a life can not matter. The award-winning poet Claudia Rankine, well known for her experimental multigenre writing, fuses the lyric and the essay in this politically and morally fierce examination of solitude in the rapacious and media-driven assault on selfhood that is contemporary America.