Essays Social

Winner of the 1988 Before Columbus Foundation National Book Award, this path-breaking collection of essays is a clarion call to build communities that nurture our spirit. Lorde announces the need for a radical politics of intersectionality while struggling to maintain her own faith as she wages a battle against liver cancer. From reflections on her struggle with the disease to thoughts on lesbian sexuality and African-American identity in a straight white man's world, Lorde's voice remains enduringly relevant in today's political landscape.

Thomas Sowell takes aim at a range of legal, social, racial, educational, and economic issues in this latest collection of his controversial, never boring, always thought-provoking essays. From "gun control myths" to "mealy mouth media" to "free lunch medicine," Sowell gets to the heart of the matters we all care about with his characteristically unsparing candor.

Exploring the relationship between Christianity and Zen, especially through his dialogue with the great Zen teacher D.T. Suzuki, the book makes an excellent introduction to a comparative study of these two traditions, as well as giving the listener a strong taste of the mature Merton. Never does one feel him losing his own faith; rather, one feels that faith getting deeply clarified and affirmed. Just as the body of "Zen" cannot be found by the scavengers, so too, Merton suggests, with the eternal truth of Christ.

'On Anger' is one of Seneca's most important essays. At some length he investigates the nature of anger: how and why it emerges, the effect it has on the individual and those to whom it is directed, and how to manage it and prevent it even from arising. For, Seneca considers, anger simply serves no purpose - it does not bring courage in war, prevent others misbehaving or punish miscreants. In short it has a negative effect on all. In 'On Leisure' he takes a short look at what is really meant by the term.

An exploration into the curation of the self in Western civilization from Da Vinci to Kim Kardashian. In a technologically-saturated era where nearly everything can be effortlessly and digitally reproduced, we're all hungry to carve out our own unique personalities, our own bespoke personae, to...

Henri Bergson (1859-1941) was the leading French philosopher of the first half of the 20th century. Near the end of his life when he was forced to register with the police in Nazi occupied France he wrote: ‘Academic. Philosopher. Nobel prize winner. Jew.’ Time and Free Will, his doctoral thesis, was published as a book in 1889 and attacks and rejects the mechanistic view of causality described in Kant’s version of space and time and proceeds to attempt to define free-will and consciousness by separating space and time.

New York Times best-selling author and acclaimed Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson is known for such groundbreaking works as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. A provocative collection of rants and reflections from Thompson’s columns at ESPN.com, Hey Rube offers outrageously brilliant insight on topics ranging from the 2000 election to his unconventional take on professional sports (“eliminate the pitcher” to improve Major League Baseball).

"The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." This ancient Greek aphorism, preserved in a fragment from the poet Archilochus, describes the central thesis of Isaiah Berlin's masterly essay on Leo Tolstoy and the philosophy of history, the subject of the epilogue to War and Peace. Although there have been many interpretations of the adage, Berlin uses it to mark a fundamental distinction between human beings who are fascinated by the infinite variety of things and those who relate everything to a central, all-embracing system.

Is our democracy corroding? In this original, eloquent essay, Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens explore the ethics and politics of public debate—and the threat it now faces. In a healthy society we need the capacity to disagree. Yet Aly and Stephens note a growing tendency to disdain and dismiss opponents, to treat them with contempt. This toxic partisanship has been imported from the United States, where it has been a temptation for both left and right.

In this gripping essay, Hugh White explores Australia’s fateful choice to back America to the hilt and oppose China. What led both sides of politics to align with America so absolutely? Is this a case of sleepwalking to war? What tests might a new government face? White assesses America’s credibility and commitment, by examining AUKUS, the Quad, Trump and Biden. He discusses what the Ukraine conflict tells us about the future. And he argues that the US can neither contain China nor win a war over Taiwan. So where does this leave our future security and prosperity in Asia?

Written between A.D. 413 and 426, The City of God is one of the great cornerstones in the history of Christian thought, a book which is vital to the understanding of modern Western society. Augustine originally intended it to be an apology for Christianity against the accusation that the Church was responsible for the decline of the Roman Empire, which had occurred just three years earlier. Indeed, Augustine produced a great amount of evidence to prove that paganism was responsible for this event. However, by the time the work was finished, the book had taken on a larger theme.

Australian politics is shifting. The two-party system was broken at the last federal election, and another minority government is a real possibility in the future. Politics-as-usual is not enough for many voters. In this richly insightful essay, George Megalogenis traces the how and why of a political realignment. This is an essay about the teals, the Greens and the Coalition.

Biographer Michael Shelden called Orwell’s Politics and the English Language “his most important essay on style”. First published in 1946, the essay exploded the language trends of the time and served as an inflection point in the debate about communication in the 20th century. This collection of essays published 1946-48 provides a comprehensive critique of the status of politics and speech in the mid-century.

Famines are becoming smaller and rarer, but optimism about the possibility of a famine-free future must be tempered by the threat of global warming. That is just one of the arguments that Cormac Ó Gráda, one of the world's leading authorities on the history and economics of famine, develops in this wide-ranging audiobook, which provides crucial new perspectives on key questions raised by famines around the globe between the 17th and 21st centuries.

This philosophical essay is the development of a lecture on probabilities which I delivered in 1795 to the normal schools whither I had been called, by a decree of the national convention, as professor of mathematics with Lagrange. I have recently published upon the same subject a work entitled The Analytical Theory of Probabilities. I present here without the aid of analysis the principles and general results of this theory, applying them to the most important questions of life, which are indeed for the most part only problems of probability.

A group of notable writers - including UK poet laureate Simon Armitage, Julian Barnes, Margaret MacMillan, and Jenny Uglow - celebrate our fascination with the houses of famous literary figures, artists, composers, and politicians of the past.

In America and in England, faltering economies at home and failed wars abroad have generated a political and intellectual hysteria. It is a derangement manifested in a number of ways: nostalgia for imperialism, xenophobic paranoia, and denunciations of an allegedly intolerant left. These symptoms can be found even among the most informed of Anglo-America.

Picking up where Berton Roueche's The Medical Detectives left off, The Deadly Dinner Party presents 15 edge-of-your-seat, real-life medical detective stories written by a practicing physician. Award-winning author Jonathan Edlow, MD, shows the doctor as detective and the epidemiologist as elite sleuth in stories that are as gripping as the best thrillers.

Best-selling author Peter Kreeft presents a series of brilliant essays about many of the issues that increasingly divide our Western civilization and culture. He states that "these essays are not new proposals or solutions to today's problems. They are old. They have been tried, and have worked. They have made people happy and good. That is what makes them so radical and so unusual today. The most uncommon thing today is common sense".

Immediately after two hijacked jets struck the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, Dennis Smith volunteered in the rescue effort. Having spent his career as both a respected writer and a member of one of the city's busiest firehouses, Smith became determined to use his unique background to tell the story of the disaster and its aftermath with the empathy and understanding that only an insider could bring to it. In this audio memoir, he has collected astonishing first-person testimony.