Among the Greats

Singer published ‘Animal Liberation’, an essay in The New York Review of Books that resonated widely. It laid the groundwork for his seminal book of the same name, which popularized a moral principle that has hardly lost its edge: that it is not intellect or language that grants moral standing, but the capacity to suffer. With unflinching precision, Singer described the lives of animals in laboratories and factory farms. His ideas filtered into legislation, education, and consumer behavior, laying the foundation for the modern animal rights movement.

In 1972, the young philosopher Peter Singer published "Famine, Affluence and Morality," which rapidly became one of the most widely discussed essays in applied ethics. Through this article, Singer presents his view that we have the same moral obligations to those far away as we do to those close to us. He argued that choosing not to send life-saving money to starving people on the other side of the earth is the moral equivalent of neglecting to save drowning children because we prefer not to muddy our shoes. If we can help, we must--and any excuse is hypocrisy. Singer's extreme stand on our moral obligations to others became a powerful call to arms and continues to challenge people's attitudes towards extreme poverty. Today, it remains a central touchstone for those who argue we should all help others more than we do.

Baldwin's searing account of his father's death, the Harlem riot, and what it means to be Black in America — one of the defining essays of the twentieth century.