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Politics and the English Language, the essay of George Orwell. First published: April 1946 by/in Horizon, GB, London

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When I was young, I thought Life: A User’s Manual would teach me how to live and Suicide: A User’s Manual how to die. I don’t really listen to what people tell me. I forget things I don’t like. I look down dead-end streets.

Nora Ephron talks about boobs.

Central message of the article.. In so many ways, even after nearly four decades of this speech by Margaret Atwood, the deficiencies of the curriculum, the

When I was twenty years old, I became a kind of apprentice to a man named Andrew Lytle, whom pretty much no one apart from his negligibly less ancient sister, Polly.

Joan Didion’s seminal 1961 Vogue essay on self-respect.

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. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. What I am grateful for is the gift of intelligence, and for life, love, wonder, and laughter. You can’t say it wasn’t interesting. My lifetime’s memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris.

Zadie Smith on learning to like Joni Mitchell, from 2012.

“Fiction becomes a weird way to countenance yourself and to tell the truth instead of being a way to escape yourself or present yourself in a way you figure you will be maximally likable.&#82…

“We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.”

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Published in 1931, "A Hanging" is a powerful short essay by George Orwell (writing under his real name, Eric Arthur Blair) reflecting on his time as an imperial police officer in Burma

Blue-chiseling the Ten Commandments, Christopher Hitchens decrees which should stay and which should go, adding a few new ones of his own.

A day in the bush, a night at home.

When Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa on novelist Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses, it was the opening shot in a war on cultural freedom. Two decades later, the violence continues, and Muslim fundamentalists have gained a new advantage: media self-censorship.

"Fail Better" is a famous 2007 essay by British novelist Zadie Smith, published in The Guardian on January 13, 2007. Borrowing its ethos from Samuel Beckett's phrase "Fail better", the essay explores the nature of literary failure, writing as a measure of moral character, and how writers judge their own work.

A visit to the Maine Lobster Festival becomes an extended meditation on animal consciousness, ethics, and what we lose when comfort becomes our highest value.

A writer sifts poems, letters, and suicide notes from a fractured family, tracing love, illness, and estrangement across decades.