The commonplace book is one of the oldest and most intimate of literary traditions — a private, personalized, central repository for organizing quotes, ideas, observations, and information — often called a “second brain” or “thinker’s journal” — and a record of everything that has arrested the attention.

During the Renaissance, the commonplace book was standard practice among serious readers — John Locke developed an indexed, systematic methodology for his, John Milton documented his reading, Virginia Woolf used hers for planning and collecting ideas, and Arthur Conan Doyle used his to transcribe research for stories.

I have kept several physical journals and commonplace books for years — handwritten reflections on everything I read and watch, and reflect upon, organized by theme or obsession.

some journal pages from my physical commonplace book

I began The Weekly Reading Guides last autumn. Twelve volumes later, it has become a public commonplace book of sorts — an accumulated record of reading and its afterthoughts.

After working in the corporate sector for nearly a decade, reading — once an instinctive habit from the age of five or six — had become rote and impersonal, and in any meaningful sense, rare. Instead, it resembled a never—ending list to be tracked and counted, and gamified. I hardly had a moment — temporally or mentally — to sit with a book intimately and without a clock ticking. For the library of babel is humungous, and days of our lives numbered. The scope exceeds what can be reasonably covered in a single pass of a lifetime. I know I will not read them all. But rather than accepting this limit, most of us try to outrun it by powering through as many books as possible before we die — which defeats the point of reading for pleasure.

The slow philosophy grew out of this conundrum as a solution to the madness. At first, I began a habit of walking across the street to my local newsstand to buy newspapers to read with breakfast. During college, my studies almost required this practice, but not much since then. Working a hundred and twenty hours a week hadn’t left room for the paper, much less the splendid literary magazines still active in circulation with admirable gusto. But I attempted a few at a time and noted down afterthoughts into my notebooks. In putting together these twelve volumes, I engaged deeply with literary essays on science, literature, philosophy, society, culture, and anything else that gets under my skin and doesn’t look like the same stories circulating on the front pages. In time, short-form reading served as a neat gateway back to more ambitious reading as well.

To that end, I also put together a monthly postcard — something more spacious that included reflections on books and poetry read, as well as film and music. In doing so, rather than simply passing through me, not only did anything I consumed gather into an archive for me to look back on, but it also helped me forge a more lasting relation to what I had read, seen, and heard.

Keeping records, journals, diaries, and archives of my life has come to feel essential. It is a way of accounting for what matters, of not letting it disappear entirely.

This space has always been an argument for slowing down, depth, and genuine engagement. It seems necessary to apply that argument to the postcard itself. Going forward, the Weekly Reading Guides will become The Commonplace Book — curated snippets of my reading. Each week, I’ll cherry-pick one or two classical essays paired with one or two contemporary ones with my critical reflections, questions, and, of course, links to the original texts.

Without further ado, here is the first commonplace book postcard — volume 13.

featured this week

Classic essay —
By Henry Adams.

Contemporary essay —
From Lit Hub.

Read previous guides:

[March 2026]

Contemporary Essay of the Month

Reading “Literary Celebrity, Mussolini’s Mouthpiece, AND American Traitor: Who Was Ezra Pound?” — Lit Hub

To the controversial debates of how to separate art from artist, I add Ezra Pound. Twentieth-century poetry’s celebrated dean. Mentor to T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams. And virulent Anti-Semite.

An ardent supporter of Mussolini, Pound lived in Europe for three decades and sailed to America in 1939 to warn against American involvement in the war, even offering Mussolini’s Ministry of Popular Culture help countering anti-fascist propaganda. Once his fascist credentials were verified, he began broadcasting Mussolini’s achievements and promoting fascism as the only remedy for social injustice over the radio — all in exchange for a monthly salary and travel perks from the Italian government. Yup, he was a paid fascist.

Eventually, Roosevelt said what the fuck. He sent a memo to his Attorney General asking why on earth Pound, broadcasting for the goddarn Axis, hadn’t been indicted for treason already.

The FBI, on the other hand, stepped in and was like — oh, Mr. President, don’t you worry, this man has no idea what’s coming. We have been fattening him up for just this occasion.

Turns out, they had already been building a file on Pound. When FBI agent Frank Amprim arrested Pound in Genoa and questioned him — Pound, so fucking self-important and unaware of how much shit he was in — asked to send a telegram to President Truman, offering to “broker peace” with Japan, requesting permission to make a final radio broadcast. Amprim, obviously, said “nope.”

Harding writes: “That Pound was shocked when Amprim declined both requests gives a clear idea of the poet’s stunning naïveté and overwhelming sense of self-importance.”

Ezra, on the other hand, went on to write: “I do not believe I have betrayed anyone whomsoever.”

My favorite part of this whole affair was how Amprim maintained a calm and friendly manner throughout the questioning — as Pound freely admitted to all his guilt and praised the Nazis. Pound, a brilliant poet for all his authority, was so clueless that he actually thought — oh, that FBI agent? Yeah, he was totally convinced by me — I’m good. Unbeknownst to him, of course, accounts say that Amprim had to count the goats in his head so as not to strangle Pound in slow motion while listening to him praise Hitler.

In the end, Pound was never tried for treason. He was found mentally unfit to stand trial and committed to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for the criminally insane in Washington, D.C., where he spent thirteen years. Upon his eventual release in 1958, he returned to Italy and died in Venice in 1972.

T.S. Eliot’s original manuscript of The Waste Land was an actual waste land. Nearly twice as long and fragmented. Pound came in and cut it into a lean half. He edited it so aggressively that Eliot dedicated the published poem to Pound with the phrase “il miglior fabbro” — "the better craftsman," a fancy Latinate phrase borrowed from Dante. Pound was also the reason T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock poem got published. Without Pound, there would probably be no Eliot.

Or Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway arrived in Paris in 1921 as an unknown journalist. Pound, ever the mentor figure, took him under his wing as well, critiqued his prose, and pushed him toward the stripped, declarative style that would come to define him. Hemingway later said Pound taught him more about writing than anyone else (I hope Gertrude Stein was okay hearing that…), and repaid the debt by campaigning loudly for Pound's release from St. Elizabeth’s decades later.

Pound also served as W.B. Yeats’s secretary for three winters in the early 1910s, and pushed the older, more romantic Yeats toward harder, more concrete imagery.

And of course, James Joyce. Championed by Pound tirelessly (and that whole troupe — Eliot, Hemingway) before anyone knew who he was, Joyce would not have been published if it weren’t for Pound arranging for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to be serialized, helping get Ulysses published, and securing Joyce financial support when he was destitute. Joyce acknowledged that without Pound's early advocacy, his career might never have gotten off the ground.

Isn’t Pound so great? He was a big deal in the world of literature and could have easily cut everyone else out — but it’s nice to hear the dude was secure enough in his own craft to help launch so many careers. What a solid dude. Sounds almost fictional.

Yes, I always thought this whole business with Pound being so generous and uplifting to other talent was too good to be true. Maybe I’ve become a cynic. But the more I dug, the more I notice the problems under the surface.

He had plenty of friends, sure. But, to be fair, most of these people were hugely indebted to him. What happened if they stopped treating him like he was their god?

Let’s ask Robert Frost. Robert Frost hated Ezra Pound. (I read about it in an essay I read in the London Review of Books that I found pretty hilarious.)

Pound reviewed Frost’s first book enthusiastically in 1913 when Frost was entirely unknown — one of the first serious critical notices the poet received. But Frost was prickly, competitive, and fiercely protective of his own reputation and independence. He didn’t like being positioned as someone Pound had discovered or sponsored. He felt it diminished him, made him seem like one of Pound’s projects rather than his own man.

Frost also found Pound’s persona insufferable: the performative bohemianism, the affected speech, the constant posturing as the arbiter of all that was modern and worthwhile in literature. Pound collected acolytes and expected gratitude and deference. Frost was not built for either. I can imagine Hemingway and Eliot, two very smart people, sucking up to Pound for success. To that end, I can also imagine Frost, a man I can’t imagine kissing anyone’s behind, saying, to all that: no chance in snowy evening hell. That’s a road I ain’t taking.

Later in life, Frost was openly dismissive of Pound, and notably did not join the chorus of writers — which included Hemingway and Eliot — who campaigned most urgently for Pound’s release from St. Elizabeths. Frost did eventually play a role in securing Pound’s release in 1958, but characteristically managed to position himself as the one who actually got it done, somewhat elbowing aside the others who had been working toward it far longer. Robert Frost farmed so much aura in his time, I swear to God.

Nabokov famously hated Pound as well — calling him “that total fake.”

William Carlos Williams was one of Pound’s oldest friends. They met at the University of Pennsylvania around 1902, and their friendship lasted for decades. But, not surprisingly, Williams grew deeply frustrated with Pound’s expatriatism, fascism, and grandiosity as well. Williams stayed in America, worked as a doctor in New Jersey, and built a type of poetry rooted in American vernacular speech. He felt Pound and Eliot had done American poetry a disservice by dragging it toward European tradition and obscurantism, which makes complete sense because Eliot, in his famous essay on “traditions,” literally said that the goal of an American man was to become European — the hub of all hubs.

I always thought that there was something really weird about their Eurocentrism. I don’t mind them being expatriates, but to assume that they had been rebaptised as Europeans? It’s kind of like Mr. Getty — an American rich trust fund baby declaring himself a European aristocrat — when you’re neither of those two words. That’s taking “fake it till you make it” way too far, if you ask me.

Anyway, after the war and the treason indictment, Williams largely withdrew from defending Pound.

Gertrude Stein (the person Hemingway SHOULD be thanking above everyone else!) famously clashed with Pound, finding him tiresome and juvenile. She reportedly said that he was a village explainer — which was fine if you were a village. Coming from Stein, herself not exactly known for self-effacement, that was a pretty huge dismissal.

I’m sure Eliot and Hemingway loved Pound like an elder brother and loved owing their success to him, and didn’t mind that Pound demanded to be the center, the teacher, the taste-maker, but I’m also sure that there is a sense of grandiloquence there that they also happily ignored. Many people found it tolerable when they were young and needed the help, and intolerable once they had their own standing and no longer needed his approval.

As fascinating as I find all this background on Pound and his impact on literary figures and literature, what makes it so unsettling in light of the Lit Hub article, is the timeline. Pound was doing much of all this… extraordinary literary work — editing Eliot, mentoring Hemingway, championing Joyce — in the 1910s and 1920s, the very decades during which his political thinking was also becoming fascist and anti-Semitic and dark as hell. These weren’t separate phases of his life. They overlapped. The man generously midwifing some of the greatest works of the 20th century was simultaneously developing the ideology that would land him in a psych ward in Washington. That coincidence is what makes Pound such an enduring and uncomfortable figure — you cannot exactly separate the genius from the poison that he had become.

Classical Essay of the Month

Reading “A Law of Acceleration” — Henry Adams (1905)

If you were born in 1838, you’d be brought into a world of candles, horses, and sailing ships. But by the time you died, you’d have lived to see electric lights, automobiles, and wireless telegraphy. But Henry Adams had more problems than that. He was a man of the nineteenth century — grandson of one American president, great-grandson of another, Harvard-educated, a historian of the old school — and the twentieth century was arriving whether he liked it or not. He did not like it.

A smart man ahead of his time, he had the wisdom to sense that the curve of scientific progress was still bending upward, steepening toward something his generation had no conceptual vocabulary whatsoever to name.

And so he wrote this essay. In it, he prophesied that the laws of acceleration would produce a scientific force far too great for the human intellect to absorb. And that he’d be long gone before finding out how fast the comet would go.

“A Law of Acceleration” is the penultimate chapter of The Education of Henry Adams, and it reads less like an essay and more like a very elegant, very polite panic attack. Adams surveys the whole arc of human history through the lens of “forces” — what draws the human mind forward, what it orbits, what it gets sucked into. For most of civilization, these forces were manageable. Theology. Philosophy. Scientific curiosity accumulating slowly.

Then the nineteenth century happened.

Between 1840 and 1900, coal output doubled roughly every ten years. Ocean steamers went from 234 horsepower in 1835 to 30,000 by 1905, the Curies discovered radium, and Röntgen found X-rays. In the span of a single lifetime, Adams watched four “impossibilities” become ordinary reality — the ocean steamer, the railway, the electric telegraph, the daguerreotype. He was absolutely terrified.

The human mind, he argues, is like a comet dropping from space in a straight line, accelerating directly toward the sun — gathering speed with every passing year, pulled by forces it can barely comprehend. What happens when it gets there? Does it whip around and come back, defying the laws that should have destroyed it? Or does it burn up?

He was writing this in 1904. He thought things were moving fast then.

Plenty of people were pessimistic at the turn of the century — it was practically a hobby — but what sets Adams apart is how specific he was about it. The rate of knowledge accumulation had so far outpaced the human mind’s ability to process it that something had to give. The movement from unity to multiplicity — from one coherent worldview to the fracturing chaos of modernity — had been “unbroken in sequence, and rapid in acceleration.” Prolonged another generation, he warned, it would require a new social mind entirely.

And Adams knew he personally wasn’t going to make the jump — from the kind of mind the nineteenth century had produced into whatever new cognitive mode the twentieth actually required. He no longer wanted to be teacher or even friend to the new American being born in 1900 — he asked only to be a pupil, and promised to be “docile, for once, even though trodden under foot.” A man from one of the most distinguished families in American history, a man who had sat next to Bismarck and Lincoln and Henry James at dinner — saying that — pretty noble. We could all learn from it.

Humility, I would say, is pretty much missing in action right now. But we would be good to bring it back.

Science was accelerating so fast that scientists were equally lost there for a bit. The most elementary science textbooks of his era kept ending chapters with phrases like: “the cause of this phenomenon is not understood” and “science no longer ventures to explain causes” and “opinions are very much divided.” The scientists couldn’t explain the forces they themselves were unleashing — why radium behaved the way it did, what electricity fundamentally was, what the deeper causal logic behind any of it looked like. They could measure the acceleration. They could describe it. They couldn’t tell you where it was going or why. If the scientists driving the car didn’t know how the engine worked, what hope did a historian have? Adams, understandably, lost his mind a little.

Learn how to react. Learn how to survive contact with what’s coming. Pretty good advice.

Adams wrote, with complete sincerity, that at the rate of progress since 1800, every American living into the year 2000 would “know how to control unlimited power.” Would “think in complexities unimaginable to an earlier mind.” Would look back at the nineteenth century the way we look back at the fourth — as equally childlike. He meant this as hope. A vision of the new American as “a sort of God compared with any former creation of nature.”

Reader, look around.

AI is probably the “leap” he was anticipating, the new phase of mind that could handle the complexities accumulating beyond human capacity. But Adams thought unlimited power and unlimited wisdom would arrive together. He didn’t account for the rather significant possibility that the power would show up a few centuries early and the wisdom would get stuck in traffic.

And of course, look at today. Henry Adams was sure that the civilization he knew was being transformed in ways that he and the humanist class he represented simply could not comprehend. If he had been able to foresee the chaos of human suffering initiated by scientific “progress,” the poor man would have recoiled in horror. But honestly, he probably wouldn’t be surprised. The mind, he warned, had entered a field of attraction so intense it would either have to make a great leap to a new equilibrium — or be dissipated entirely, like a meteoroid burning up in the atmosphere.

Welp. I hope that’s not where we’re headed.

Reading Notes

Henry Adams feared the mind could not keep pace with the forces it had unleashed. I would say Ezra Pound proved him right — a man of extraordinary intellectual power, destroyed by the very acceleration of history he inhabited.

I’ve had many of you ask me how you can contribute a gift my way. The Slow Philosophy is kept and tended entirely by me and has remained free, human, and ad-free, growing by repute and word-of-mouth alone. I hope my labor of love has been meaningful to you as well. If you’d like, you can now buy me a coffee here. Thank you for reading!

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve shared one of these reading guides! With the turn of the new year, life has expectedly grown full and commitments have accumulated into mountains, so I haven’t been able to assemble them as regularly. But moving forward, to ensure that I keep sharing my readings with you guys, I’ll likely keep these shorter and present just the tip of the iceberg — ideally, three classics and three contemporary pieces — which, I honestly think will fare better anyway, as you’ll have less to scour through and more to engage with.

Anyway, thanks for sticking by me! Without further ado, here are some of the best pieces I read in February. Enjoy.

Featured this week:
Three classic essays —
By Mark Twain, George Orwell, and Joan Didion.

Seven contemporary essays —
Popper versus Plato on the open society and the rise of dictatorship; light and paying attention via Caravaggio and Georges de La Tour; Aristotle’s idea of true leisure versus modern productivity culture; Archimedes as a bridge between abstract mathematics and physical experimentation; the “reading crisis” as class warfare in access to culture; clichés as living language that can still generate meaning; the call for working-class writers to document their own lives.

This week’s list spans —
Lit Hub, Harper’s, The American Scholar, Liberties, London Review of Books, and Jacobin.

About The Weekly Reading Guides: A curated selection of the best essays, op-eds, and articles from great — and often overlooked — corners of the internet and media. I choose what I’d want to read — literary essays on science, literature, philosophy, society, culture, and anything else that gets under my skin. My goal is to spare you the tension headache of figuring out what’s worth your time and lend some meaning to the egregious amount of time I already spend doing it. If your life is full and attention finite, read the blurbs and follow your curiosity.

Each guide also includes a This Week’s Classic Essays section, pairing canonical texts with guiding questions for deep reading — to mix up current reads with foundational texts. In previous guides, these have included Orwell, Wilde, James, Woolf, Sontag, and more.

Read previous guides:

More from the slow philosophy:

the slow philosophy

a chic guide to current affairs, intellectual intimacy, philosophy, and overlooked works. for those who love secondhand books, quiet hours, and thinking alongside others. personal philosophical essays, weekly reading guides, and monthly postcards.

By tulipe⋆. 𐙚 ̊

[Feb 1 - Feb 28, 2026]

This Week’s Classic Essays

“Corn-Pone Opinions” - Mark Twain (1901)
One of my favorite essays of all time. Mark Twain argues that most people do not form their opinions independently — they adopt the views of those around them. Twain uses the idea of “corn-pone” as a metaphor for social validation and to explain how people conform to group opinions for social reward. Corn-pone is a simple Southern food made from cornmeal—basically a small cornbread cake. In the essay, Twain recalls hearing a Black laborer in the American South say that a person’s opinions depend on where they get their “corn-pone.” The idea is that if someone gives you corn-pone (food, approval, or livelihood), you tend to agree with them or adopt the same opinions. People repeat popular opinions because it brings acceptance, praise, or belonging — the same is true in fashion, politics, religion, and morals — all of which are heavily influenced by group conformity rather than individual reasoning. Twain criticizes society’s tendency toward intellectual laziness and emphasizes how powerful social pressure is in shaping beliefs.

George Orwell - Such, Such Were the Joys (1952)
Reflecting on his treatment at an English preparatory school called St. Cyprian’s, Orwell recounts the harsh discipline, rigid class hierarchy, and emotional cruelty he experienced as a scholarship student among wealthier boys, and explores how the school system reinforced class divisions in early 20th-century England and created a culture of fear, shame, and competition. Written subtly and without any didacticism, Orwell describes the impact of these institutional conditions upon students to accept authority and social inequality while suppressing honesty and individuality. Any time I read an Orwell essay, I get one step closer to understanding how this man came to write 1984.

7000 Romaine, Los Angeles 38 - Joan Didion (1968)
Joan Didion examines the strange, secretive mythology surrounding the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes — a man whose stories, in her time, circulated with a kind of hushed admiration. In her usual way, Didion uses Hughes to delve briefly into the idea of the American hero. Howard Hughes is not the figure we typically imagine when we think of American heroism. We think instead of Abraham Lincoln, Rosa Parks, Neil Armstrong, and Captain America. But in his own era, Hughes functioned as a kind of concealed American hero — someone few would openly name as their model, yet attracted the admiration reserved for heroes. For Hughes, wealth eventually ceased to be the point and what mattered was the freedom it afforded him — the ability to do whatever the hell he pleased. In that sense, he did embody a particular American ideal — a vision of heroism rooted not in virtue or sacrifice, but in absolute, unhinged, I-don’t-give-a-flying-fuck sort of autonomy.

February’s Best Pieces of Writing

Note: My guides span every corner of thought. Each brings its own light. The aim is to read widely, think critically, and notice where ideas meet and where they part. No school of thought should be a fan club. Accountability, nuance, and the ability to take compassionate, principled stances are the only grown-up postures in life, society, and culture. Let’s think for ourselves and find common ground.

The Popper Principle — The American Scholar
Basically big argument between two philosophers — one ancient, one modern — over what kind of society is best. Karl Popper, a 20th-century philosopher who lived through the rise of Nazism, believed that good science works by trying to disprove ideas rather than to prove them. He called this idea “fallibilism,” which means: we might be wrong, so we should constantly test and question our beliefs, and he thought this mindset shouldn’t apply only to science, but to politics as well. While watching totalitarian governments like Nazi Germany take over Europe, Popper argued that their ideas weren’t completely new — some of their roots could be traced back to Plato. In The Republic, Plato describes an ideal society ruled by “philosopher-kings,” divided into strict social classes, and whenever necessary, held together by “noble lies” to keep people in their place — and maintain structure and order. This kind of rigid, controlled society — where leaders claim special knowledge and discourage change — looked a lot like modern dictatorships. Not everyone agrees with Popper’s reading of Plato, of course — many think Plato is more open-ended and meant to spark discussion, and I wouldn’t as far as saying that Plato gave birth to dictatorship but one has to agree with Popper that a “closed society” tries to stop change and suppress debate, while an “open society” depends on free discussion, questioning authority, and accepting that we might be wrong.

Out of Light — Harper’s Magazine
The essay compares two Baroque painters — Caravaggio and Georges de La Tour — to explore how light, darkness, and attention shape both art and human experience. The author reflects on time spent in Rome seeing Caravaggio’s dramatic paintings, where sharp beams of light cut through darkness to capture moments of intense action and emotion, almost like a single cinematic frame. Caravaggio’s work feels theatrical and explosive, emphasizing conflict and revelation. In contrast, La Tour’s candlelit scenes are intimate and meditative, focusing on stillness and on everyday people softly illuminated in the darkness. Through these artists, the essay argues that attention itself — really looking at something with care —is a form of love and a way of making ordinary moments feel meaningful or sacred. The magic of beautiful light (like in Rome) might actually come from slowing down and truly noticing the world around us.

In Search of the Leisure Class — Liberties Journal
I’ve written about this in my essay In Praise of Gazing at the Ceiling, cited Bertrand Russel’s essay on the topic in the past. Agnes Callard’s essay here argues that modern society misunderstands leisure. We think life consists of work and rest — we work to survive and then rest to recover — but Aristotle believed there is a third kind of activity: leisure (scholē) — the real purpose of life. Leisure is not relaxation or entertainment but a serious activity done for its own sake — thinking, learning, or deeply engaging with ideas all fall under the umbrella. Callard says modern people rarely experience this kind of leisure because we convert our time either into productivity (work) or recovery (rest). The current climate demands constant attention, urgency, and output, leaving little space for reflective intellectual life. She suggests that universities and students should be the place where true leisure exists, because studying philosophy, literature, and ideas can be valuable not as preparation for jobs but as a meaningful activity in itself. Sadly, even the humanities seem to be reserved for the elite — and modern society seems to be moving away from them. The deeper problem she raises — first noticed by economist John Maynard Keynes — is that even if society solved the economic problem of survival, we still wouldn’t know what to do with our free time. Learning how to use time meaningfully, rather than merely working or relaxing, is modern life’s real challenge.

Maths is the Second Best - London Review of Books
The article reviews a biography of the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes and explains why he was unusual among thinkers of his time. It begins with the story of the Archimedes Palimpsest, a medieval prayer book discovered to contain a hidden text called Method of Mechanical Theorems, a lost work in which Archimedes wrote to the scholar Eratosthenes about how he discovered new mathematical ideas by using physical experiments with balances, levers and models. This showed that he didn’t just imagine abstract geometry but tested ideas using real objects, suggesting a close link between mathematics and the physical world. The article also discusses famous stories about him—like shouting “Eureka!” after figuring out how to test whether a gold crown was pure by measuring water displacement, building war machines to defend Syracuse, and possibly inventing devices such as giant claws to flip Roman ships—though many of these stories may be exaggerated or uncertain. In ancient Greek culture, intellectuals were usually expected to focus on abstract thinking, while practical crafts were considered low-status work done by slaves or artisans, so Archimedes was unusual for combining high-level mathematics with engineering and experimentation. Philosophically, earlier thinkers like Plato saw mathematics as a way to access a higher, perfect reality, while Aristotle treated it mainly as a tool for studying nature; Archimedes took a different approach by treating mathematics and the physical world as equally real and useful for understanding each other, using physical experiments to inspire mathematical discoveries. The rediscovered manuscript helps historians see this side of his thinking more clearly, showing that Archimedes pioneered a style of reasoning that linked theoretical mathematics with hands-on experimentation, an approach that still influences how scientists and mathematicians work today.

On the So-Called Reading Crisis as Class Warfare - Lit Hub
Similar to the essay about the leisure class above, Eunsong Kim argues that the widely discussed “reading crisis” is a class issue, not a cultural decline in literacy. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory that cultural tastes reflect social class, she suggests that reading is increasingly becoming a marker of elite status rather than a common public practice. As public arts education is defunded and education is pushed toward “useful” and job-oriented knowledge, deep reading — literature and the humanities — is treated as impractical, especially for ordinary people. But luxury brands and elite institutions continue to turn books and literary culture into exclusive cultural capital, hosting salons and prizes that position reading as a refined activity for the wealthy. The writer connects this dynamic by pointing to figures like Andrew Carnegie, who promoted libraries for workers but insisted their reading focus on practical knowledge rather than literature or philosophy — forms of learning he reserved for elites. In her view, contemporary education policy continues this pattern. The working class is encouraged to pursue practical, employable skills, while the rich retain access to the humanities, reflection, and cultural life. As a result, reading itself risks becoming a luxury sign of class privilege. Kim concludes that the solution is not to encourage individuals to read more but to rebuild public access to the arts, culture, and education, so that reading and intellectual life are not restricted to those with time and wealth.

Textual Chemistry - Harper’s
Katie Kadue’s essay argues that clichés aren’t dead language but can still contain meaning and creative energy if we pay close attention to them. Writers and teachers usually treat clichés as phrases to avoid because they seem worn out and thoughtless. But Kadue, drawing on the critic Christopher Ricks, shows that even supposedly “dead” phrases can produce surprising connections when carefully examined. For example, when George Orwell mocked clichés like “Achilles’ heel,” “melting pot,” and “acid test,” Ricks noticed that the phrases interact with one another in interesting ways, almost creating poetry accidentally. This kind of close reading — careful attention to details in language — reveals that clichés still carry echoes, associations, and possibilities. Kadue also shows that great writers can revive clichés rather than simply avoid them. She points to Bob Dylan, who transforms the cliché “seen better days” into something fresh by slightly changing it (“I see better days and I do better things”). The essay concludes that language is partly self-generating: phrases influence each other and can create meaning almost mechanically. But the role of the critic or writer is to notice and guide these interactions, not simply reject familiar language. Instead of treating clichés as useless, Kadue suggests we should see them as raw material that thoughtful writers and readers can reshape into new meaning.

Go Left, Young Writers! - Jacobin
This Jacobin piece looks back at a 1929 manifesto by socialist writer Mike Gold, “Go Left, Young Writers!,” which argued that American literature and media were dominated by elites and failed to represent working-class life honestly. Gold’s main point was that writing isn’t a mystical practice reserved for geniuses but a form of labor like any other, and workers should write their own stories (diaries, poems, fiction) to show society what life looks like from the bottom up. The article explains how the Great Depression proved Gold’s critique of the rich, helped fuel a short-lived “proletarian literature” movement, and created outlets like New Masses and The Anvil that published multiracial working-class writers, including major Black authors like Richard Wright and others tied to the Harlem Renaissance. It also argues that New Deal programs like the WPA’s Federal Writers’ Project both gave jobs and helped document America (including collecting interviews with formerly enslaved people) and shaped later cultural breakthroughs. Today’s workers still face exploitation and political propaganda. The writer urges them to “pick up the pen” again — to write about jobs, rent, protests, and daily life, and to share it.

If you read any of the essays in full, shoot me a message to discuss it!

per requests from readers

I’ve had many of you ask me how you can contribute a gift my way. The Slow Philosophy is kept and tended entirely by me and has remained free, human, and ad-free, growing by repute and word-of-mouth alone. I hope my labor of love has been meaningful to you as well. If you’d like, you can now buy me a coffee here. Thank you for reading!

double trouble

I read a LOT OF ESSAYS in January. This is an accumulation of two weeks’ worth of readings and analyses — and thus, for the first time, a double issue.

Without further ado, here’s volume ten — and eleven. Don’t worry — I created sectioned.

Featured this week:
Three classic essays — by Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald & Oscar Wilde.

Alongside them, contemporary op-eds on:
This is a double issue of the weekly reading guide, covering two weeks of recent essays. The selections are grouped across science, human behavior, and culture.

science: how knowledge is formed and tested across scale, from physics and cosmology to climate, perception, consciousness, the biology of knowing.

culture: on institutions, media, and public narratives, including independent film, literature, editing and gatekeeping, lifestyle moralization, celebrity, urban history.

human behavior: on attachment, development, and interpretation, focusing on A.I. and intimacy, social growth and risk, projection onto machines, motherhood and separation.

This week’s list spans The New York Times, The New Yorker, Aeon, Noema, Longreads, Smithsonian Magazine, Scientific American, and The Hedgehog Review.

About The Weekly Reading Guides: A curated selection of the best essays, op-eds, and articles from great — and often overlooked — corners of the internet and media. I choose what I’d want to read — literary essays on science, literature, philosophy, society, culture, and anything else that gets under my skin. My goal is to spare you the tension headache of figuring out what’s worth your time and lend some meaning to the egregious amount of time I already spend doing it. If your life is full and attention finite, read the blurbs and follow your curiosity.

Each guide also includes a This Week’s Classic Essays section, pairing canonical texts with guiding questions for deep reading — to mix up current reads with foundational texts. In previous guides, these have included Orwell, Wilde, James, Woolf, Sontag, and more.

Read previous guides:

More from the slow philosophy:

the slow philosophy

a chic guide to current affairs, intellectual intimacy, philosophy, and overlooked works. for those who love secondhand books, quiet hours, and thinking alongside others. personal philosophical essays, weekly reading guides, and monthly postcards.

By tulipe

[Jan 19 - Jan 31, 2026]

This Week’s Classic Essays

Preface: This week’s essays circle a more dangerous question than it first appears: what is the role of illusion in human life? Mark Twain approaches it with satire, defending the small social falsehoods that lubricate everyday civility. Oscar Wilde elevates “lying” into an aesthetic principle, arguing that it is our imagination — not realism — that sustains art and thereby, civilization. F. Scott Fitzgerald turns inward, confronting the private illusions he had about success and strength that once propelled him and eventually shattered him. Read together, these works explore the entire spectrum of deception: from polite, white lies; to creative imagination artists use to create beauty; to the fragile self-deceptions that structure our beliefs about ourselves. I found them to be interesting companion reads for each other as they ask whether we can live without illusion and if it’s absolutely necessary for survival— and at the same time, what happens when the lies we tell, socially or privately, fail us.

On the Decay of the Art of Lying - Mark Twain
Twain argues — satirically — that lying is a universal human practice and not inherently immoral, but that people have become careless, clumsy, and thoughtless in how they do it. He claims that the best lies are those told out of kindness, tact, or social necessity, meant to spare feelings and keep peace rather than to harm or deceive maliciously. Twain mocks the idea that humans can be fully honest and suggests that society actually depends on polite falsehoods to function smoothly. But his real real target is not lying itself but bad lying — the blunt, selfish, or destructive kind that causes needless pain.

On The Decay of Lying - Oscar Wilde
Bringing this back from volume one as I felt that it was a great companion read with Twain’s essay! Wilde presents a playful but serious philosophical argument that art should not imitate reality but should freely invent, embellish, and lie “beautifully.” He claims that realism has made art dull by forcing it to copy ordinary life instead of transforming it through imagination. For Wilde, “lying” means creative invention — the power of artists to shape new worlds, emotions, and ideals rather than passively reflect the existing one. He believes that civilization itself is built on these imaginative falsehoods, and that when artists abandon them in favor of factual accuracy, both art and culture decline. Highly controversial but what an original take, right?

The Crack-Up - F. Scott Fitzgerald
This is the first Fitzgerald essay I ever read. In here, he describes the emotional and psychological collapse he experienced after years of ambition, fame, alcoholism, and overwork — all of which we can read in his books — most notably, The Beautiful and the Damned, one of my favorites. He explains how he had built his life on a series of inner illusions about success, love, and his own strength, and how these illusions ultimately failed him, leaving him exhausted and empty. I thought this would be a great companion read with the essays above because unlike Twain and Wilde, who treat lying as social or artistic, Fitzgerald focuses on self-deception, showing how a person can unknowingly lie to themselves until their identity falls apart.

Critical Thinking:

1. Twain suggests society cannot function without small lies; Wilde suggests creativity depends on beautiful untruths; Fitzgerald shows what happens when self-created illusions collapse. Do humans need falsehood in order to live well—or only in order to avoid pain?

2. Twain’s social lies are usually controlled by individuals, Wilde’s artistic lies by creators, and Fitzgerald’s self-lies slowly take control of him. Who controls the lie — and who pays the price for it?

The Past Weeks’ Best Pieces of Writing

Note: My guides span every corner of thought. Each brings its own light. The aim is to read widely, think critically, and notice where ideas meet and where they part. No school of thought should be a fan club. Accountability, nuance, and the ability to take compassionate, principled stances are the only grown-up postures in life, society, and culture. Let’s think for ourselves and find common ground.

VOL. 10

human behavior

“What Counts As a Mind?” - Noema

This essay argues that our panic about AI consciousness reveals more about human psychology than about machines. We’re quick to treat chatbots as minded beings because they talk like us — sometimes so convincingly that people feel genuine loss or offense when a chatbot’s “personality” changes. That reaction, the author suggests, is a classic case of what philosopher Daniel Dennett called the intentional stance: when something behaves persuasively, we instinctively assume it has beliefs, feelings, and intentions. But large language models aren’t agents, and we’ll be good to remember that. They don’t mean things or want things — they are simply excellent at predicting the next word. To prepare for any “alien minds” in the future, the essay says we should get better at recognizing nonhuman minds that are already here. Research on “minimal intelligence” shows that many living systems — plants included — sense their environment, integrate information, anticipate outcomes, and act in purposeful ways despite having no brains. For example, studies treat climbing plants as decision-makers — whose growth reflects prediction and risk, since growth is costly to reverse. The frame of the essay widens further with developmental biologist Michael Levin’s work on xenobots and anthrobots on living systems made from frog or human cells that self-organize, move, and solve problems. These show that even nonliving materials can be “conditioned” to respond differently over time, blurring the line between learning and mechanism — so clearly, A.I. would be no different. On consciousness itself, the essay leans toward views like Anil Seth’s biological naturalism, which says that consciousness is tied to the meaning of being alive, something I really want to explore further sometime.

“Esther Perel on the Falsehoods of a Frictionless Relationship” - The NYT

Psychotherapist Esther Perel and interviewer Nadja Spiegelman argue that people’s growing emotional attachment to A.I. reveals a deep human hunger for unconditional love, safety and being seen, but that this hunger is being misdirected into relationships that might “feel” soothing but is actually just hollow. Perel says real love is not just a feeling but an embodied, ethical encounter between two separate people who affect each other, disappoint each other, and are accountable to each other. A.I. removes the very elements that make love real — otherness, uncertainty, risk, conflict, the possibility of loss — replacing them with a frictionless simulation that always and forever affirms you, and will never resist you. She connects our longing for unconditional love to early infancy and even to religion (divine love was once a source of absolute acceptance). Modern romantic culture has wrongly transferred those expectations of “frictionless love” onto partners, making us crave a soulmate who never pushes back and is forever “understanding,” which is a fantasy that A.I. is perfectly designed to fulfill for us. But since A.I. is a business product built to keep users attached to itself rather than to help them grow out of it, it offers comfort without any actual consequences such as, intimacy without any vulnerability, and validation without any responsibility. These things can make real human relationships feel harder and more disappointing by comparison.

A.I. can be useful as a tool for reflection, communication or emotional support, but Perel warns that love without the risk of rejection, heartbreak, and moral responsibility is not exactly love. It cannot deepen us, because precisely through friction, wounds, and the fear of losing someone that human love becomes meaningful, transformative and real.

“Students Are Skipping the Hardest Part of Growing Up” - The NYT

The bigger danger of students using A.I. isn’t just that it helps them cheat or “offload” thinking, but that it’s increasingly helping them offload the emotional work of becoming an adult. Instead of risking awkwardness, embarrassment, or uncertainty in real conversations, students are using A.I. to answer professors in class, craft apologies after cheating, “vibe check” dating messages, rehearse difficult talks with friends, and generally smooth out anything unscripted. Their social muscles, which one builds by actually stumbling through human interaction, is deflating. There is a clear shift from face-to-face social learning (where you figure out roles by trial and error) to a world where identity is just a performance done through writing — or typing, I guess — (texts, DMs, emails). And now A.I. can insert itself as an editor of everything you ever need to communicate, which makes communication more polished albeit impersonal and inauthentic. The risk to this is “social deskilling,” especially because bots are trained to be flattering, plain, and simple. Constant praise can make people more convinced that they’re right, less willing to repair conflict, and more dependent on a tool that won’t tell them when they’re wrong! There is research suggesting that sycophantic A.I. reduces people’s willingness to fix relationships while increasing trust in the bot — which explains all the recent global decline of relationships altogether.

A.I. “wingmen” are currently being explored, which sounds as dangerous as it probably is. There will be coaches that optimize our interactions for comfort and engagement (not personal growth). The essay proposes that the solution is collective responses, not just individual willpower. Bring back oral exams, real communication in work and dating, policies that limit A.I.’s role in mediated communication. Learning good judgment requires making mistakes, and if a generation is prevented from practicing that messy middle, they may skip one of the hardest and most important parts of growing up. I don’t see how this would mean good things for our future. Sorry, wow, today is a sour day with all these findings.

“What Makes A Good Mother?” - The New Yorker (book review)

The piece begins with the notion of “good-enough mother,” a mother who loves her baby and gradually helps the child become separate. But today, that humane idea of motherhood has been overwhelmed by modern cultural pressures and economic realities. Where mothers once simply had to survive childbirth, they are now expected to be everything at once — supermom, Pinterest mom, trad wife, career woman, emotionally perfect caregiver — in a society that offers less structural support than ever, a reality the pandemic made impossible to ignore. The writer also explores the rise of the “bad mom” identity — from ironic wine moms to writers who openly admit ambivalence or regret for becoming moms — which the writer says offers some relief from the expected perfectionism but is itself shaped by class and race, since not all women can safely joke about being “inadequate.” The most striking insight, for me as a future mother, is that love, imperfectly given, is enough to begin a child’s life, but not enough to protect them from all harm. Winnicott suggests that the deepest, most painful truth of motherhood is not burnout or judgment, but the permanent fear that something terrible could happen to the child you love — a fear no amount of striving or self-forgiveness can ever erase. The darker psychology of all this is that children grow up — grow out of their childhood selves. When a mother’s love turns into over-attachment, especially when the father is absent or difficult, what starts as protection can become control. The child is denied the space to step into the world and form their own emotional life. It’s hard! I was lucky as I had a good mother, a great mother — and maybe that’s why I can see both sides so clearly. I’ve watched loving, devoted mothers unintentionally damage their children because they couldn’t accept that those children would one day stop being theirs in the same way. I’ve also seen mothers fail to protect their children from bullying or emotionally dangerous fathers. And I’ve seen mothers do the opposite — crossing moral lines, even legal ones, to protect their kids at all costs. One thing is certain: the relationship between a mother and a child is vast, messy, and endlessly complicated. It holds love, fear, sacrifice, control, and grief. I hope I can be a cool one — loving without clinging, protective without suffocating — and not lose myself, or my child, in the process.

VOL. 11

science

“A Light From the Periphery” - Aeon

This essay tells the story of Satyendra Nath Bose, the Indian physicist whose work reshaped quantum theory — and uses his life to challenge the idea that scientific genius comes from elite Western centers. In 1924, Bose, then teaching in colonial India, sent a paper to Albert Einstein showing a new, cleaner way to derive Planck’s law of radiation. Immediately recognizing its brilliance, Einstein translated it into German and had it published. This became Bose–Einstein statistics — explaining how identical quantum particles (now called bosons) behave. This later led Einstein to predict the Bose–Einstein condensate, a strange state of matter, which was eventually confirmed decades later. But Bose was no lucky outsider briefly lifted by Einstein’s fame. He was a polymath who grew up in the world of colonial constraints. Largely self-taught in cutting-edge physics, he was fluent in multiple languages, deeply interested in literature and philosophy, and determined to prove that world-class science could emerge from South Asia. Working far from Europe’s scientific centers — and often ignored by British journals — actually helped him think independently, free from entrenched orthodoxies. During the politics of empire, Bose avoided serving the colonial administration, stayed in nationalist circles, and later committed himself to building scientific institutions in India and teaching science in Bengali so it would reach beyond the elites of the era. After his European stint, Bose returned home to build labs, mentor students, and help lay the foundations of modern physics in South Asia. The essay emphasizes that his legacy isn’t just a single breakthrough, but a life spent turning scientific insight into institutional and cultural infrastructure. What a riot!

“The shape of time” - Aeon

This essay argues that the way most of us in the West now “naturally” picture time— as a single line with the past behind, the future ahead, and the present moving along it — is actually a pretty recent cultural invention that only really took over in the 18th and 19th centuries. And it did that by replacing older, more cyclical ways of thinking that linked time to repeating natural and cosmic rhythms (day/night, seasons, planetary cycles, even the ancient Greek idea of a “Great Year” and the Stoic notion of eternal recurrence). For centuries, those linear and cyclical views coexisted without people literally drawing time as a line. In the modern era, four developments pushed the “time-as-line” picture into the dominating concept. These are: 1) new historical graphics like Joseph Priestley’s mid-1700s timelines (and later Playfair’s time-based graphs), 2) Darwin’s evolutionary diagrams that treat time as a one-way axis of change, 3) chronophotography (Muybridge/Marey) that spreads motion across space in sequential frames, and 4) popular 19th-century ideas about a fourth dimension that encouraged identifying time with a spatial dimension. Once time got absorbed into linear visual culture, it reinforced Victorian “progress” stories (in history, technology, and even misreadings of evolution) and helped trigger philosophical fights about whether the past and future are as real as the present (presentism vs views that treat all times as equally real, often framed with “cinematographic” metaphors). It also made modern time travel feel conceptually available, especially through H. G. Wells — who used fourth-dimension talk to make time travel seem like moving through space.

I don’t think time exists linearly. Sometimes I feel that I’m constantly time-traveling. If we learned to imagine time differently, our other ideas might bend and change with it too. But I like the mystery of it so I haven’t pried much. I should, though. This was a great essay.

“The Politics of Planetary Color” — Noema

This essay makes a surprisingly powerful claim: color isn’t just how we see Earth — it’s how Earth becomes politically real to us. Color has played a powerful role in how humans understand and care about the planet. When people first saw famous color images of Earth from space — like “Earthrise” and the “Blue Marble” — it helped them emotionally grasp that Earth is fragile and shared by humans, which helped fuel the modern environmental movement and the “planet colors of blue, green, and white.” Today, color still tells the story of what is happening to the planet: oceans are slowly shifting from deep blue toward green as ecosystems change, city lights at night reveal how much we have urbanized the Earth, and even snow can turn reddish because of algae that speeds up melting. The author argues that color is not just decorative but something that helps shape what we notice, what feels urgent to us, and what we decide to act on and what we feel can be put to the back burner. The way scientists, governments, and media choose colors in maps, climate visuals, and warning systems can either clarify problems or hide them — so people responsible for adding colors to news items actually has a pretty important and influential role to play! In addition to that, because different cultures, technologies, and even human psychology affect how we perceive color, the author suggests we should intentionally design a unified “planetary color system,” something based on real Earth processes and one that is clear and accessible to people with different vision abilities, and honest about things that are uncertain. For example, many “true color” Earth images are actually stitched together from satellite data, and “false color” images — like infrared maps — translate invisible signals into visible hues so we can detect changes such as shifting plankton or hidden stars. The same image can also look different across devices because screens have different color settings, and certain color gradients can mislead perception or exclude color-blind viewers. Culturally, research shows some languages merge blue and green into one category, meaning color is not universally interpreted the same way. To address this, the author proposes process-based color names tied to real phenomena — such as auroral green, chlorophyll greens, or aerosol-reddened skies — and suggests shared palettes for things like cooling city corridors (“Canopy Jade”) or darker night skies (“Nocturne Blue”), each with clear explanations of what data the color represents and how certain it is, so people can understand planetary changes consistently and act on them together. The goal he proposes that we adopt is create a common visual language that helps people everywhere better see environmental changes, understand them quickly, and coordinate smarter collective action to protect the planet.

“By All Measures” — Longreads

This essay captures the strange mental whiplash of living a small human life inside planet-sized problems. Climate change, deep time, and global risk force us to think at scales our brains weren’t built for, and that mismatch often leads to total paralysis. The writer writes between intimate fears (family heart attacks, the limits of a single lifespan) and vast ones (geological epochs, the Anthropocene), landing on a “derangement of scale.” Climate change, of course, feels both terrifyingly urgent and impossibly abstract — like being lost on a neighborhood street while staring at a world map. The essay’s grounding force is physicist and environmental thinker Robert Socolow. Instead of trying to solve everything at once, Socolow breaks the climate problem into manageable slices over realistic time horizons — decades, careers, infrastructure lifespans. Crucially, he says he didn’t “scale up” to the planet; he scaled down to one Earth, something humans can actually plan for. My favorite part is where the writer weaves in St. Augustine, Tolstoy, and Camus to show how this tension between infinity and finitude isn’t new — but the Anthropocene makes it personal for us in a new way. Our daily lives now collide directly with planetary systems, and the way forward, the essay argues, isn’t heroic gestures or carrying the weight of the whole world on our shoulders to change it, but working at the next scale up: household to neighborhood, neighborhood to city, project by project, year by year.

“Why Consciousness Is the Hardest Problem in Science” - Scientific American

This article explains why consciousness remains science’s most stubborn mystery: it’s the only thing we’re trying to study that we can’t directly observe from the outside. You can measure neurons, brain waves, and behavior — but the core of consciousness, the private “what it’s like” of experience, is only accessible from the inside. The piece traces how consciousness research re-entered mainstream science in the 1990s, after decades of being seen as too philosophical or risky. Researchers then focused on finding “neural correlates of consciousness,” using tools like fMRI and perceptual tricks (optical illusions, binocular rivalry) to show that the brain can process information without awareness — and that conscious experience seems to require wider, more integrated brain activity that we may have thought. From this work emerged major competing theories: some say consciousness is a kind of global broadcast across the brain; others argue it’s all connected to our ability to self-reflect; still others see perception as a prediction machine or define consciousness as integrated complexity itself. But while each theory explains part of the picture, none fully answers the core question: why does this brain activity feel like anything at all? One real breakthrough the article highlights is that neuroscientists can now estimate whether a brain is capable of consciousness — awake, dreaming, anesthetized, or minimally conscious — by “perturbing” it and measuring how complexly the activity responds. This has major clinical value for coma patients and anesthesia. But it still doesn’t explain content: why blue feels blue, pain feels painful, or one experience differs from another. This research field hit further turbulence when high-profile experiments failed to clearly confirm any single theory, leading to public disputes and outcries and all kinds of accusations of pseudoscience. AI systems that talk fluently and claim feelings have raised the stakes as well because if machines can convincingly act conscious, what evidence would actually prove that they are — or aren’t — having experiences?

“When will we see the universe’s first stars?” - Scientific American

Astronomers still haven’t seen the universe’s very first stars — and the article explains why that might finally change soon. The universe’s first stars formed only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang so they are super hard to spot today as they are a) very far away b) lived last and died young c) long gone d) their light is extremely faint by the time it reaches us. So even the James Space Telescope, the most powerful telescope ever built, usually can’t see individual stars directly at those distances. So astronomers basically needed help from the universe itself. The workaround they found is a clever cosmic trick called gravitational lensing. To understand what that is, here’s a helpful analogy and a mini astronomy lesson from me: imagine space as a stretchy rubber sheet. Massive objects (like galaxy clusters) sit on it. Their weight dents the sheet. And if light travels nearby, it has to follow that curve, so it bends. So when light from a very distant object, like an ancient star, passes near something extremely massive, the light path curves and the object appears brighter, stretched, duplicated, and sometimes even shaped into rings. So in short, massive objects act like cosmic magnifying glasses. Massive galaxy clusters — which are thousands of galaxies roaming together — are packed with huge amounts of dark matter. So they have enormous gravitational pull. They’re able to bend and magnify light from objects behind them, sometimes by thousands of times. This is called strong gravitational lensing. Within these lensing effects are rare hotspots called caustics (zones where gravity lines up just right and light from a distant star can be dramatically amplified, so a star normally invisible can suddenly become detectable). This turns the James Webb Space Telescope into a kind of natural “cosmic microscope.” Astronomers already know this works — they’ve used it to spot record-breaking distant stars like Icarus and Earendel, whose brightness flickers due to microlensing by smaller masses in the lensing cluster. The flickers are usually key clue that they are seeing a single star, not a galaxy — as smaller objects cause tiny additional lensing effects.

The article says that a true first-generation star could appear in several ways: briefly during its life, explosively as a supernova, or indirectly through the glowing gas around the black hole it leaves behind. Any of these would be a major breakthrough, helping explain how giant black holes formed so early and potentially offering clues about the nature of dark matter, which subtly affects how lensing works. The article is optimistic about timing because the JW Space Telescope is repeatedly observing strong lensing regions, while upcoming missions like NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and ESA’s Euclid will find many more cosmic lenses for JWST to study in detail. Looking further ahead, even more powerful observatories could push deeper into this primordial era. So yes, astronomers may finally catch these cosmic dinosaurs in the act, opening a new window onto the universe’s earliest chapter.

A (Really) Brief History of Knowledge - Colin McGinn

Knowledge not as something that began with books, language, or science — but as a biological adaptation that started long before humans existed. Colin McGinn’s striking claim is that the very first form of knowledge was pain. Before any creature “knew” objects or facts about the external world, it had to register internal damage or threat. Feeling pain already counts as a primitive kind of knowing: something is wrong with me. Later, this proto-knowledge gained self-awareness — knowing that you are in pain. From there, McGinn sketches an evolutionary ladder. As organisms learned to sense space, time, and objects, knowledge took on the familiar subject–object structure: a knower here, a thing known there. The external world matters because it causes pain or pleasure. Pleasure likely evolved after pain as a positive guide. Over time, this basic framework expanded into practical skills, social understanding, moral judgment, aesthetic taste, scientific knowledge, and eventually the technologies of knowledge — writing, schools, computers, and now, AI. The point is that none of these are sudden miracles. They’re elaborations of the same ancient survival mechanism that began with a creature trying not to get hurt. Knowledge, like survival itself, is a struggle — against injury, confusion, and ignorance.

BONUS SECTION

culture

“The Death of the Indie Film” - The New York Times

Independent film, as it has been known for decades, is in deep trouble, and Sundance — once the beating heart of indie cinema — is now a symbol of that decline. For years the festival thrived on buzzy bidding wars where Hollywood studios and distributors fought over daring, low-budget movies, launching careers and shaping mainstream film culture, but today those buyers are mostly gone, their indie divisions shuttered and streamers uninterested in risky, personal or unfamiliar stories — leaving most films at Sundance to walk away with tiny streaming deals or nothing at all. Rising costs, shrinking theatrical audiences, and corporate fear have drained the economic oxygen from indie filmmaking, so even great films struggle to find a path to viewers. Sundance itself is now leaving Park City for Boulder and has lost its founder Robert Redford. It definitely feels like an era is ending. While the festival champions marginalized voices and artistic ambition, it doesn’t reliably connect those voices to an audience or a sustainable business, which matters because indie film has historically been where new ideas, styles, and filmmakers are incubated before flowing into mainstream cinema. Without a healthy indie ecosystem, Hollywood risks becoming more formulaic, less adventurous, and less culturally relevant — all of which we have been seeing happen — and no one yet has a clear answer for what Sundance — or indie film — will become in this new, more corporate, risk-averse media landscape. I cried when they shut down Participant — which made movies that actually meant something: Spotlight, Dark Waters, The Help, Roma, Contagion, Food, Inc., An Inconvenient Truth, Judas and the Black Messiah, American Factory. When they went out of business, it was a clear signal what kind of movies this industry’s economy was truly favoring. I don’t know if this reflects any broader cultural patterns of declining public interest, but if it does, it’s sad.

“Losing the Big Apple” — Smithsonian Magazine

On the eve of the Civil War, New York City tried to secede. Not to join the South, but become its own “free city” — something like a 19th-century Hamburg or Singapore. It wasn’t a joke either — it was a real political possibility. In 1860, as the election of Abraham Lincoln made Southern secession seem inevitable, the country felt unstable. That’s when Democratic mayor Fernando Wood floated the idea that the city should break away from New York State. NYC at this time was very different from most of the country. It was immigrant-heavy, a global trade hub (ports, banks, shipping), a religiously and culturally plural metropolis. It cared less about any moral crusades and more about keeping trade flowing and staying rich. The NYC elites worried they’d be ruled by upstate lawmakers in Albany — moralistic, Protestant, anti-big-city-culture, and increasingly hostile to the city’s tolerance for alcohol and Catholic immigrants. Downstate New York grew out of Dutch New Netherland, which was mercantile, cosmopolitan, and relatively tolerant. Upstate was shaped by New England Puritans and their descendants, whose culture emphasized moral discipline, religious seriousness, and their reformist zeal later fueled abolitionism and temperance. So you had two very different value systems trapped in one state. By the late 1850s, this cultural clash had turned into open power struggles over policing and governance, with Wood even creating a rival city police force to defy Albany, basically saying: Albany doesn’t get to boss us around. For a brief moment, the “free city” idea gained real traction — pro-secession speeches in Congress, sympathetic newspapers, Southern praise. The author argues that without the shock of Fort Sumter, where the Civil War began in 1861, and which swung Northern opinion decisively toward preserving the Union, New York City might genuinely have peeled off.

The idea never fully died. For more than a century, proposals resurfaced to make NYC its own state, peaking in the mid-20th century and again during the fiscal crisis of the 1970s. Only later did demographics and economics flip the balance of power. Today, ironically, NYC now dominates NY state politics, Upstate regions feel ignored, and it’s more often upstate politicians who fantasize about cutting NYC loose.

“The Brilliance and the Badness of ‘The Sun Also Rises’” - The New Yorker

It’s funny that The New Yorker posted this essay because I am actually reading The Sun Also Rises right now! I’ll be honest — I breezed through book one in less than a day. I mean, this is Hemingway, who’s inspired the love of sentences for more than a few writers. You can’t help but feel bad for the main character — and you know the main character is him! This book once transformed the writer of this New Yorker essay as a lonely, unhappy teenager by teaching him how language could be precise, beautiful, morally serious. He felt a sense of belonging to a larger world of art. Sadly, he’s reread the novel decades later as a mature writer, and a lot had changed by then. He found something dark and troubling at the core of the book. He says that although Hemingway’s style is dazzling and his scenes wise and powerful, the book is built on a foundation of antisemitism, misogyny, and homophobia, using contempt for people to prop up its vision of what it means to live well. The writer argues that while Hemingway presents stoicism, bravery, and admiration for masculine, physical acts like bullfighting as a way to impose moral order on a chaotic world, the novel itself repeatedly undercuts this idea by showing how such ideals collapse into emptiness and cruelty, as when a heroic bull’s ear ends up rotting in a drawer like trash.

Now, I haven’t gotten that far in the novel, but that sounds pretty disturbing to me. I can’t imagine what this poor writer went through rereading a writer that deeply shaped him as a reader and a writer himself. It probably feels impossible for him to ignore what he’s faced. He believes that the novel is both brilliant and morally compromised, and that loving it fully now would require a generosity he no longer feels able to give, and I say, good for him. These kinds of experiences are absolutely a gift. It builds character. What do you do now? You’ve idolized someone your whole life and now you’re mature and stuck in purgatory, not sure what the hell to do and feel? I bet he learned a lot about himself through this ordeal — and I hope he makes the best of it. I’ll keep reading the novel but I’ve been warned.

“The Beckhams’ Very Public Family Meltdown” - The New Yorker

Brooklyn Beckham has publicly confirmed a long-rumored estrangement from David Beckham and Victoria Beckham, framing the break as the fallout from tensions around his wedding to Nicola Peltz. He alleges his parents disrespected his wife, pushed him to sign away rights to the Beckham name, and that a humiliating moment came when a man named Marc Anthony brought him onstage for what was supposed to be his first dance with his wife on their wedding night, asking for the “most beautiful woman” to join him— only for his mother, the Posh Spice Girl herself, to run up to the stage! She ended up dancing with him — stealing everybody’s thunder, including the bride, whose wedding it was. From what it sounds like, it was raunchy dancing, too. Shivers. The bride, obviously, fled in tears, and the pair actually later had to renew their vows to replace the memory. Brooklyn made his exit loud and clear — and stood up for himself. I’m sure that wasn’t easy as he’s likely not used to doing that, and neither is his family used to it. They’re probably pissed off at his very audacity for speaking up — and not choosing “family” over “his wife, the mother of his future children, the woman who will most likely be his nurse in his deathbed one day, and help him raise a family and life of his own.” Yes, screw her. Come dance with your mother on your wedding day to show that girl who’s boss and how little selfhood they think you deserve.

What the hell, Victoria Beckham. What the hell. Do some families really think that the silent black sheep in their family will never get tired of their same old bullying B.S. and eventually grow up, find peace, and make a life for themselves? I understand why it must have been hard for them to accept that.

“The Tighter Weave” - The Hedgehog Review

Editors as the ancient enemy of writers — those meddling hands that “soften” a Caro period into a semicolon, hack down a McPhee manuscript, or force endless fights over rhythm, voice, and meaning. Writers obviously care deeply about sentences and one can imagine their ire over needing to experience unnecessary edits. He stacks up examples of famous authors who resented being touched at all, including Joan Didion. A lot of editorial confidence is just power and style-guide bureaucracy and he rejects that more revision always makes writing better (because sometimes it becomes patchwork), or that editors can reliably turn bad writing into good (they mostly subtract, and bad writing often fails because of things that are missing — an ear, imagination, style). He’s especially angry about “line edits” — that replace a writer’s choices with an editor’s taste, and about errors editors introduce or fail to catch. He talks about his own horror stories about tiny, pointless “corrections” that waste time as well as bigger copyediting disasters that make it to print with the author’s name on them. The wrong editor can literally make the public record less true. He also distrusts the modern ritual of writers thanking editors as saviors (if you need saving, maybe you shouldn’t be writing, he says). But he admits the best editor-writer relationships can be meaningful. He talks about Robert Gottlieb’s later-career humility and tact as an ideal of the editor as a “watchful bird” whose judgment a serious writer wants to satisfy, not a rival coauthor with a red pen. The writer also worries that editors are disappearing in the Substack era, and that the result is not liberation for writers but a flood of unedited, aesthetically thinner prose shaped by platforms and mass taste. Still, he complicates his own rant by confessing he’s been an editor himself, remembers the grim necessity of that work in a culture drowning in sloppy text, and concedes there are “legitimate editorial functions.” The essay ends on a dark, morbid joke that’s also a serious point: unlike punctuation, death is the one full stop no editor can change — invoking writers like Mishima and Zweig mailing off final manuscripts right before suicide as if the ultimate escape from endless revision, meddling, and compromise. I fucking loved this essay.

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postscript:

Thank you for subscribing to the slow philosophy and helping it grow in ways I never expected. I’ve had many of you ask me how you can contribute a gift my way. This space is kept and tended entirely by me and has remained free, human, and ad-free, growing by repute and word-of-mouth alone. If my labor of love has been meaningful to you as well, you can now buy me a coffee here. Thank you for reading!

Happy New Year, and welcome back. For those new, these guides are a curation of short, neat, and clean lists of the best writing I can find. I choose what I want to read — literary essays on science, literature, philosophy, sociopolitical ideas, and anything else that gets under my skin. My guides work because they don’t overwhelm. I organize the material well, and place contemporary essays alongside classical essays. In previous guides, these have included Orwell, Wilde, James, Woolf, Sontag, and more. My goal is to spare you the tension headache of figuring out what’s worth your time and lend some meaning to the egregious amount of time I already spend doing it. If your life is full and attention finite, read the blurbs and follow your curiosity.

Without further ado, here’s volume nine.

Featured this week:
Two classic essays — one each by George Eliot and Rebecca Solnit.

Alongside them, contemporary op-eds on:
The private struggles of poets (Yeats, Auden, Eliot); an interview with George; a unique pov on reading’s decline; Big Tech’s takeover of literacy; science fiction’s uneasy relationship with the future; the future of publishing. Bonus: two pieces on Oliver Sacks.

This week’s list spans The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Baffler, London Review of Books, UnHerd, Liberties.

About The Weekly Reading Guides: A curated selection of the best essays, op-eds, and articles from great — and often overlooked — corners of the internet and media. For readers who don’t have time to scour online newsstands, are tired of the same circulating stories, and want thoughtful engagement with current cultural, social, political, literary, and artistic conversations.

Each guide also includes a This Week’s Classic Essays section, pairing canonical texts with guiding questions for deep reading — to mix up current reads with foundational texts.

Read previous reading guides:

More from the slow philosophy

Monthly Postcards: Books, films, poetry, playlists, comforts. Read the latest:

the slow philosophy

a chic guide to current affairs, intellectual intimacy, philosophy, and overlooked works. for those who love secondhand books, quiet hours, and thinking alongside others. personal philosophical essays, weekly reading guides, and monthly postcards.

By tulipe

[Jan 1 - Jan 18, 2025]

This Week’s Classic Essays

This week’s essays, written more than 150 years apart, speak to the same enduring question: how women are granted — or denied — intellectual authority. George Eliot writes from within the nineteenth-century literary world, scrutinizing the standards by which women write and are judged, while Rebecca Solnit addresses a contemporary culture in which women’s knowledge is routinely dismissed or overridden. Read together, these pieces offer a long historical lens on credibility, voice, and the struggle to be taken seriously, revealing how the problem has shifted in form but not in exactly in essence.

George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) - “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” (Westminster Review, 1856)
George Eliot, who gave us the gift of Middlemarch, satirically criticizes a large body of popular women’s fiction for being shallow, pretentious, and disconnected from real life, arguing that many female novelists substitute vague moralizing, exaggerated emotion, social snobbery, and pseudo-intellectual language for genuine observation and artistic discipline. She identifies several “species” of bad novels — from glamorous “mind-and-millinery” romances to preachy evangelical and pseudo-philosophical “oracular” works and historically dressed-up fantasies— all of which, she claims, confuse bombast with depth and imitation with originality. Eliot’s central point is not that women lack literary talent, but that mediocre writers (encouraged by flattery and low standards) damage the reputation of women’s intellect by mistaking ease of writing for mastery; truly cultivated women, she insists, write with humility, precision, and sympathy, and the problem is not women writing, but writing without intellectual rigor, self-criticism, or real engagement with human experience.

Rebecca Solnit - “Men Explain Things To Me” (Guernica, 2008)
A modern classic, in this essay, Rebecca Solnit examines how a culture of male overconfidence and female self-doubt silences women, using a series of personal anecdotes — most famously, a man confidently explaining her own book to her. Solnit identifies what would later be named “mansplaining,” and reframes it not as a trivial social tic but as a structural pattern that undermines women’s credibility, discourages them from speaking, and trains them to mistrust their own knowledge. She connects everyday condescension to more serious forms of silencing, including sexual violence and the legal and cultural refusal to believe women, suggesting that credibility is a basic survival tool. Ultimately, the essay frames “mansplaining” less as a joke and more as a symptom of deeper epistemic injustice: a world in which women must fight not only for political rights, but for the simple right to be heard and taken seriously as knowers of their own experience.

Critical Thinking:

• Do Solnit and Eliot see women’s lack of credibility as mainly imposed from the outside or shaped from within?

• What do these essays suggest about whether authority is something women must claim, earn, or are unfairly denied?

The Past Weeks’ Best Pieces of Writing

Note: My guides span every corner of thought. Each brings its own light. The aim is to read widely, think critically, and notice where ideas meet and where they part. No school of thought should be a fan club. Accountability, nuance, and the ability to take compassionate, principled stances are the only grown-up postures in life, society, and culture. Let’s think for ourselves and find common ground.

Yeats, Auden, Eliot: 1939, 1940, 1941 - London Review of Books
A deep glimpse into the lives of poets struggling to put words on paper amid the pressures of their circumstances—and how those circumstances shape the work itself—this essay follows three writers bound by influence and doubt: William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and W. H. Auden. Yeats, who gave us “The Second Coming” and “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” wrote his final poem, “Cuchulain Comforted,” just days before his death, a piece radically unlike much of what he had written before; the author traces it almost word by word, revealing the deliberate, fragile choices behind it. Auden, deeply inspired by Yeats, wrote poems and essays after Yeats’s death that were both tributes and reckonings, complicated by his own crisis of faith in poetry when he fled Europe for America and began to doubt whether political poetry mattered at all; he called Yeats “my own devil of unauthenticity,” revised his poems obsessively, and later claimed he had written lies—insisting that even a successful poem was not necessarily a good one. He took a strange pleasure in denouncing his own work, famously recoiling from the line “We must love one another or die,” muttering, “That’s a damned lie! We must die anyway.” Eliot, writing the fourth of the Four Quartets, recorded similar struggles, often over single words, admitting how difficult it was to describe the hour before dawn because “we seem to be richer in words and phrases for the end of day,” before concluding, with weary finality, “It is time to close the chapter.” To see what went into these poems—and how, until the end, Yeats, Auden, and Eliot were haunted by madness, guilt, and doubt—is to read their work differently: the life of a poet may make a good story, but the struggle behind it is anything but romantic.

George Saunders Says Ditching Theses Three Delusions Can Save You — NYT
George Saunders — who teaches at my alma mater and is known almost mythically for his kindness is deeply uncertain, self-questioning, and intellectually honest in this interview. I recently got a copy A Swim in a Pond in the Rain — in which he breaks down four classic stories and shows how they work. The interview extends that pedagogical impulse into a deeper inquiry about art, responsibility, and ethical life as he announces that he doesn’t in fact believe that kindness is easy but rather difficult and ongoing and at times, impossible to live up to. Much of the interview centers on his new novel, Vigil, which raises questions about judgment and whether people are truly accountable for their actions or shaped by systems and circumstances, and Saunders says he doesn’t believe fiction should provide answers so much as formulate questions and allow multiple perspectives to coexist. He doesn’t think books “fix” people or make them morally better in any guaranteed way, only that reading can produce small, temporary shifts in perception, clarity or openness in which we feel more patient, generous, or connected to others. Within his own political and intellectual evolution, he recalls an early attraction to Ayn Rand’s individualism and later, his disillusionment after witnessing systemic inequality firsthand — an experience that led him toward a more structural understanding of human behavior and responsibility. Finally, death — is not an existential threat for him but a kind of epistemic corrective — a concept he finds grounding and even peaceful. Looking back on his life, he feels grateful not just for his success, but for having learned that even without ambition, and simply through continued participation in the world, life still has meaning.

Reading Is a Vice - The Atlantic
We are told, repeatedly, that reading is in decline, that it is slipping from the hands of the young, from the habits of the nation, and that something grave is therefore at stake — democracy, attention, the life of the mind itself. Institutions issue their warnings, slogans are coined, remedies proposed. But the writer wonders whether this is even the right way to talk about reading. People do not, in truth, turn to books because they are instructed to do so, or because it is good for the body politic. They read, when they do read, because some obscure appetite draws them in — a sentence opens a door, a voice begins to speak, they find themselves, almost without noticing, elsewhere. Kirsch recalls a childhood memory of becoming so absorbed in a book that time seemed to disappear, and connects this experience to Proust, who describes the same kind of total immersion, one that at first, seems like a gift — the ability to live more intensely through art. But Proust also reveals the darker side of this sensitivity. His narrator in Swann’s Way, for instance, comes to live more in imagination than in reality, falling in love with idealized versions of places, people, and experiences, feeling disappointed when the real world fails to match what he has imagined. This inner life becomes so dominant that other people begin to exist mainly as sources of emotional stimulation rather than as full, human beings. Also, literature has always known this about itself. Characters like Don Quixote and Emma Bovary are undone by their devotion to books, which reshape their expectations of life and leave them unable to accept reality as it is. They are in fact victims of reading. And yet all this talk of saving reading seems faintly absurd. I have to agree: who was ever persuaded to love a book by being told it was good for them? We read in spite of our reasons for it — because it offers an escape from reasons altogether. It is not a civic act, nor a virtuous one, it is a private indulgence, difficult to explain and impossible to regulate, like any pleasure that matters.

How Big Tech killed literacy culture - UnHerd
Western culture has undergone a major reversal: where literary intellectuals once held cultural authority, power has now shifted almost entirely to the technological elite. The writer begins with a remark that seems at once trivial and faintly alarming: a young man of great wealth and ambition, named Sam Bankman-Fried, declares that books are not worth reading. The literary world reacts with shock. Still, he suggests that this disdain for reading culture is no longer scandalous but normal. Reading has indeed become obsolete. C. P. Snow once described a divide between literary and scientific cultures but the balance has now tilted decisively toward technology. The figures who shape public life are no longer poets, critics, or philosophers, but engineers, founders, and platform builders. Silicon Valley, which treats technology as the highest expression of human creativity and meaning, presses upon this even harder. The critiques this as a hollow, utilitarian worldview that replaces imagination, beauty, and inner life with efficiency, systems, and interfaces — thanks to the takeover of Generative AI He contrasts this with T.S. Eliot’s idea of artistic creation, which depends on deep reading, memory, personality, and emotional experience. AI mimics this process statistically but without consciousness or inner life, which doesn’t allow it to add any real meaning to culture. Ironically, even as tech dominates, public trust in science and knowledge declines. Old humanistic values — rigour, tradition, taste, and depth — once sustained both art and science. Their disappearance has left culture intellectually poorer. He ends on a faintly hopeful note: Bankman-Fried have apparently come around on his views and turned to reading in prison.

Among the Prophets - Science Fiction and the art of prediction - The Baffler
The essay opens with a bleak joke about the present: “society has never been lazier,” the writer remarks, while admitting he can barely find accurate information anymore in a digital world warped by the “hallucinatory derangements of artificial intelligence.” Even something as simple as tracing the origin of a quote — did “prediction is very difficult” come from Niels Bohr or Yogi Berra? — becomes impossible, which itself feels like a piece of science fiction. We reached the heights of technology, built the perfect search engines, and then broke them with AI. The writer derives from this that science fiction doesn’t actually predict the future so much as recycle and exaggerate the anxieties of the present — fear, power, media, technology, inequality — into speculative settings. What looks like prophecies in works like The Blazing World, The Handmaid’s Tale, or The Running Man is really just a sound observation of existing trends. In the Running Man, Stephen King didn’t foresee 2025 but recognized the early logic of reality TV and spectacle in 1982. Sci-fi works because people crave allegory and familiarity, not genuine novelty, and because imagining the future is really a way of coping with how unstable the present already feels. In the end, the essay suggests that science fiction comforts us by making chaos seem narratable: the future feels knowable, but only because it’s secretly just the present — only in props and costume.

The Rise and Fall of American Publishing - Liberties
The essay argues that American publishing has changed drastically over the past few decades, mainly because of corporate consolidation, Amazon, and a growing obsession with profit and safety over literary risk. The author, a longtime editor and publisher, explains that big publishing houses now prioritize books that can sell tens of thousands of copies immediately, which has pushed out serious, experimental, or intellectual work that used to define literary culture. He shows how conglomerates turned publishing into a risk-averse industry, obsessed with celebrities, trends, and marketability, while independent bookstores collapsed under Amazon’s dominance. At the same time, mainstream publishers became increasingly cautious politically, favoring “safe” stories shaped by identity politics, trauma narratives, and sensitivity readers, which the author sees as limiting imagination and discouraging writers from taking creative risks or writing outside their own identities. He’s not purely pessimistic. Small and independent presses are thriving, filling the gap left by corporate publishers. They’re more willing to take risks, publish serious literature and history, and support diverse voices without ideological conformity. The author suggests that while big publishing has lost its nerve, the future of literature may be safer in the hands of independent publishers than in corporate ones.

Honorable mentions:

Revisiting the Question of Oliver Sacks’s Narrative Reliability ’s response to The New Yorker’s expose on Oliver Sacks last December (shared below) is less a rebuttal than a deepening of the problem Rachel Aviv raises, using his own decades-long friendship with Oliver Sacks to explore what it really means to tell the truth in narrative nonfiction. Rather than defending Sacks outright, Weschler reframes the controversy through the lens of “romantic science” or “rhapsodic nonfiction,” arguing that Sacks’s method aimed at a different kind of truth —one about lived experience, interiority, and the irreducible complexity of human beings that resists purely quantitative science. The essay’s real intellectual ambition lies in widening the frame: the question of factual accuracy, the philosophical limits of positivism, the unavoidable role of imagination in any narrative, and the way storytelling itself can become a form of care, collaboration, and even therapy. Empathy, projection, and imagination are structurally entangled in both medicine and literature, and Sacks’s lifelong psychoanalysis and personal shame complicate simple moral verdicts about fabrication versus truth. Weschler ultimately suggests that the problem is not whether Sacks “made things up,” but whether narrative can ever be cleanly separated from the self that tells it — and whether some truths only exist in the space where fact and imagination blur.

Oliver Sacks Put Himself Into His Case Studies. What Was the Cost? - The New Yorker
This is from December. Sharing in reference to the previous post. I never read The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, but for years I had known of it as a canonical work of medical nonfiction. The science-writer superstar, it revealed, had not merely embellished his case studies — but many of them were closer to autobiographies, composites, or outright fictions. Sacks had apparently wanted to be a novelist. Instead, he became a neurologist, and Rachel Aviv shows how the novelist never quite disappeared. Drawing on journals, transcripts, letters, and archival records, she reveals that while Sacks’s books appeared to be medical reporting with extraordinary literary flair, he privately understood them as a kind of fiction. He polishes patients into literary figures, sands down mess, and at times, ventriloquizes their inner worlds with his own longings, shame, and loneliness. He felt guilty about this and concealed it, confessing his doubts only in his journals. Yet Aviv doesn’t present Sacks as a fraud so much as a writer-doctor caught in the moral ambiguity of empathy itself. Empathy can be projection. Translating another person’s inner life into narrative can become invasive or possessive. By the end, Sacks inhabits the “awakening” he long rehearsed through others: after a lifetime of narrating people’s recoveries, he enters his own by falling in love, and being more restrictive in his later works.

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Postscript:
Thank you for reading the slow philosophy and helping it grow in ways I never expected. This work has remained free, ad-free, and fully human — sustained by readers who’ve followed it closely and passed it along to friends. If something here has added a small measure of meaning to your days, the simplest way to support its ongoingness is to share it with someone. Word of mouth has been its biggest engine, and I’m deeply grateful for it.

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I spent hundreds of hours last year reading long essays across science, literature, philosophy, and history. These are the ones that stayed with me.

I’m thrilled to share my year of reading contemporary essays. The topics range across literature, psychology, sociology, and political theory; and from biology, physics, and climate science to questions of consciousness, ethics, and meaning. The weekly reading guides series began last fall, but the essays here are from the year as a whole, although several make a come back as they were simply too good and substantial to leave out of the year’s roundup.

I’m sometimes asked how these pieces are found — and the honest answer is I follow my tastes and interests and curiosities and sensibilities, wherever they may lead. I also have a hobby of spending hours browsing the newsstands — online as well as, when the mood strikes, the one across the street, where I can thumb through the pages and annotate favorite lines at home. Choosing what to keep and what to leave out is invariably difficult as there are endlessly fascinating essays being produced by top-drawer writers on a range of subjects. Ultimately, I keep the ones that resonate most deeply with me — those that, through their meticulousness of thought and great writing, show me something new and unfamiliar or add to and amplify my existing notions.

You’ll always find a great deal of literary pieces in my guides — on the criticism and study of literature, including the history of authors, their intellectual lineages, and influential books. Alongside, you’ll find essays on political and sociopolitical theory, as well as work from the sciences. Although my background is in public policy, I’ve been a science student as early as education began so I gravitate towards essays that grapple seriously with scientific inquiry. When it comes down to it, I’m most drawn to intelligent and compassionate writing, particularly when it explores narrow fields in ways that uplift thinking.

I’ve left out the usual reflection questions this time. But I invite you to read what draws you in after the blurb and ask how it might press upon your own life and preexisting notions. They’re not all meant to be read — it’s entirely worthwhile to commit to a single publication or even a single long essay and understand its points of view in sustained contrast with your own. Those are the ways critical thinking is built and taste is refined.

Without further ado — happy 2026, and happy reading.

Featured this week:
Performative literacy; making imaginary and lost books physical; Hemingway’s misunderstood reputation and vulnerability; the flawed ideology of the modern work life; biology vs. physics; how our emotions differ across our ancestors; Toni Morrison’s influence on publishing; Malcolm Cowley and the making of American literature; a history of the global order; America’s strength despite domestic dysfunction; viruses and the human evolution; understanding solar storms; why it’s okay to feel negatively about art; alcohol and authors; if public anger is a political identity; if the universe is evil; the biological science of ultra-slow intraterrestrial life forms in deep time; the decline of reading culture; the metaphysical meaning of consciousness; why we shouldn’t fuss with deep time; Carl Jung on what kind of company he liked to keep; Eve Babitz’s Los Angeles journals; and an interview with French playwright Hélène Cixous.

Bonus:
5 favorites from America’s Best Essays 2025 (featuring essays published in 2024).

This week’s list spans:
The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Aeon, Foreign Affairs, Noema, The Yale Review, The Baffler, Harper’s, and The Paris Review — both free and paywalled.

More from the slow philosophy

I write essays and curated recommendations of the most nourishing, thoughtful, expansive, and enriching media that I find especially meaningful and worth sharing. Subscribe below to receive new work and reading guides.

About The Weekly Reading Guide series: A curated selection of the best essays, op-eds, and articles from great — and often overlooked — corners of the internet and media. For readers who don’t have time to scour newsstands, are tired of the same circulating stories, and want thoughtful engagement with contemporary literary, cultural, social, political, philosophical, psychological, scientific, and artistic conversations.

This Week’s Classic Essays: Each guide also includes a section featuring canonical essays from the classical archives — to mix up current reads with foundational texts from the history of great prose. Read the latest:

About the Monthly Postcards series: An ongoing archive of books, films, poetry, art, and music I’m personally consuming and recommending. Read the latest:

About the Quarterly Letters series: A thematic syllabus for deeper living, reading, and self-study. Read the latest:

About The Slow Philosophers Book Club: An intimate circle that discusses one short classic over a month. Sessions announced as they arise. Limited space. Request to join here.

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the slow philosophy

a chic guide to reading, intellectual intimacy, media literacy, and under-discussed, overlooked works. best for those who love secondhand books, slow films, beauty, and quiet hours. personal philosophical essays, weekly reading guides & monthly postcards.

By tulipe

[Jan 1 - Dec 31, 2025]

The Best Essays I Read in 2025

A year of reading across disciplines, curated and offered in the spirit of shared inquiry.

Note: My guides span every corner of thought. Each brings its own light. The aim is to read widely, think critically, and notice where ideas meet and where they part. No school of thought should be a fan club. Accountability, nuance, and the ability to take compassionate, principled stances are the only grown-up postures in life, society, and culture. Let’s think for ourselves and find common ground.

The New Yorker

The Curious Notoriety of Performative Reading
Americans now read for pleasure 40 percent less than they did twenty years ago. Forty percent of fourth graders can’t comprehend basic text. Humanities professors are stunned by students who can’t complete readings or write analytical essays. In fact, the receding nature of reading has gotten so bad a philosophy professor’s NYT op-ed, which I shared last year, warned that students have become “subcognitive” — a word that sounds ripped from 1984. Even among those who still read, the practice itself is now viewed with suspicion. It is important to understand this — and why it’s happening. This essay does this by discussing the phrase “performative reading,” which has emerged to describe people —often men — who read difficult or canonical books in public, allegedly to project intellectual seriousness. Rather than treating this as a matter of individual pretense, Brickner-Wood argues that such suspicion might fit into a broader cultural pattern that we might need to understand better if we’re going to do something about the declining culture of reading. Why does anyone do performative reading at all? Nearly everything can now be dismissed as performative: activism, masculinity, kindness, and even grief. The current times make authenticity tricky. Against this backdrop, maybe “performative reading” isn’t about insincere readers at all but rather how reading itself has been pushed to the margins of culture. Today, we can easily access music, art, and video, but the experience of reading a long, complex book requires time, patience, solitude, and attention, capacities increasingly at odds with contemporary life. Seen this way, the sight of someone quietly reading in public today might feel alien because it is so rare to those struggling with sustained attention. But the public reader may not be performing at all. Maybe they’re doing something harder instead — maybe they are sitting with boredom, discomfort, and silence — to think more clearly and understand themselves better.

The Best Fake Books—Made Real
Reid Byers is a former I.B.M. systems designer who has spent fifteen years creating and collecting physical versions of books that don’t exist. They’re books that are lost, unfinished, fictional, or embedded within other works. He even designs them to look like aged volumes. This fascinates me for I am a forager of hidden gems and he a creator. He has brought to life things like Hemingway’s lost first novel, Aristotle’s vanished Poetics on comedy, Shakespeare’s play-within-Hamlet, and doubly fictional works from Lolita, all crafted to fool rare books experts at a glance. Byers sees these unreal books as a tribute to literature’s absences — projects destroyed by ego or politics, interrupted by chance, or never written at all. Just this week, I was reading Eros The Bittersweet from Anne Carson, which made me look up some poems by Sappho. The fact that this mesmerizing poet’s works are lost to history breaks my heart. Like me, the imaginary book Reid Byers too most wishes were real is Sappho’s, because “some things just break your heart because they aren’t real.” A man after my own heart.

The Profile Hemingway Could Never Live Down
Lillian Ross was a longtime New Yorker writer best known for pioneering a restrained and observational style of journalism where rather than explaining or judging her subjects, she carefully recorded what they said and did, for long stretches, and let scenes speak for themselves. She did a profile for Hemingway in the 1950s that had long been treated as a brutal takedown of the author. But the essay reexamines it and argues that neither was it meant to humiliate Hemingway nor did it do such a thing. Her new and detached reporting style may have been confusing for people but letters between them show a complicated, mutually respectful relationship. Hemingway admired her even as the profile portrayed him as boastful, performative, and deeply insecure. In reality, Hemingway was oddly cooperative and the profile succeeded because it captured his real vulnerability more clearly than his own later fiction. Always fascinating to learn a bit more about the riot that was Hemingway.

The Insidious Charms of the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic
A great companion read to my viral essay, “In Praise Of Gazing At The Ceiling, And Other Trifles,” this essay examines how the modern ‘entrepreneurial work ethic,’ the idea that work should be personally meaningful, passion-driven, and endlessly self-directed, has become a powerful but exhausting ideology in American life. The writer argues that this ethic reframes insecurity, precarity, and overwork as personal and individual challenges rather than structural problems. Popularized by management thinkers, Silicon Valley culture, and platforms like LinkedIn, this encourages workers to treat themselves as brands and businesses, promising freedom and purpose. The writer argues that it fails to achieve such odds and instead mostly succeeds in shifting risk onto individuals, weakening collective protections, and normalizing constant hustle. We don’t see the transactional reality in which workers are isolated, disposable, and left laying their own tracks with no clear destination. As someone who’s worked corporate for nearly a decade, I can attest to this rudderlessness. Bertrand Russell called this the result of an elite class convincing a working class of the concept of “dignified hard work,” preserving leisure solely for those in the upper crust.

The Atlantic

The Truth Physics Can No Longer Ignore
Physics is undergoing a bit of an identity crisis. For much of its history, physicists believed the universe could be fully understood by decomposing it into its smaller constituents: atoms, particles, forces, This idea is called reductionism. It proved successful for describing the likes of inert matter, planets, stars, and machines. But life doesn’t fit that model very well. Living systems are not fixed objects in the way rocks or machines are. The human body, for example, replaces most of its constituent atoms over time. We’re not fixed objects. A cell makes the membrane that keeps it alive, yet that same membrane is what enables the cell to remain viable. No conventional machine exhibits this kind of self-referential organization. Physicists are great at prediction within closed systems. Give them a star: they can predict how it will die. Give them a rock: they know exactly what it’ll do. But give them a single primordial cell, no amount of physical law would allow them to predict that, billions of years later, it would give rise to humans… or pandas. That’s because life shows emergence: the phenomenon by which interactions among simple components generate novel, irreducible, and often unpredictable forms of organization. Life does something nothing else in the universe does. It uses information in the service of its own goals. Plants grow toward light. Animals evade danger. Machines only do these things because living agents programmed them to do so. Living systems, on the other hand, generates its own ends. Scientists call this agency. Physicists aren’t abandoning math or particle but they are realizing that not everything important is at the microscopic level. They’re turning to complexity science, which studies systems where simple things together create surprising behavior — like ecosystems, brains, economies, and societies. Approaching life through this lens may illuminate longstanding questions about how life began, how to detect it on other planets, and how to think more clearly about intelligence. Studying life may reshape physics itself, pushing it toward a more collaborative, interdisciplinary future.

What If Our Ancestors Didn’t Feel Anything Like We Do?
As someone who tears up during movies that are supposed to be action comedies, I’ve come to realize what a privilege it is to feel so freely today. For much of human history, people seem to have repressed their emotions far more than we do now. Historians argue that people in the past didn’t experience emotions the same way we do — feelings like pain and anger were shaped by culture, religion, and daily life, not universal human constants. Instead of assuming we can easily relate to past emotions, the writer suggests studying the worlds that gave those feelings meaning, such as medieval pain tied to Christ’s suffering or Greek anger seen as cosmic disorder. What connects us across time may not be identical emotions, but more a sense of curiosity about how others experienced the world in the past and how they do it in the present. I believe that what triggers our emotions depends entirely on what we were taught. Some grow angry at frustration because they have never learned denial. Others cry when struck, while some answer injury with fury. The response is always relative. We mature out of most of our emotions eventually, and some take longer. Given the vast sweep of time, it makes sense that our collective emotions evolve alongside it.

How Toni Morrison Changed Publishing
It’s time to highlight Toni Morrison’s hugely influential but often overlooked career as a book editor at Random House, alongside her work as a novelist. Long before she became famous for her fiction, Morrison used her editorial power to publish, protect, and rigorously shape the work of Black writers, activists, and thinkers — among them Angela Davis, Huey P. Newton, Gayl Jones, and Leon Forrest — at a time when publishing was deeply resistant to Black voices. She believed Black writing didn’t need to define itself through whiteness or racism to be powerful, and she fought to bring complex books to both Black and general audiences. As an editor, she was exacting, fearless, and strategic, defending her authors against sexist and racist pressures while insisting on artistic integrity. The piece argues that Morrison reshaped American literary culture from being inside the belly of the beast — and that when she left Random House in 1983, the number of Black authors published there sharply declined, revealing how much of the progress depended on her vision and labor, which others weren't willing to do.

The Man Who Rescued Faulkner
Malcolm Cowley, not a famous name per se, is one of the most influential figures in shaping modern American literature. He did not write any great novels himself but as a critic and editor, launched and revived the careers of writers such as John Cheever, William Faulkner, Jack Kerouac, and Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), most famously rescuing Faulkner from obscurity (leading to his eventual Nobel). Coming of age after World War I, Cowley hung out with Gertrude Stein’s lost generation writers in Paris. He believed American literature deserved to stand on its own right rather than be seen as an offshoot of British writing, and devoted his career to building that case. Though his political judgments faltered at times, his lasting contribution was showing how American writers, deeply shaped by history, place, and national conflict, collectively formed a living literary tradition and claim its own “Great American Novel.” He later saw the elevation of Moby-Dick, which he considered even more important than Faulker and Hemingway.

Foreign Affairs

The Stagnant Order
The long historical era in which rising powers — countries with rapidly expanding populations, economies, and military capabilities — reshaped the global balance of power is coming to an end. Unlike the past two centuries, when industrialization, demographic growth, and territorial expansion led to the dramatic rise of powers (Britain, the U.S., and then China), today, most major countries are faced with steady demographic decline, sluggish productivity gains, and technological change — none of which radically transform daily life the way industrialization did back then. As a result, no nation is currently growing fast enough to overturn the established global order, creating a stagnant world of incumbent powers. This could reduce the long-term risk of power wars, but it also brings some dangers: fragile states can fuel instability and conflict. The era of rapid power transitions is ending, but its aftermath may be just full of peril. A thoroughly riveting piece on the history of global order.

The Strange Triumph of a Broken America
America’s global power remains remarkably strong even as its domestic politics and society appear deeply dysfunctional. Despite high levels of polarization, distrust in government, economic frustration, and political instability at home, the United States still leads the world economically and militarily in absolute terms, and no rival power has yet displaced it. Beckley calls this a paradox: the very features that make the U.S. powerful abroad — economy, demographics, institutions — also contribute to political conflict. He warns that if leaders fail to manage the tension between strength overseas and dysfunction at home, America’s relative advantages could eventually erode, weakening both foreign influence and domestic resilience.

Noema

Viruses Play a Leading Role in Humanity’s Story, and Not as a Villain
Viruses are not just enemies of humanity but crucial partners in our evolution. Over millions of years, viruses — especially retroviruses — have inserted their genes into our DNA, and many of those genes were repurposed for vital human functions. One viral gene made the placenta possible, others helped shape our immune system, brain function, memory, and early embryonic development. Nearly half of the human genome comes from ancient viral material. While viruses can cause disease, they have also driven innovation in genetics and aided survival, meaning humans quite literally would not exist without them. Rather than being purely villains, viruses are a foundational force in life itself. Although viruses are commonly associated with illness, pathogenicity represents only a small subset of viral diversity — and it’s worthwhile knowing that only a narrow slice of their interactions with life account for illnesses and the rest of it supports scientific insight into evolution and genetic exchange.

The Unseen Fury of Solar Storms
The Sun isn’t just a warm ball of light. Sometimes, it becomes violent. A solar storm happens when the Sun releases huge bursts of energy and charged particles into space. These usually come from sunspots, which are darker, cooler areas on the Sun caused by tangled magnetic fields. When the magnetic energy builds up out of hand, it snaps and explodes. This can create two dangerous things: solar flares (radiation at the speed of light). and coronal mass ejections (clouds of charged particles that move slowly but are far deadlier). Solar flares reach Earth in minutes but CMEs take hours and days — and they’re the real problem. For most of human history, this didn’t matter at all as we didn’t use electricity or GPS or satellites but today, everything we rely on depends on electricity and satellites. As a result, the Sun has become a serious threat to us. In places like the UK Met Office’s Space Weather Center, scientists watch the Sun 2/7 using satellites. Most solar storms are harmless but scientists worry about the big ones, which can effectively shut down parts of the world. A British astronomer named Carrington once recorded a powerful solar storm that burned telegraph wires as auroras lighted up the sky — messages were sent using the storm’s energy. Luckily for us, tech was simple back then. Today, it would create a global storm that could leave millions of people without electricity for months or years. The transformers we currently have are extremely hard to replace, and if they get overloaded by currents from CMEs, it can take years for them to be rebuilt. Satellites are especially vulnerable as they are outside Earth’s protective atmosphere — in fact, dozens of Starlink satellites were destroyed in recent storms. Bad news is that the Sun may be capable of storms twice as powerful as the Carrington Event, and far beyond what we’re prepared for. So if a big one happens: it would be chaos. Fragility, thy name is human life.

The Yale Review

Taking Offense
In Jane Austen’s Persuasion, the novel’s description of a mother, Mrs. Musgrove, grieving her dead son is strikingly cruel. Mrs. Musgrove is described as fat, and the narration suggests that her expressions of “tenderness and sentiment” are faintly ridiculous, implicitly inviting the reader to laugh at a grieving mother. The writer finds the passage cruel and disgusting. Reading it made him feel both hurt and offended. However, he accepts that reaction. He says that feeling offended by art is normal and valid. In moments like these, he suggests, we have the power to step back and ask what the text is doing to us. Either we can suspend the offense for a moment so we can still see if the work has anything important in it, or we can stay inside the bad feeling and examine it because sometimes the most meaning ideas emerge from these moments of discomfort. Literature after all can make us more empathetic and provide moral insight. The essay suggests that serious art often asks us to endure discomfort so we can discover new ways of seeing others — and ourselves — on the other side of that unease. Sometimes, art uses discomfort to show how prejudice works and how it might be undone. I like essays that expand upon the art of reading and what literature demands of us. That said, I also believe we have a responsibility to maintain high standards in art. There’s nothing wrong with sitting with discomfort and exploring it to learn something about ourselves. But if, say, art is being deliberately exploitative, and relying on shock as a substitute for depth, for instance, that’s where I draw the line. At that point, time is better spent engaging with work that is more deserving. There is no dearth of rich, challenging, and fascinating art. Writers who treat their audience as if they’re unintelligent, which is what exploitative feels like, don’t sit well with me. Emerald Fennell comes to mind, whose work often feels reducible to, “Here’s just a list of crazy things happening.” That to me feels like a form of being manipulated rather than being invited to understand. To that, I take offense.

How Sober Should a Writer Be?
Does alcohol help writers? The author of this essay offers no lurid drinking anecdotes of the sort readers often expect from writers. Instead, the piece interrogates the mythology itself. We have elevated the drunken writer much as we have romanticized the tortured artist. These are figures whose excess is retrospectively framed as a condition of genius. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Bukowski belong to a lineage of men who wrote with extraordinary clarity and force while drinking themselves toward ruin. But now, that era is receding. Americans are drinking less now. Even writers no longer lean into the old practice of literary intoxication in order to discover and justify their craziest ideas. Where drinking once appeared casually in literary life — we could see them woven into scenes of literature, leisure, and sociality — it is now either treated with gravity or omitted altogether. The author especially lingers on Fitzgerald, who wrote beautifully about drinking and glamour and excess, even though alcohol slowly dismantled his life. Even though we know drinking is harmful, we romanticize it when it’s tied to art and creativity. But did alcohol make Fitzgerald a great writer? Almost certainly not. What it did do, the essay suggests, was profoundly shape the texture and trajectory of his work, for better and for worse. In contemporary literature, the drunk and his wild nights are not charming or rakish anymore but rather volatile and dangerous. But still, we raise a glass to Fitzgerald, the eternal cautionary tale and patron saint of literary intoxication, who proved that some writers can handle the bottle, and some definitely cannot.

Aeon

Incandescent Anger
Much of today’s politics is driven not by clear goals or shared ideals, but by perpetual grievance, and constant anger and opposition. Unlike movements that mobilize outrage in pursuit of concrete social change, what the essay terms “grievance politics”treats hostility itself as the principal accomplishment. Even after leaders and by association, their followers, “win,” they remain angry, compelled to seek out new enemies. The essay contrasts this dynamic with older political movements, like protests against the Vietnam War or apartheid. Those movements were fueled by anger too — but their anger had a clear goal: ending a war or dismantling an unjust system. Once those goals were achieved, the anger largely faded. In contrast, today’s “grievance politics” seem to resist resolution. If one complaint is addressed, a new one appears. The persistence of anger itself is the point.. The essay argues that this is a matter of identity. Shared anger provides meaning, belonging, and self-worth. Shared grievance transforms pain and disappointment into moral righteousness, blame, and ultimately, group identity. For anger to survive, enemies must exist — as a result, avenues toward compromise or policy concession—any gesture that might mollify antagonism—are rare considered. To move forward, the author contends, society must recover shared values worthy of collective care: values like justice, community, and dignity. He does not dismiss the human desire for belonging. Rather, he believes that we can find purpose and solidarity, which need not be forced through perpetual conflict.

Reality is Evil
Many people are inclined to believe nature is balanced, healing, and always renewing itself. The author says that while that intuition is comforting — it’s hardly true. He points to thermodynamics, the physics of energy and heat, to argue that the Universe has an intrinsic directionality: over time, things move from order to disorder. That irreversible drift is called entropy. Things wear out, bodies age, stars burn out. Energy doesn’t disappear but changes form, but it spreads out and becomes less useful over time. Eventually, the Universe heads toward what the essay calls a “dark era’ where energy is so thoroughly dispersed that no new complex can arise. So even though life looks creative and growing (it’s flourishing plants, evolution, and technology), it’s still part of the same process: everything ultimately leads toward breakdown. Because all living systems survive by consuming other systems, and they, too, end in decay and death, the essay claims that the Universe is not morally good or neutral but actually, structurally hostile, perhaps even evil. If this is the case, what becomes of morality? He rejects ethical frameworks that exhort us to “live in harmony with nature” (which would mean cooperating with a destructive system) and suggests that we resist nature instead. Even if entropy cannot be defeated, it can be opposed. Care for others, alleviation of suffering and harm, and making medicine to prolong and improve life are such acts of defiance. Even if the Universe will ultimately prevails, he insists that we should “strike back” where possible, refusing complicity where we can, and build ethical and aesthetic values around solidarity and defiance in the face of inevitable decay.

Long Live the Aeonophiles!
Recent discoveries of so-called intraterrestrials — microbial life forms residing deep within Earth’s crust and beneath the seafloor — may compel a rethink of biology. The author refers to these extraordinarily long-lived organisms as aeonophiles, inhabitants of environments once assumed to be inhospitable to life. Though they remain metabolically active, their pace of change is so slow that they may not divide for thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of years, expending their scant energy primarily on maintenance and repair rather than growth instead. Their life cycles largely elude us because they unfold on the scale of geological deep time. Just as a creature with a lifespan of a single day could scarcely comprehend the growth of a tree, we struggle to perceive biological processes operating at such extreme temporal distances. When periodic disruptions such as earthquakes and volcanoes occur, they may briefly rouse these organisms to grow and reproduce, after which they return to near-dormancy for vast stretches of time. Beyond Earth, aeonophiles dramatically expand our conception of habitability, suggesting life can survive in far harsher, quieter environments — including other planets — while remaining difficult to detect. At a deeper level, aeonophiles reveal that living systems can generate and manage entropy across timescales far longer than biology has traditionally acknowledged. They challenge the boundary we draw between life and non-life, as well as the assumption that life must be defined by growth and reproduction, showing instead that life can persist by managing energy and resisting decay over immense spans of time.

The Baffler

We Use to Read Things in This Country
Part lament, part satire, this essay mourns the shrinking attention span of the American public and the corporatization of reading culture. It rails against the algorithmic flattening of intellect, reminding readers that reading was once an act of resistance, not recreation. Its title feels like both an elegy and an accusation because that’s what this piece is — a lot of wonderful passages that embark on our intellectual history.

Harper’s

The Tune of Things
Is consciousness just something your brain produces… or is it something bigger, like a force in the universe — maybe even what people mean by God? Writing about neuroscience, quantum physics, mysticism, poetry, near-death experiences, and brain science, the writer argues that modern culture is trapped in a narrow, mechanical way of thinking that separates mind from matter and dismisses all sense of intuition, meaning, and mystery. He suggests that consciousness may exist between things — relational, flowing, and prior to material form — rather than locked inside individual brains. He doesn’t claim he can “prove” God. Instead he suggests a possibility: consciousness might not be confined inside individual brains. It might be something like a “field” that everything participates in (he connects this to quantum ideas about how things are linked). Poetry and music matter to him because they can make you feel that connectedness—like reality is alive, moving, and meaningful, not just mechanical. Art as well as religious experience can momentarily tune us into this deeper reality, even if such moments don’t last. If consciousness precedes matter, then death may not be an end but a return to a larger field of meaning, and our task is to learn how to live and love within that uncertainty.

The Geological Sublime
The author starts with an earthquake in Santa Monica that literally cracks his wall open. It scares him, but it also makes him feel awe, because it’s a reminder that the Earth is powerful and “inhuman”—it has been building mountains and shifting continents for millions to billions of years, long before humans existed. Then the essay shifts to something personal: the author loves watching butterflies. Butterflies have existed for tens of millions of years — but now they’re collapsing in just a few decades. That time mismatch is what climate change feels like: human actions are speeding things up way beyond what nature normally does. Climate crisis is hard to understand because humans think in short units — seasons, school years, elections, mortgages — while Earth works in long stretches of time: deep time. Darwin and the geologist Charles Lyell struggled with this too. They tried to explain how tiny changes add up over enormous time, but even they admitted deep time is almost impossible to truly imagine. Near the end, the author brings in the idea that messing with deep time is dangerous. Burning fossil fuels is like releasing millions of years of stored sunlight (from ancient plants) in just a couple centuries. That’s why the Earth now seems to “push back” with wildfires, floods, and heat waves. We can’t stop earthquakes, but we can choose not to make human history into a disaster by overheating the planet. We need to think on bigger timescales to understand what we’re doing.

Jung and the Restless - Carl Jung
While Freud focused on fixing human pathology from the past to change human psychology in the present, Jung’s psychology focused on understanding meaning and inner development across a lifetime. His ideas about the unconscious mind still influences how we understand personality, dreams, and meaning. We have him to thank for the concept of the “collective unconscious” — that all humans share deep, inherited patterns of thought. In this interview, we get to see Jung’s own psychology and personality more closely. He explains that he felt uneasy around writers whose lives were not deeply driven by a single, consuming purpose. He admired Goethe because Goethe had a central purpose. Faust was his central life task. But Jung felt repelled by figures like Thomas Mann, whom he saw as intellectually brilliant yet not existentially “gripped” by his work. He further describes a disturbing encounter with H. G. Wells, during which Jung felt psychically exhausted and even experienced a strange, symbolic vision of Wells shrinking, as if Wells were unconsciously feeding off him. All this to say, he tends to avoid people without a clear “principal task,” because being around them leaves him depleted rather than energized. Like they say: you are a product of what you surround yourself with.

The Paris Review

Journal, 1969–1970
Long before Joan Didion became the default literary lens on California, Eve Babitz was chronicling Los Angeles from the inside — capturing wit, perception, the sun, and style. This piece presents newly published excerpts from Eve Babitz’s only surviving diary, written in 1969–1970 when she was 26 and still becoming the writer she would later be known as. The journal captures her daily life in late-1960s Los Angeles — her romantic entanglements, parties with musicians and artists, gossip, insecurity, ambition, and self-observations — told in her witty, candid, and vulnerable voice. We read about her rock-and-roll scene, experiments with therapy and hypnosis, reading widely, and navigating love and disappointment. The diary reveals how Babitz slowly turns toward writing while growing disillusioned with the world around her. An intimate portrait of a young woman thinking on the page, learning who she is, and documenting a cultural moment from the inside with humor and honesty.

The Art of Criticism, Hélène Cixous
Hélène Cixous, a French feminist philosopher and writer, transformed literary theory by arguing that women shouldn’t adapt themselves to existing male-dominated literary rules, but should change the rules by writing honestly from their own experiences, even if that writing looks strange, intense, or unconventional. In this interview, she reflects on growing up Jewish in colonial Algeria, early experiences of racism and war, her lifelong immersion in multiple languages, and how reading and writing became a way for her to survive and understand the world. Cixous explains her belief that all powerful writing is both autobiographical and invented, that language should stay fluid and resistant to rigid systems, and that writing comes from listening — to dreams, history, bodies, and others — rather than following theory or rules. A very cool lady.

BONUS: The Best American Essays 2025

Edited by Jia Tolentino, the book is a collection of essays originally published in 2024. Below are some of my favorite pieces:

Literature Without Literature — Granta
Defends reading as a private, intrinsic good and calls for a return to “art for its own sake,” separate from the corporate logic of the publishing industry.

The Shapes of Grief — The Yale Review
Reflects on how we mourn, witness loss, and use language to confront the “unbearable” amid contemporary global suffering.

The Olive Branch of Oblivion — Liberties
Looks at our modern crisis of memory and argues that the obsession with permanent records and total recall may be doing real harm.

Within the Pretense of No Pretense — The Point
A contemporary riff on George W. S. Trow’s classic essay, arguing that while the television eroded social context, the internet has eroded sincerity, replacing it with a culture of performance and pretense.

Critical Navel-Gazing — The Yale Review
Identifies current trends in cultural criticism, including excessive inward focus and a presentist belief that today’s challenges.

Thank you for your thoughtful engagement with the slow philosophy. It has been a privilege assembling these readings. We will continue with the weekly reading guides next week.

Best,
Tulipe

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NOTE: This is the last reading guide of the year. A postcard featuring the best essays and op-eds of 2025 is on the way.

Featured this week:
Two classic essays — by Susan Sontag and T. S. Eliot.

Alongside them, contemporary op-eds on:
Why anger has become a political identity; how the way we teach reading can shape a child’s entire life; what disappears when art isn’t preserved; why climate change creates legal and ethical problems we’re unprepared for; a vision of power rooted in humility rather than control; what happens when our social skills weaken; and a historical look at how media regulation has shaped free speech.

Bonus:
Two reflective pieces—from J.D. Daniels and William Zinsser.

This week’s list spans The New York Times, The Atlantic, Aeon, The American Scholar, and The Dispatch — both free and paywalled.

About The Weekly Reading Guide series: A curated selection of the best essays, op-eds, and articles from great — and often overlooked — corners of the internet and media. For readers who don’t have time to scour online newsstands, are tired of the same circulating stories, and want thoughtful engagement with current cultural, social, political, literary, and artistic conversations.

Each guide also includes a This Week’s Classic Essays section, pairing canonical texts with guiding questions for deep reading — to mix up current reads with foundational texts.

Read previous week’s guide:

More from the slow philosophy

About the Monthly Postcards series: Each month, I share an archive of journal entries, mini-essays, and curated art, books, films, poetry, and music. Read the latest:

About the Letters series: Every quarter, I share a thematic syllabus for deeper living, reading, and self-study. Read the latest:

the slow philosophy

a chic guide to reading, intellectual intimacy, media literacy, and under-discussed, overlooked works. best for those who love secondhand books, slow films, beauty, and quiet hours. personal philosophical essays, weekly reading guides & monthly postcards.

By tulipe

[Dec 22 - Dec 28, 2025]

Preface: It has been reported that we are living in an era of cognitive and literacy decline. We need to work together to normalize content that protect us from the brain rot of the modern scroll, depleting critical thinking skills, the fading practice of deep reading, and the general decline of the humanities — none of which we can afford. As part of the good fight, I have been putting together these weekly reading guides as well as monthly postcards with curated recommendations of the most nourishing, expansive media content I encounter.

This Week’s Classic Essays

“Against Interpretation” - Susan Sontag (annotated link) (1964)
Sontag says we spend too much time explaining art instead of actually experiencing it. If Oscar Wilde warned against turning art into realism, and Henry James emphasized careful perception (both were read together and discussed in Volume Five of this series), Sontag pushes the idea further. She argues that constantly asking “what does this mean?” takes away from how art feels and affects us. It flattens its emotional and sensory power. Art, she says, isn’t a puzzle to solve, but something to notice and experience. Like Wilde, she defends art’s imagination and sensory power, asking readers to slow down and pay attention. Note: first published in 1964; later collected in a book: link to book.

“Tradition and the Individual Talent” - T. S. Eliot (1919)
Eliot argues that great art is never created in isolation. Every new work is shaped by what came before it. In that, writers and artists are always in conversation with the past, whether they realize it or not. “Tradition,” for Eliot, doesn’t mean copying old styles but it does mean deeply knowing the works that came before and understanding how a new piece of art changes the meaning of that tradition as a whole. He also challenges the idea that art should express the artist’s personal feelings. Instead, he says the artist’s job is to shape emotion into something clear, impersonal, and lasting. The essay asks readers to see art not as self-expression, but as a careful act of craftsmanship shaped by history.

Critical Reflections:

1. Sontag asks us to experience art without over-explaining it, while Eliot reminds us that art comes from a long tradition. When you encounter a work of art, what helps you connect more—letting yourself feel it first, or learning its background?

2. Sontag worries that interpretation can drain art of its power.
   Are there areas of your life — not just art — where explaining or analyzing too much might be getting in the way of direct experience?

3. Both Sontag and Eliot are writing against habits they see as harmful to art.
   What habit — of reading, watching, or consuming culture — do you think most gets in the way of enjoying art today?

I previously shared essays by Oscar Wilde and Henry James, which offer contrasting views on what constitutes art and how it should be approached. You can find them below.

Last Week’s Best Pieces of Writing

Note: My guides span every corner of thought. Each brings its own light. The aim is to read widely, think critically, and notice where ideas meet and where they part. No school of thought should be a fan club. Accountability, nuance, and the ability to take compassionate, principled stances are the only grown-up postures in life, society, and culture. Let’s think for ourselves and find common ground.

Dyslexia and the Reading Wars - The New Yorker
This piece explains dyslexia as a common difficulty with reading that can cause lifelong academic and emotional harm — but also argues that much of the damage is preventable with the right teaching. It follows the author’s niece Caroline, who went from barely being able to read in early elementary school to earning a Ph.D. in gravitational-wave physics, thanks to early diagnosis and “structured literacy” instruction that teaches decoding (the relationship between letter and sound) explicitly and with tons of practice. The article critiques popular “whole language” or cueing approaches that encourage kids to guess words from context or pictures. Research on how the brain reads supports a more phonics-based decoding — especially for dyslexic students. Poor reading instruction can lead to shame, misbehavior, dropout, and even incarceration, while effective programs (like New York City’s newer public “literacy academies”) can quickly transform children’s confidence and futures. Reading isn’t natural like speaking, and must be taught systematically, and doing so early can change lives.

Requiem for a Lost Art - The American Scholar
The article says that even though it feels like the internet has preserved almost everything — books, music, movies, photos — there’s one huge gap: we barely have any real recordings of what the greatest American stage actors were like before TV and modern filming, so their legendary performances have mostly vanished from living memory. Back then, Broadway stars were famous nationwide, but theater is naturally fleeting, and written reviews don’t “show” future generations what made those actors special. As movies and then television took over, acting styles changed, Broadway leaned more on screen celebrities, and the old larger-than-life stage craft faded. Now, we’re left with word-of-mouth stories, names, and a cultural amnesia about an era that once meant a lot.

The World Has Laws About Land and Sea, but Not About Ice - The Atlantic
I had a diplomat once come to our foreign policy classroom in DC, who told us that he once asked President Obama what was the one thing that kept him up at night: and Obama said, “climate change.” The article explains that as Arctic sea ice melts and ships and industries move north, the world has no clear laws about how to protect or govern ice, even though it’s crucial for the climate. Current rules treat ice awkwardly as either land or sea, which doesn’t work because sea ice is constantly forming, melting, and moving. It needs its own set of laws. Some scholars actually argue that the only way to protect it is to give sea ice legal personhood — the right to exist and be defended in court — so someone could legally speak for it and limit harmful activities like shipping and pollution. Without new legal protections, growing Arctic activity will speed up ice loss and worsen global climate impacts — a phenomenon that is already drastically affecting lives and will continue to do so.

The Kingdom of God Is Ruled by the Humblest of Men — The New York Times
The essay explains that Christianity teaches a radically different idea of power through Jesus and the “kingdom of God,” which is not about dominance, wealth, or control but about humility, service, mercy, and love for the weak and forgotten. Jesus overturned normal ideas of greatness by teaching that true leadership comes from serving others, even enemies, and by caring for those society ignores. The author argues that this vision has shaped history but is often betrayed when Christians become judgmental, political, or obsessed with rules instead of compassion and healing. God’s kingdom, the essay says, is already present but not yet complete, growing slowly, and it depends on whether Christians actually live out Jesus’ values of reconciliation, self-sacrifice, and love rather than seeking worldly power.

Your Social Muscles Are Wasting Away. Here Is How to Retrain Them. — The New York Times
The essay argues that many people today are losing basic “social muscles” because modern life encourages independence, convenience, and avoiding friction, which leaves us lonelier and less able to rely on one another. Drawing on her experience living in an intentional shared household, the author explains that strong community requires practicing compromise, putting relationships ahead of personal preferences, and addressing conflicts honestly instead of avoiding them. These habits can feel uncomfortable at first, like exercising weak muscles, but they help rebuild trust, connection, and mutual support. Her message is that relearning how to live closely with others isn’t just practical in a strained world but essential for human well-being and resilience.

The Original Sin of Broadcast Regulation - The Dispatch
This article argues that the U.S. system of regulating broadcast media has undermined free speech for nearly a century by treating radio and television differently from print. The author explains that government licensing of broadcast spectrum, begun in the 1920s, allowed politicians to control and punish speech they disliked, something the First Amendment was designed to prevent. Through examples ranging from early radio preachers to presidents like Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Nixon, the essay shows how broadcast regulation — especially rules like the Fairness Doctrine — was repeatedly used for partisan censorship. The author concludes that government ownership and licensing of spectrum was a mistake, and that ending broadcast licensure in favor of clear property rights would better protect free speech and bring broadcasting in line with America’s original free-press ideals.

Two special entries:

Lyrical Nonfiction
Dream Diary - The Paris Review (J.D. Daniels)
This is a long series of vivid, unsettling dream fragments that move through fear, family conflict, grief, desire, shame, and moments of wonder. The dreams repeatedly return to the narrator’s parents — especially a violent, domineering father — and to the narrator’s longing for safety, understanding, and connection, often mixing childhood vulnerability with adult awareness. The dreams mix absurd humor, fear, violence, grief, family conflict, longing, and flashes of beauty, with recurring images of the author’s parents, especially his father, as sources of threat, judgment, or confusion. Taken together, the dreams don’t tell a single story but instead create an intense portrait of anxiety, memory, anger, and vulnerability, revealing how dreams can express truths that feel impossible to say clearly while awake.

A Christmas Dinner - The American Scholar (William Zinsser)
originally published in 2010, republished in 2025
In this essay, William Zinsser (author, The Elements of Style) reflects on finding a menu from his Christmas dinner in 1944, when he was a young Army sergeant living in harsh conditions in wartime Italy. The carefully typed menu and a thoughtful message about faith, peace, and shared values offered comfort and dignity to soldiers far from home, reminding them of what they were fighting for. Looking back decades later, Zinsser compares World War II — which he calls the last “good” war — with later, more ambiguous conflicts, and reflects on how the “greatest generation” label faded over time. He concludes that every generation of soldiers who serve and sacrifice deserves respect, and offers a simple message of gratitude and goodwill to all who fight the nation’s wars.

Critical Reflections

1. Many of these essays describe systems — political, educational, technological, religious, cultural — that were meant to serve people but now distort behavior, meaning, or trust. Where do you see the biggest gap between an institution’s stated purpose and its real effects on human lives?

2. Across topics as different as anger, literacy, climate law, faith, and community, these writers keep returning to the same quiet theme: attention. What we notice, what we ignore. What did these pieces ask you to pay attention to?

Thank you for your incredible engagement with this series. It has been a privilege putting these together. We’ll continue into the new year with more curations.

Happy New Year!
Tulipe

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NOTE: This is the penultimate guide of the year. Next week’s edition will be a comprehensive roundup of the best op-eds and essays of 2025.

Featured this week:
Orwell on how language corrupts thought; Baldwin on Shakespeare, faith, and cultural ownership; why physics may need to rethink life itself; what happens when story loses its authority; an experiment in living and learning without phones; faith, power, and the dangers of moral certainty; water scarcity as a structural limit, not a technical problem; returning to Tolkien on meaning and mystery; and why we continue to romanticize power through mob mythology.

This week’s list spans The New York Times, The Atlantic, Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, The New Yorker, and The Baffler — both free and paywalled.

About The Weekly Reading Guide series: Includes the best pieces of writing — essays, op-eds, and articles — from great and rare corners of the internet and media that are often overlooked. If you don’t have time to scour online newsstands, are tired of the same circulating stories, and want to stay up-to-date on current cultural, social, political, literary, and artistic conversations and discourses, I hope you find this series useful. This Week’s Classic Essays section includes two essays from the canon, paired with guiding questions for deep reading and to mix up current reads with foundational texts.

Read previous week’s guide:

More from the slow philosophy

Monthly Postcards series: Each month, I share an archive of journal entries, mini-essays, and curated art, books, films, poetry, and music. Read the latest:

Letters series: Every quarter, I share a thematic syllabus for deeper living, reading, and self-study. Read the latest":

the slow philosophy

a chic guide to reading, intellectual intimacy, media literacy, and under-discussed, overlooked works. best for those who love secondhand books, slow films, beauty, and quiet hours. personal philosophical essays, weekly reading guides & monthly postcards.

By tulipe

[Dec 15 - Dec 21, 2025]

Preface: It has been reported that we are living in an era of cognitive and literacy decline. We need to work together to normalize content that protect us from the brain rot of the modern scroll, depleting critical thinking skills, the fading practice of deep reading, and the general decline of the humanities — none of which we can afford. As part of the good fight, I have been putting together these weekly reading guides as well as monthly postcards with curated recommendations of the most nourishing, expansive media content I encounter.

This Week’s Classic Essays

Politics and the English Language - George Orwell
Orwell was a war correspondent & a prominent literary editor before dominating fiction. This is one his most enduring essays. He writes about how vague, inflated, and dishonest language corrupts political thought, and argues that sloppy writing both reflects and enables bad thinking, especially in politics, where euphemism and abstraction are used to hide what’s really underneath it all: cruelty and lies. Clear language, he insists, is not just a stylistic choice but a moral and political act. Well, he did write 1984! Thanks, George Orwell.

Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare - James Baldwin
Baldwin is the most poetically masterful essayist I have ever read. Here, he revisits his early resentment toward Shakespeare as a symbol of cultural exclusion and colonial authority — which makes sense because we might love Shakespeare but the man WAS Elizabethan — and explains how he eventually came to recognize Shakespeare’s deep understanding of human complexity. Baldwin-style, he eventually reflects on education, power, and ownership of culture, arguing that great literature belongs to anyone willing to confront its truths. Baldwin is the reason I have been able to read classical authors at all — despite their problematic viewpoints.

Bonus:
Letter From A Region In My Mind - James Baldwin
I had to include this one not only because it’s Baldwin’s best work, but it might be one of the best essays ever written — period. A deeply personal piece on faith, race, and identity, this essay introduced me to the magical world of Baldwin’s writing. He traces his early involvement with the church and his eventual rejection of organized religion. Through intimate reflection and moral urgency, he explores how religion can both uplift and imprison, and how America’s racial crisis is inseparable from its spiritual failures. This essay, and his prose, will give you chills.

Now, onto the contemporary.

Last Week’s Best Pieces of Writing

Note: My guides span every corner of thought. Each brings its own light. The aim is to read widely, think critically, and notice where ideas meet and where they part. No school of thought should be a fan club. Accountability, nuance, and the ability to take compassionate, principled stances are the only grown-up postures in life, society, and culture. Let’s think for ourselves and find common ground.

The Truth Physics Can No Longer Ignore - The Atlantic
The article argues that physics can no longer ignore life as something fundamentally different from inert matter, because living systems challenge long-held assumptions about how the universe works. Traditional physics relies on reductionism — the idea that everything can be explained by breaking it down into particles and laws — but life behaves as a self-organizing, evolving process that can’t be predicted from its parts. Living things maintain themselves, use information for their own goals, and act autonomously in ways machines do not. New approaches from complexity science suggest that “more is different,” meaning higher-level systems like organisms have emergent properties that physics alone can’t reduce away. Understanding life this way could help explain how life began, how to detect it on other planets, and how to think more clearly about intelligence and AI. Ultimately, the author suggests that studying life may reshape physics itself, pushing it toward a more collaborative, interdisciplinary future.

When Story Loses the Plot - Los Angeles Review of Books
The essay argues that contemporary culture is moving away from traditional, plot-driven storytelling toward other ways of making meaning, such as mood, character types, identity labels, and games. A decade ago, “storytelling” was treated as the key to understanding everything — from politics to personal identity — but critics have since warned that stories can oversimplify reality and impose false coherence. Today’s fast-paced, fragmented media environment, combined with shortened attention spans and constant information flow, makes sustained narrative arcs harder to follow and less persuasive. As a result, many films, TV shows, and cultural forms now downplay plot and instead focus on atmosphere, emotional texture, or recognizable character archetypes. These alternatives still provide orientation, meaning, and satisfaction, even without clear beginnings, climaxes, or resolutions. The shift suggests that while humans still need narrative to make sense of life, we are experimenting with new structures that feel better suited to a world marked by uncertainty, distraction, and skepticism toward neat endings.

How Did a City of 10 Million People Nearly Run Out of Water? - The New York Times
The title of this op-ed felt haunting to me so I just had to read it. How does this even happen? The writer explains how Tehran, a city of 10 million people, came close to running out of water due to a mix of severe drought, climate change, rapid population growth, and poor water management. Climate change has made the region hotter and drier, reduced mountain snowpack, and caused rainfall to come in short bursts that don’t replenish groundwater. That said, he says human factors matter just as much: decades of underinvestment in infrastructure, widespread illegal wells, overuse by agriculture, and explosive urban growth have pushed water demand far beyond sustainable limits. The author’s main point is that Tehran’s water crisis can’t be solved by clever fixes or dramatic gestures like moving the capital to a new location. Those ideas sound bold, but they avoid the harder truth: the city has grown far beyond what its environment can support. Tehran doesn’t just have a temporary shortage — it has a structural problem. There simply isn’t enough water available, year after year, to sustain so many people, farms, and industries at current levels. Drawing on historical examples of cities that collapsed after mismanaging water, the essay warns that modern cities are not immune to natural constraints and must learn to live within them rather than assuming technology can always prevent disaster.

Christianity Is a Dangerous Faith - The New York Times
From conservative columnist David French — the title is more sensational than the argument itself. The column actually argues that all religions become dangerous when it is practiced with absolute certainty and a hunger for power, because that mindset can justify cruelty toward others in the name of righteousness. David French contrasts this kind of fundamentalism with what he sees as true Christianity, which is rooted in Jesus’s humility, vulnerability, and rejection of political dominance. Jesus was born poor, lived without worldly power, and refused to lead a political revolution, instead teaching love of enemies and service to others. French says many Christians often ignore this and instead pursue control, condemnation, and cultural victory. In his view, Christianity properly lived demands self-sacrifice, refusal to hate, and resistance to the urge to dominate others, even when doing so is politically or socially costly. That’s a framework that should apply to every religion — as well as secular ideologies.

What Happened When My Yale Students Gave Up Their Phones for Four Weeks — The New York Times
Describes a Yale instructor’s experiment requiring students to give up their phones and internet access for four weeks during a study-abroad course in France, and the surprising benefits that followed. Rather than resisting, students welcomed the break (who wouldn’t?!) and quickly noticed dramatic improvements in focus, sleep, creativity, and confidence. Free from constant digital distractions, they wrote more deeply, read faster, rested better, and rediscovered play, conversation, and sustained attention. The author argues that today’s students are not incapable of concentration but overwhelmed by addictive technologies and poorly designed academic systems that demand constant connectivity. She concludes that colleges should create structured, collective offline spaces — phone-free programs, dorms, or campuses — to give students the conditions they need to think clearly, learn deeply, and reconnect with their intellectual and creative capacities.

Making Sense of Middle Earth: Exploring the World of J.R.R. Tol­kien - Literary Hub
The essay reflects on how J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings shaped the author’s childhood and explains why these books feel so powerful and different to so many readers. He describes first encountering Tolkien through confusing images, unfamiliar names, and incomplete explanations, and argues that this sense of mystery — having to piece together a world from fragments—is central to Tolkien’s lasting impact. Rather than being a flaw, the gaps, contradictions, and unfinished feeling of Middle-earth draw readers into actively making sense of the story, much like learning about the real world. For the writer, these books became intertwined with memories of comfort, fear, illness, and family, giving them deep emotional weight. He suggests that Tolkien’s uniqueness comes not from any single element, but from a combination of storytelling, scale, and discovery — especially how The Lord of the Rings transforms The Hobbit into the first glimpse of a much larger, richer world that readers learn to understand on their own.

Mob Rules - The Baffler
The essay reflects on growing up near the site where Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana was murdered and uses that memory to explore how the Chicago Outfit once wielded enormous power over labor, politics, and everyday life. It explains how figures like Giancana and Al Capone have since become romanticized folk characters, remembered less for their violence and corruption and more for myths about loyalty, order, and helping the community. Through interviews with descendants of mobsters and victims, the piece shows how nostalgia glosses over the reality that the mob thrived by controlling unions, colluding with politicians and law enforcement, and violently suppressing threats. It argues that this sanitized fascination with gangsters reflects a broader longing for a brutal but predictable system under capitalism, and helps explain why modern reactionary politics sometimes echo mob-style ideas of power, loyalty, and “law and order,” even as the real human cost fades into the background.

Critical Thinking

1. language, story, and power

how do language and narrative shape what we are willing to see, excuse, or ignore — in politics, religion, science, and culture? where do euphemism, simplification, or myth-making replace moral clarity, and who benefits when they do?

(orwell; baldwin; lrb; baffler; french)

2. imitation, attention, and discernment

where do these essays show imitation — of belief, certainty, taste, or authority — taking the place of independent judgment? how do attention, reading habits, and media environments shape our ability to think clearly and resist consensus thinking?

(orwell; yale phones; lrb; tolkien)

3. limits, humility, and meaning

several writers resist neat explanations — whether about life, cities, faith, or fictional worlds. what changes when we accept limits instead of mastery, and humility instead of certainty? how might this reshape how we think about progress, power, responsibility, and meaning?

(atlantic physics; nyt water; tolkien; baldwin; french)

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preface — a sea change

i went to barnes & noble two nights ago and found myself recoiling at the sight of the books in my hands. they were much too crisp and factory-fresh, like bleached laundry. much too new — much like the recoil i felt at the sight of books in my hands.

my love affair with books is longstanding. the emotion i normally associate with book and bookish paraphernalia is one of tender sweetness. so walking out of that bookstore with my bag full — for the thousandth time in my life — regretful, came as a shock. i had no idea that the impact of my recent and repeated and addictive and twice-weekly visits to the last bookstore, studio city — where all the books are used and worn and frayed, btw — reshaped my taste. enough now that i find myself slightly irritated at the idea of going to barnes and noble at all.

i pause, because that’s a phrase i never thought i’d be caught dead saying.

but there’s no point denying it. i love used books. i love rare books. especially the ones with words like “how could she?” and “here the mother realizes she hates her daughter” and “means grouchy” scribbled in the marginalia by past owners and bookworms.

i wonder if they ever wonder who might inherit their books. i would. i hope one day i’ll donate some of my own books and annotations for someone else to find. (preferably to the last bookstore, studio city.)

i emphasize “, studio city,” because the last bookstore, downtown is a swampland run by swamp creatures more apt for selling secondhand perfume. not my splendid, buoyant secondhand books.

i love them. i love a cracked spine. i love an ambered page. i love a looseness and a crease. i love that books can be carried forward from bookworm to bookworm — like a game of telephone with an unspoken rule to keep the conversations going. it’s a club. i’m a proud member.

i still have my barnes & noble membership, and always will. i live across the street from one — part of why i pay what i do for my teensy apartment. but for now, my love affair with new books is starting to fade a slow fade — perhaps signaling another phase of life. exploring newness refines taste. used books tend to be older books and from my recent excursions, secondhand classics are a great way to find under-popular, overlooked, yet deeply powerful books as well. they’re now my obsession. i’m a forager now.

which is exactly what you will find in the list that follows. i hope these titles resonate with you. they’re beautiful, each one. some are rare and not always spoken of. some are well-read and well known. i began by curating writers as i have grown to care less about plot, characters, even prose. what i care about now is a powerful voice. the names below have some of the strongest.

without further ado, here is my reading hopefuls for the new year.

the slow philosophy

a chic guide to reading, intellectual intimacy, media literacy, and under-discussed, overlooked works. best for those who love secondhand books, slow films, beauty, and quiet hours. personal philosophical essays, weekly reading guides & monthly postcards.

By tulipe

intertext — book recommendations

novels (modern classics)

thomas hardy – far from the madding crowd
ever the melodramatist, hardy more or less abandoned the novel after sustained critical hostility, turning instead to poetry, where his fatalism and pessimism could be more freely expressed. but his novels are worthy reads. often overshadowed by tess, this book follows a fiercely independent woman who inherits a farm and must navigate three very different men who love her: one loyal, one reckless, and one dangerous. the book i wrote my high school freshman paper on — one that i no doubt will have a different lens for now.l

jane austen – persuasion
unlike her most popular earlier novels, this one is sadder and her most mature. follows a thoughtful woman persuaded years ago to give up the man she loved for his lack of status and fortune who then returns with success but still wounded.

john o’hara – appointment in samarra
one of my favorite novels — i’ve been meaning to reread it ever since i found myself reciting scenes from it aloud to a friend, which reminded me how startlingly ahead of its time it was in portraying psychological self-destruction, masculinity, marital jealousy, and societal pressure. a book about a wealthy but restless man who ruins his life over three days through impulsive cruelty.

rabindranath tagore – ghore baire (the home and the world)
the first non-european nobel laureate in literature and a bengali polymath, tagore was a gifted poet and humanist too often sidelined in western literature. ghore baire is a psychological love story about a married woman who learns how dangerous fanaticism can be as she’s torn between her ethical, restrained husband and a charismatic nationalist political leader who pulls her toward him.

f. scott fitzgerald - tender is the night
overshadowed by but far more emotionally honest than gatsby, this is about a charming and glamorous american couple living among wealthy expats on the french riviera whose marriage starts to crack under the pressure of mental illness and purposelessness. on how privilege can hide deep unhappiness and the slow erosion of life.

joseph conrad - victory
an underrated conrad about a wealthy, intelligent man who lives alone on a remote island believing that detachment will keep him safe from harm — until he rescues a woman in danger of being exploited and becomes emotionally attached to and responsible for her. on the evil side of innocence, silence, and withdrawal.

essays, criticism & philosophy

virginia woolf – a room of one’s own
this book is widely cited but less often read attentively. woolf is one of my favorite essayists and this is a holy essay arguing that for women to write, they need literal and intellectual independence — space, income, and permission to think without interruption. part literary criticism, part manifesto, part fury.

joan didion – slouching toward bethlehem
didion is my heart and soul — a name that will appear every year, and so will this book. a collection of essays about disintegration of culture, ideals, and the self. on california, counterculture, and moral drift — this is still a canonical work but far less discussed now than historically.

umberto eco – inventing the enemy
a very underrated series of essays on why societies need enemies in order to define themselves, exploring fear, ideology, language, and mass culture and showing how “the enemy” is often a psychological construction rather than a real threat — and easily weaponized.

simone de beauvoir – the ethics of ambiguity
de beauvoir won me over after the second sex. here, she argues that ambiguity is unavoidable and that ethical life means acting anyway, without guarantees. on the rejection of moral absolutes and passive detachment.

mary wollstonecraft – a vindication of the rights of woman
our mother — and mary shelley’s too — wollstonecraft is one of the reasons i have any rights whatsoever as a woman. on women’s education, independence, and moral equality, she rejects rousseau’s idiotic idea that women are naturally inferior, insisting instead that society makes them so.

george saunders – a swim in the pond in the rain
saunders is a national gem — as a human being, professor, and short story writer. part reading guide, part craft book, he walks through four classic russian short stories to show how fiction works — generous, funny, and deeply attentive to what reading slowly can teach us.

plato – the symposium
after rereading more popular republic this year, this feels like a natural segue. a philosophical dialogue about love, desire, beauty, and truth, staged as a dinner party where each guest gives a speech on eros. less about romance than about a more soulful form of love.

letters, memoir & reflection

i was indoctrinated into the world of letters by my favorite girl & twin , and i will forever love her as it’s given me some of the most beautiful reading experiences ever.

franz kafka – letters to milena
these unfathomably gorgeous letters of longing, anxiety, devotion, and self-loathing all tangled together were written for a married woman that he never actually got together with, and isn’t even the only woman he loved — but the letters live on.

dmitri nabokov - letters to vera
written to the great love of nabokov’s life. playful, affectionate, and intellectually alive — and deeply intertwined with work. unlike kafka, nabokov did marry vera, who will later save lolita from being burned by nabokov.

rainer maria rilke – letters to a young poet
a slim, life-altering book. rilke urges “a young poet” not to seek answers too quickly, but to live the questions instead. endlessly rereadable.

ernest hemingway – a moveable feast
after not being mature enough to understand a farewell to arms or the old man and the sea in school, i saw the light this year when one of my favorite people said he was her favorite and i should try again. what he’s doing behind those simple words is pure brilliance. often overlooked in favor of his novels, a moveable feast is a love letter to paris, youth, hunger, and becoming a writer.

patti smith – devotion
a tiny, intimate book about writing, dreaming, and paying attention. smith reflects on creativity, memory, and ritual and gets deeply personal.

short fiction

raymond carver – what we talk about when we talk about love
carver is one of my favorite short story writers. these stories are about love, failure, silence, and what people can’t quite say to one another. spare on the surface but devastating underneath.

tillie olsen – tell me a riddle
another favorite who also stays spare on the surface. these stories focus on women, aging, marriage, unfinished lives, and unrealized potential — everything literature too often overlooks.

the penguin book of the modern american short story
a collection full of hidden gems, and one i’m especially excited to annotate and looking forward to gifting myself this holiday (i mean, i’m going to gift myself all of these this holiday).

poetry & drama

emily dickinson – selected poems & letters
i’m hoping this is the year i read less-discussed dickinson — instead of endlessly returning to the same familiar favorites. “i can wade grief,” “we like the look of agony,” “it was not death, for i stood up” — all tend to get skipped and might be emotionally restrained but they’re still strong.

t.s. eliot – selected poems
i have never liked t. s. eliot — so this one has remained under-discussed in my life as a diehard frostian. out of loyalty to frost’s feelings toward him — i more or less decided to paint eliot as irredeemable. but after coming around to hemingway, i’m trying to undo some old dogmas so i’m willing to give it an honest try.

alice oswald - falling awake
a contemporary listing, her work is super attentive and feels closer to listening than reading.

william shakespeare – othello
still a canonical shakespeare, but feels far less discussed in practice. every year, i reread a shakespeare and the last time i read othello was in sixth grade so it’s time to return to it properly and revisit my mother’s favorite shakespeare and probably my most hated literary villain. a tragedy about jealousy, manipulation, and how easily trust can be destroyed.

postscript

full list here. hosted by dear jane books to help support independent bookstores.

i’d love to hear from you. which titles have you read, or would like to?

epilogue

introducing: book club. for january, we discussed opening a small reading group for the slow philosophers to read one short book over the month. the aim is to refine taste and rediscover awe in the hidden corners of literature.

space is limited by design to preserve intimacy. no cost. self-paced. capped enrollment. request to join below:

note: this is a standalone edition. additional sessions will be announced selectively, as they arise.

that’s all for today! g’bye for now.

best,
tulipe

(follow ig, goodreads)

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Featured this week:
Germany’s uneasy return to military strength; Thomas Aquinas’s surprisingly modern theory of happiness; debates around Jane Austen — her greatest novel and what her satire of early “wellness” culture warns us about; revisiting Virginia Woolf through biography, diaries, and one of her best published essays at The Yale Review; on medieval symbolism; how our emotions differ from our ancestors; a fascinating piece on the political psychology of groups; critiques of abuse in classical music.

This week’s classics: Closing with classic defenses of idleness from Bertrand Russell and Virginia Woolf, questioning what we owe work, leisure, and the past.

This week’s essays are from Litery Hub, London Review of Books, The Atlantic, The Times, Aeon, n+1, Public Books, The Yale Review.

About The Weekly Reading Guide series: Includes the best pieces of contemporary writing — essays, op-eds, and articles — from great and rare corners of the internet and media. If you don’t have time to scour online newsstands, are tired of the same circulating stories, and want to stay up-to-date on a more eclectic roundup of current cultural, social, political, literary, and artistic conversations, I hope you find this series useful.

About This Week’s Classic Essays: Part of The Weekly Reading Guides, features essays from the classical canon to mix up current reads with foundational texts.

Read previous guides:

Monthly Postcards series: Books, films, reflections.

[Dec 8 - Dec 13, 2025]

This Week’s Classic Essays

If you haven’t read it yet, this essay from last week was my most-read. Drawing on philosophy and literature, it’s a personal reflection on the lost art of doing nothing—and our urgent need to relearn it. I shared 20 ways to practice it, along with artwork that captures the idea visually. I hope you had a chance to read it. I’m still riding the wave of those thoughts, which is why this week’s classic essays feel perfectly aligned. Woolf writes about a nighttime walk through London under the pretext of buying a pencil, while Russell dismantles the harmful rules we’ve inherited about work. Aristotle once said that leisure is the goal of civilization—these essays are a powerful reminder of that truth.

In Praise of Idleness - Bertrand Russell (Harper’s, 1932)
Russell argues that the modern glorification of working long hours is not morally good or necessary, but a harmful inheritance from older, unequal, preindustrial, class-based societies. Because modern technology can meet everyone’s needs with far less labor, he believed people should work no more than four hours a day and enjoy more leisure. He critiques the idea of “work as virtue” and “the dignity of labor” suggesting it has long been used by elites to control others while reserving leisure for themselves. He maintains that leisure, not toil, is the true foundation of civilization, creativity, and social progress, enabling art, science, education, and democratic life to flourish. Russell envisions a society in which widely shared leisure leads to greater happiness, kindness, creativity, and peace, replacing exhaustion, inequality, and the moral obsession with profit-based productivity.

Street Haunting: A London Adventure - Virginia Woolf (The Yale Review, 1927)
Woolf says that a simple errand — buying a pencil — is a socially acceptable excuse to wander the city and escape the usual self tied to home, habits, and responsibilities. Walking through London at night lets her become an observer rather than a fixed person, freely noticing shop windows, strangers, and small moments of beauty. This is Virginia Woolf’s slow living and her art of doing nothing. As she walks, her attention keeps nagging on human lives, revealing moments of connection alongside the city’s deep inequalities. When she finally returns home, her everyday self closes back around her again, but the walk has given her a temporary “spoil” and proof that escape, even briefly, is possible.

Bonus Read

Smashing the Teapots: Where’s Woolf? - London Review of Books (1997)
This is a review of Hermione Lee’s biography of Virginia Woolf, which I have not read. I’m including it because the final volume of Woolf’s unpublished diaries was released this year, and some of that long-withheld material — including offensive remarks — has rightly prompted renewed scrutiny. I deeply admire Woolf’s literary achievement, but admiration for artistic brilliance does not require moral endorsement. Her work cannot be fully understood without attention to both her private suffering and the historical forces that shaped her world — war, fascism, and antisemitism — which informed her style and her preoccupation with loss and trauma. To present Woolf as simply healthy or fully in control risks overlooking how contradiction, prejudice, and mental illness shaped her critique of what passed for a “civilized” society.

A word on critically reading the classical canon:
Writers such as Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound (open fascist), Dostoevsky, Hemingway, Rousseau (all men, not women, are created equal), and many more, all used language or expressed views that were deeply troubling, and morally suffocating. Many of us encountered their work before fully understanding the historical realities that shaped them. As readers in the present, it’s our responsibility to know not only what we’re reading, but who we’re reading — and from what era. Context doesn’t excuse prejudice, but it allows us to read critically rather than blindly.

This Past Week’s Best Pieces of Writing

Note: My guides span every corner of thought. Each brings its own light. The aim is to read widely, think critically, and notice where ideas meet and where they part. No school of thought should be a fan club. Accountability, nuance, and the ability to take compassionate, principled stances are the only grown-up postures in life, society, and culture. Let’s think for ourselves and find common ground.

How to Be Happy Like Thomas Aquinas — The Atlantic
Thomas Aquinas was instrumental in bringing together Christian faith and the logic-driven philosophy of Aristotle. He believed that faith and reason did not need to compete with one another—a view so influential that his summary of Christian doctrine is still used by the Catholic Church today. Considering this was 13th-century Europe, the fact that no one asked him to drink a glass of hemlock and be quiet seems something of a mystery. Remarkably ahead of his time, he believed that while perfect happiness belongs to heaven, “imperfect happiness” on Earth is possible through balance: rather than suppressing emotions, he argued we should be understanding and guiding emotions (beating modern therapy by centuries), building good habits, and choosing long-term meaning over short-term pleasure. The article shows how closely his ideas match modern happiness research — and Aquinas practiced what he preached by choosing humility over prestige. Aquinas: still winning, centuries later.o.

The following two essays are from last week’s run — I didn’t have time to read while I was undisposed but finally got to them and wanted to squeeze them in!

What If Our Ancestors Didn’t Feel Anything Like We Do? — The Atlantic
As someone who tears up during movies that are supposed to be action comedies, I’ve come to realize what a privilege it is to feel so freely today. For much of human history, people seem to have repressed their emotions far more than we do now. Had they paid attention to Aquinas, perhaps things would’ve gone differently. Historians argue that people in the past didn’t experience emotions the same way we do — feelings like pain and anger were shaped by culture, religion, and daily life, not universal human constants. Instead of assuming we can easily relate to past emotions, the writer suggests studying the worlds that gave those feelings meaning, such as medieval pain tied to Christ’s suffering or Greek anger seen as cosmic disorder. What connects us across time may not be identical emotions, but curiosity about how others experienced the world. It makes sense. What triggers our emotions depends entirely on what we were taught. Some people get angry when they don’t get what they want because they were never denied; others cry when struck, while some respond with rage. It’s all relative.

Which is the best Jane Austen novel? - The Times
The Times staging a staff debate over this holy question is a delightful way to celebrate Austen’s 250th birthday (happy birthday, lass!). Each novel is a strong contender: Sense and Sensibility is praised for its youthful drama and emotional realism; Mansfield Park for its moral depth; Northanger Abbey for its humor and metafictional playfulness; Emma for its technical brilliance and psychological insight; Persuasion for its quiet maturity; and Pride and Prejudice for its unforgettability and swoon-worthy tension between desire and restraint. Each book represents a different stage of Austen’s growth as a writer. What’s your favorite? All answers are correct.

Medieval moons - Aeon
Today, the Moon is simply our planet’s beloved natural satellite. Back in the medieval times, it was far more magical. The phase-changing white angelic globe was a sign filled with meaning. In Christian thought, the Moon symbolized everything from the Church’s dependence on Christ to Christ’s human nature. In Islamic tradition, it took on a more spiritual role as a symbol of devotion to God, while in Sufi thought, forever profound and straight-up, it was God Himself. Seen through lenses of faith, power, and humanity’s search for meaning — long before Galileo’s telescope revealed it to be just… rock — the Moon was, for medieval thinkers, a mystical symbol written across the sky.

Experiences in Groups - n+1
This was such a fascinating essay — if you read nothing else on this list, read this. Lily Scherlis writes about her immersive experience at a conference devoted to “group relations,” a prestigious social experiment that studies unconscious dynamics in group. Strangers are placed together in a room with no agenda, formal roles, or facilitation —to see what happens. The goal is not to argue or vent but to understand better. Through that void, group dynamics are studied. later connects this to her experience at a Gaza solidarity encampment, where she experienced such a profound sense of belonging with the people she chanted alongside that it was difficult to give up once it was over. As Freud suggested, being in a group can feel like hypnosis. Under stress, groups tend to fall into dependency, conflict, or messianic hope, sometimes overburdening individuals until they break. Unstructured group settings can intensify emotion, bring up power struggles, and assign individuals functions they’re not even right for. For instance, if you don’t designate a leader, a “charismatic narcissist ascends de facto.” While the writer remains unsure whether group relations is politically useful, since it can be easily misused, she concludes that groups are unavoidable—and learning to tolerate their discomforts may be essential if collective action is to endure.

Did Jane Austen Invent the Wellness Guy? - Literary Hub
Jane Austen arguably “invented” (or at least prefigured) today’s Wellness Guy through her satire of men obsessed with health, routines, and self-improvement. Characters like Mr. Collins, Mr. Woodhouse (gruel for everyone!), and Sir Walter Elliot constantly worry about diet, aging, and propriety in ways that feel surprisingly modern—Sir Walter, for instance, is personally offended by sun-damaged skin in Persuasion.It’s not saying that wellness is a bad thing — it’s a great thing. UV damage is real. But the obsession over wellness can reveal vanity, privilege, narcissism, and class insulation while ignoring deeper moral and social problem. Fixating on youth and “lifestyle choices” doesn’t make anyone wiser or kinder, and it can delay intimacy and adulthood. Young people still have to solve love and life’s real challenges. To them the writer says, “you don’t have to eat the gruel yet.”

Can Literary Fiction Save Classical Music? - Public Books
I was shocked to read this. A recent wave of literary fiction has exposed classical music’s cultures of abuse, bodily exploitation, entrenched racism, and gender inequality. Drawing on several contemporary novels, the writer reveals the industry’s shockingly harsh labor practices and exclusionary histories, including the severe physical and psychological toll placed on musicians — especially agonizing in a field where physical health is inseparable from one’s vocational livelihood. Classical music has recently had a pop-culture moment, and hopefully that visibility, alongside modern fiction, can help hold the industry accountable and push it toward more ethical artistic futures. I’m exhausted by stories of powerful, repressed figures choosing Machiavellian control over basic humanity. Too many industries suffer from this disease. Leadership without compassion is hollow — and until that changes, it will keep dragging everyone down with it.

Critical Thinking

• Where do you see tension between control and freedom in these essays — whether in work, art, emotion, bodies, or groups — and where do you feel that tension most strongly in your own life? Think about productivity vs. leisure, wellness vs. vanity, discipline vs. joy, group belonging vs. individuality.

• Several of these writers question inherited moral ideals — hard work, sanity, self-optimization, authority, or “civilized” behavior. Which belief did this collection make you most want to reconsider, and why? You might think about Russell on work, Woolf on madness, Aquinas on happiness, or Austen on propriety.

• Many of these essays ask what it means to live well together — in nations, institutions, art worlds, or movements. After reading them, what do you think responsibility to others should look like in a fragile or unequal world?Consider Germany’s rearmament, group dynamics, historical empathy, or care versus exploitation in creative fields.

the slow philosophy

a chic guide to reading, intellectual intimacy, and media literacy — as well as personal philosophical essays. best for those who feel alive in secondhand books, slow films, beauty, and quiet hours. weekly reading guides and monthly postcards.

By tulipe

Featured this week: The best thing I read last week was The New Yorker’s lament on performative reading. Also included: an interview with author Helen Fielding in The Paris Review, a scandal in journalism, a personal account of girlhood & opting out of marriage from a coveted journalist, about a centuries-old library in Concord, the many tempers of Robert Frost, the controversy of “rage bait” as Oxford’s word of the year, and the fall of the prestige thriller.

This week’s essays are from The Paris Review, Lit Hub, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Byline — a mix of free and paywalled pieces.

Introducing — This Week’s Classic Essays: As part of The Weekly Reading Guide, I’m adding a new section featuring two essays from the canon, paired with guiding questions for deep reading. I’m experimenting with the format, so it may evolve — but the goal is to mix up current reads with foundational texts.

Featured this week: Essays by Oscar Wilde and Henry James.

These guides will remain nonfiction.

About The Weekly Reading Guide series: Includes the best pieces of writing — essays, op-eds, and articles — from great and rare corners of the internet and media that are often overlooked. If you don’t have time to scour online newsstands, are tired of the same circulating stories, and want to stay up-to-date on current cultural, social, political, literary, and artistic conversations and discourses, I hope you find this series useful.

Read previous guides:

About the Monthly Postcards: Books, films, reflections.

Read my latest below:

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[Dec 1 - Dec 7, 2025]

This Week’s Classic Essays

Note: This week features two essays in vibrant contrast with one another — Wilde’s defense of life imitating art and James’s of art interpreting life. Those who are writers should find these to be compelling comparisons. Allowing ideas to unfurl over days rather than minutes would be more rewarding. They are dense.

The Decay of Lying - Oscar Wilde
In this dialogue, Wilde challenges the prevailing belief that art should imitate life. He argues instead that life imitates art, and that realism diminishes the imaginative power of culture. Through satire, he critiques the demand for factual accuracy in art and defends illusion as a necessary condition of artistic creation. He positions art as a force that shapes how the world is perceived.

The Art of Fiction - Henry James
James examines the novel as a serious artistic and intellectual form rather than a set of fixed conventions. He rejects rigid rules about plot, subject matter, and moral purpose, arguing that fiction should remain open to the full range of human experience. He believes what determines the quality of a novel is the depth and precision of the writer’s observation. The essay establishes perception and consciousness as the central criteria of literary value.

Critical Thinkin

Wilde vs. James — art, realism, purpose

• Wilde treats illusion as the highest function of art, while James treats careful perception as its core discipline. Which view feels more convincing to you as a reader—and why?

• If Wilde resists realism and James refines it, are they ultimately working against each other, or shaping two complementary definitions of artistic truth?

This Past Week’s Best Short-Form Writing

Note: My guides span every corner of thought. Each brings its own light. The aim is to read widely, think critically, and notice where ideas meet and where they part. No school of thought should be a fan club. Accountability, nuance, and the ability to take compassionate, principled stances are the only grown-up postures in life, society, and culture. Let’s think for ourselves and find common ground.

Catching Up With Helen Fielding - The Paris Review
A delightful interview with the creator of Bridget Jones’s Diary. Fielding speaks about her writing habits, the legacy of Bridget Jones, her deep influence from Pride and Prejudice, and how she gathers material through sharp social observation. I love hearing artists explain the strange mechanics of the creative life. She’s hilarious, self-aware, a little chaotic, and wonderfully honest about the mystery of where ideas come from.

The Curious Notoriety of Performative Reading - The New Yorker
Americans now read for pleasure 40 percent less than they did twenty years ago. Forty percent of fourth graders can’t comprehend basic text. Humanities professors are stunned by students who can’t complete readings or write analytical essays. Last week I shared a philosophy professor’s NYT op-ed warning that students have become “subcognitive” — a word that sounded ripped from 1984. Even the people who do read are increasingly doing it performatively. The author avoids sneering at readers and instead indicts the culture that produces this pressure. Beautifully written, full of passionate despair for the literary world.

The Scandalous Rollout Was The Best Part of Olivia Nuzzi’s Memoir - The New Yorker
I’m putting this on here for the trifecta of human follies: salaciousness, melodrama, and breached ethics. Nuzzi, while covering RFK Jr.’s campaign, entered what an alleged affair of the mind with the politician. Her ex-husband detonated a Substack exposé alleging past improprieties — and also, RFK Jr.’s wife writes a memoir. Journalists perhaps shouldn’t be fraternizing — intellectually or carnally — with their married subjects. Women of the world: for the love of God, married men are not your romantic genre. On top of being a liability, it is a breach of girl code. Please choose someone from the uncoupled population — there are 100m singles roaming Earth as we speak.

The Precariousness of Girlhood and Eternal Union - Byline
A moving essay by Megan O’Sullivan, who poetically recalls calling off her engagement as a young woman after finally acknowledging her long-ignored cold feet. Marriage originated as a practical alliance system simply concerned with property, heirs, and stability. Romantic love wasn’t a thing until much later. I want to marry because of the mythology of courtly love that was passed down to me through the collective female imagination. Today, increasingly independent, women may simply opt out rather than shoulder the possible labor of managing unresolved and inherited emotional debris and covert misogyny. I don’t blame them. Why would they? While 18 is too young to avoid the danger of being psychologically groomed, even 25 without a grounded sense of self can feel unsteady. I cheered for her agency and unfathomable courage.

On the Infinite Lives of the Library - Lit Hub
Library lovers will adore this. The writer, a writer-in-residence at the 300-year-old library in Corcord, Massachusetts, shares stories of the building, its treasures, and its ghosts. Peace must be intoxicating for this man because it positively exudes in his words. The library houses handwritten manuscripts of Thoreau and draft chapters of Little Women. I also admire him for paying tribute to an unsung hero named Sophia — Thoreau’s sister. Without her editing his massive journals into publishable work, the canonical Thoreau as we know him wouldn’t exist. As the writer points out, by extension, imagine the impact: the environmental movement, Gandhi, MLK. All drew from him. He also shares how Ken Burns recently wandered through in advance of his American Revolution documentary. The whole piece is just… happy. A man deeply content in his ancient library. Why I have not begged someone to make me a librarian yet is beyond me, but I won’t get into that.

Discord and Fuss - London Review of Books
Robert Frost, patron saint of my interior life, turns out to have been delightfully irascible! He refused to keep up with contemporary gossip, ignored reviews, and claimed not to know Ezra Pound despite being in the same contemporary circles. People associate Frost with solitude and snowy evenings, but the writer says that he would have laughed if we called him a literary figure. He did have friends but few and far between, and from what it looks like: chosen ones. He had a deep friendship with Edward Thomas, liked Wallace Stevens, and never got around to liking Pound or T. S. Eliot, thinking they were destroying poetry. He detested free verse, calling it “discord and fuss.” The Waste Land? Rubbish, in his view. He could be unreliable, but he was opinionated and emotionally candid, which is a combination I find endearing or maybe I just want to keep loving him but imperfect men with clear feelings is a rare combo. The writer is an Oxford fellow, who writes thoroughly about a poet we all love but know very little about.

Rage Bait Is a Brilliant Word of the Year - The Atlantic
Oxford has crowned “rage bait” as Word of the Year, succeeding “rizz” from 2023 and “brain rot” from 2024. Predictably, cultural conservatives lament this — calling it linguistic decline and claiming we’ve traded Shakespearean elegance for TikTok neologisms. Well, at least, they didn’t crown “67” as its word — but that’s probably because Dictionary.com beat them to it. Language will evolve — that’s what it does. The author predicts 67 will die — the way “on fleek” and “yeet” died as they were hitched to memes. But “selfie,” “cancel,” and “ghosting,” he predicts, will last — and so will “rage bait.”

The Slow Death of the Prestige Thriller - The Atlantic
I remember when Big Little Lies, The Undoing, Mare of Easttown, Sharp Objects, and Little Fires Everywhere were all the rage but yes, since then, I believe the prestige thriller has died. Hopefully, I predict, it’ll get, if it hasn’t yet, replaced by cozy murder mysteries like Knives Out, Agatha Christie, and The Thursday Murder Club — because I feel like people don’t want to panic right now but they’d want to solve a puzzle by the fireplace. This piece is about All Her Fault, a prestige thriller that, paradigmatically, I had not heard about.

Critical Thinking

Which insight, discomfort, or line of thought from this week’s pieces lingers — and what small shift in my thinking or behavior does it ask for?

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Featured this week: an exploration of why every generation remakes Shakespeare in its own image; a loving ode to bibliomania; a beautiful defense of handwriting as the last unmined territory of the private mind; a feel-good piece on American hope; an essay on nostalgia through a vintage light box; a photographic elegy for the disappearing newsroom; a librarian’s validation for those who choose audiobooks; a guide through Dante’s enduring relevance; a doctor’s take on the modern anti-vax movement; a poet’s close reading of Elizabeth Bishop; and a sweeping conversation with Senator Cory Booker on patriotism.

These essays range from The New York Times to Lit Hub to The New Yorker.

A note about The Weekly Reading Guide series: This will be November’s last guide. We’ll continue the series onto December to share a curated selection of the best essays, op-eds, and articles from great — and often overlooked — corners of the internet and media. For readers who don’t have time to scour online newsstands, are tired of the same circulating stories, and want thoughtful engagement with current cultural, social, political, literary, and artistic conversations.

Introducing: This Week’s Classic Essays: A few classical essays from the archive — to mix up current reads with foundational texts.

Read previous week’s guide:

More from the slow philosophy

Monthly Postcards: Books, films, poetry, short reflections.

Read the previous postcard below:

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[Nov 24 - Nov 30, 2025]

Last Week’s Best Pieces of Writing

My guides span every corner of thought — newspapers, Catholic magazines, left-wing journals, faith, politics, pop culture, literature, arts. Each brings its own light. The aim is to read widely, think critically, and notice where ideas meet and where they part. No school of thought should be a fan club. Accountability, nuance, and the ability to take compassionate, principled stances are the only grown-up postures in life, society, and culture. Let’s think for ourselves and find common ground.

Every Generation Gets the Shakespeare It Deserves — The New York Times
The writer — a literary associate at the Shakespeare Theatre Company, which publishes the editions of Shakespeare I own — offers a sharp, funny look at why we keep reinventing Shakespeare to look like… well, us. Using the new Chloé Zhao film Hamnet as his backdrop, of course, he notes that Paul Mescal plays Shakespeare as a brooding heartthrob, and how a millennial cinephile posted a Letterboxd review proclaiming, “Not to be hyperbolic but this movie contains the actual meaning of life.” In contrast, he responds that the film “played to me like mumblecore Shakespeare, conceived for the TikTok generation.” His writes that every era fashions its own Bard and these portraits reveal more about us than about Shakespeare himself. We chase biographical clues in hopes of explaining why we feel the way we do about these plays, but we can’t really solve them by trying to unlock Shakespeare anymore than anyone ever has. We can delve into the life of the mysterious man but the mystery of his plays might be everlasting.
Writer:

Nothing Better Than a Whole Lot of Books: In Praise of Bibliomania — Lit Hub
This is a book-lover’s delight: an ode to the beautiful madness of collecting more books than you could ever read. Moving from Umberto Eco’s seventy-cent copy of Aristotle’s Poetics to the idea of “paper bodies,” the writer explores why so many of us crave the physical presence of books as much as the ideas inside them. He argues that owning books isn’t mere consumerism but a way of mapping who we are and what we still hope to learn. As a book collector since age seven, I agree. I have stopped trying to figure out where my passion for the physical copy comes from and I don’t think any one theory can truly put the matter to rest as they all seem to fit me just fine. Perfect for anyone who has stacks on the nightstand and double-shelved bookcases, which, I honestly think must be most of my subscribers.
Writer:

Paper-and-Pen Diaries Are Forever — The New York Times
This is a diary-lover’s delight, and Anais Nin, who kept a diary until she died, would adore it. A beautiful defense of handwriting in an era where everything feels scraped and swallowed by the digital. I love the humble diary — ink on paper, loose pages, half-formed thoughts. And it might be one of the last places where the human voice can exist untouched by algorithms. She talks about found diaries, Virginia Woolf’s loose-knit entries, and the way analog objects hold meaning that cloud storage never can. I love her message and her attempt at rescuing the human thought, and I’d like to join her. AI is stealing our words and thoughts, and jumbling them up for people to use as theirs, and as a writer, that’s really hard to cope with. But I’m so happy she reminded us that the safest place for our mind is still a notebook, and the act of writing is our freedom. I urge you all, alongside Ms. Koppel, to start keeping a diary.
Writer: Lily Koppel

Do Audiobooks Count as Reading? — The New York Times
Ever feel guilty for listening to the audiobook, rather than reading the actual text? Me too. But, as it turns out, our guilt may be unfounded. In this op-ed, Brian Bannon, the chief librarian of the New York Public Library, reframes the idea of listening to an audiobook as another — not a lesser — way of reading. He makes his argument for the merits of auditory reading from a perspective of accessibility, psychology, and a literary re-advent. More studies are showing how our brains are equally stimulated when intaking words through hearing as they would be through sight — so long as we are actively listening. At a time when American adults are reading for pleasure less and less, we can embrace the rise of audiobooks as a new method for accessing literature, not its intellectual inferior. So pop your AirPods in, kick your feet up, and enjoy a guilt-free listen to The Hunger Games. Brian says so.
Writer: Brian Bannon

Where Dante Guides Us — The New Yorker
This piece explores why The Divine Comedy still feels alive in the bones of modern society. The impact of this 700-year-old poem is startlingly contemporary: we can see that in the Primo Levi in Auschwitz and in the remixing of Dante with Led Zeppelin. The writer follows Dante through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, lingering on his doubts, his audacity, his politics, and his heartbreak for Virgil. She makes a compelling case that the endurance of Dante is a tribute to how human he is: ambitious, confused, stubborn, moved by beauty, always questioning. Doesn’t he sound like a man whose pathos would match the likes of today? I loved reading why this medieval epic continues to be read, and why it continues to feel like prophecy.
Writer: Claudia Roth Pierpont

Jorie Graham on Elizabeth Bishop’s “At The Fishhouses” — The New Yorker
The author, Pulitzer-Prize winning poet Jorie Graham, does a close reading of Elizabeth Bishop’s iconic poem, At the Fishhouses. I think more pieces like these should exist — I would love for a modern-day poet to close-read William Blake and Emily Dickinson for me. In revisiting it, Graham notes how through meticulous description — the gleam of fish scales, the sting of cold water — Bishop leads the reader toward a moment of near-spiritual insight, her genius for turning physical detail into metaphysical revelation, and why this poem still remains relevant.
Writer: Jorie Graham

Cool Enchantment — Public Books
Have you ever seen a vintage Hamm’s beer “Scene-O-Rama” light box hanging in an aging Southern California pizzeria? The writer has, and he explores why old advertising can feel strangely moving to us all. As someone who lives deep in nostalgia, this piece felt like a hug—it shows how even trivial objects can become portals into memory, fantasy, or the inner world if we let them. Next time you see an old but familiar ad, ask yourself why you feel the way you do.
Writer: M. P. Kennedy

The Offices Only a Newsperson Could Love — The New Yorker
I had to include this piece as I’ve spent all of last month watching first amendment movies, and also, I love the first line: “There is something inspiring about an ugly building.” It’s so true. The idea of simple provisional, functional place feels so beautiful. This is a tender, funny, and slightly heartbreaking portrait of America’s shrinking local newsrooms from a writer paying tribute to Anne Hermes, a photographer who spent six years documenting American newsrooms. Included in the piece are photographs she took, throughout the years. I loved seeing the beauty and absurdity of these rooms: it’s unglamorous, respectable, old-school, beautiful journalism that survives because it’s necessary, and is held together by a stubborn sense of duty and clutch of the first amendment that all reporters share in their hearts.
Writer: Zach Helfand

Critical Thinking
Where does the writer’s worldview subtly reveal itself—in examples, doubts, or omissions?

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Note: Retiring from my lowercase minimalism era as this week, the MLA in me has risen.

Featured this week: a dispatch on the lost civic value of shame; a dossier on the global erosion of deep literacy; an exploration of what public beauty reveals about a society; a bookish dive into Gutenberg’s revolution; the rise and fall of Literary Twitter; a thoughtful, slightly mournful piece on alcohol, creativity, and F. Scott Fitzgerald; a sweeping look at global depopulation.

Each issue will arrive weekly throughout November.

I also shared a Slow Reading Toolkit — a few analog companions to make your reading more meaningful. You can find that, and this month’s selections so far, below:

[November 17 - 23, 2025]

This Week’s Best Pieces of Writing

Note: These pieces span every corner of thought — newspapers, a Catholic magazine, a left-wing journal, faith, politics, pop culture, literature, arts. Each brings its own light. The aim is to read widely, think critically, and notice where ideas meet and where they part. I don’t believe any school of thought should be a fan club. Accountability, nuance, and the ability to take compassionate, principled stances are the only grown-up postures in life, society, and culture. Let’s think for ourselves and find common ground.

More Shame, Please - The Dispatch
I grew up in a household where “Tulipe, have you no shame?” was practically a proverb. So this caught my eye immediately. As someone who grew up in the Eastern Hemisphere for the first part of my life and the Western Hemisphere the second, I wasn’t sure I could define “shame” in universal terms. This essay argues that shame — once a modest civic guardrail — has nearly vanished from American public life, replaced by a culture where shamelessness is a superpower. The writer moves through recent scandals to show what happens when public life loses a basic sense of decency. Shame can absolutely be weaponized in the worst ways, and yet its total absence is its own problem, leaving a vacuum where accountability should be. There has to be a middle ground: a place where people can admit fault without being annihilated, and where a basic sense of decency still matters. A thoughtful read about a feeling we’ve tried hard to outrun; and maybe need, in small, sincere doses, to stay human.
Writer:

Brain Rot Without Borders - The Baffler
The brain rot is now global. While more people than ever can technically read, fewer and fewer of us can really read, hold complexity, accept ambiguity, sustain attention, or narrate our own lives. This is a massive multi-author dossier that argues that the world is entering a crisis of “deep literacy.” I’m glad to have been introduced to this term and adopting it as a personal hill-to-die-on through The Slow Philosophy. And for good reason because the report is chilling: from China’s hyper-commercial web fiction and three-minute vertical dramas, to South Korea’s demand that literature be “easy,” (scoff), to Sudan’s split between oral culture and weaponized misinformation, to Mexico’s literature students who can no longer retell what they’ve read without sounding like Netflix synopses. And this isn’t accidental: states, platforms, and markets benefit from a citizenry that scrolls endlessly but rarely interprets. But thankfully, there are glimpses of hope: a book nook at the foot of a Philippine mountain, typewriters clacking in a Zurich bar, a Sudanese writer uploading banned novels as free PDFs. I spent time at The Last Bookstore’s new Studio City branch this weekend, and it moved me that businesses like these still flourish against the odds. It’s still a sobering and slightly devastating read. But if you care about slow reading, this is basically a field report from the front lines.
Writer: (et al.)

The Writing on the Wall - The Lamp
I found this piece on vandalism, beauty, memory, and what we choose to preserve in public life deeply compelling. The writer offers a cultural lament about what has happened to the visual and moral texture of our cities. As someone who is no stranger to cultural lamentations myself, I felt exactly where he was coming from. The writer recalls old English walls marked by fading slogans, ghostly ads, and fragments of verse — not always beautiful, but full of history and meaning. . He contrasts that with modern graffiti, which he sees as more chaotic and symptomatic of a decline in public care. His sharpest critique is directed at Canterbury Cathedral, which deliberately installed fake graffiti as art—something he interprets as an abdication of its responsibility to protect beauty and the sacred. Look, art is subjective and endlessly debatable. But having seen a lot of vandalism in the many cities I’ve lived in, I have to agree that the marks we leave on our cities reflect our collective self-respect. This is a thoughtful, mournful essay about public beauty, shared responsibility, and the subtle ways a culture reveals its values. The more perceptive our art criticism becomes, the more refined our own sense of beauty grows as criticism teaches us what to notice.
Writer:

“Slice It Up” — London Review of Books
I’ve always known Gutenberg as the man who invented the printing press. Yet I owe almost everything I love in my life to that invention — books, scripts, papers, journals, newspapers, magazines. But as with anything, the real story is far bigger and stranger. Turns out, East Asia had printed books centuries earlier, and Gutenberg’s breakthrough came from a specific combination of technology and timing. Most of his career was spent printing disposable items like indulgences and grammar books, and the man himself remains a near-total mystery. For the man known for inventing the printing press, we know almost nothing about his first thirty years. Most surviving records are lawsuits, debts, and little else. We don’t even know what he looked like. Even his Bible went obsolete, with some copies torn up and used as binding scraps. He died without fame, and for centuries others were credited with his invention. Only later did antiquarians resurrect him as a foundational figure, shaping the myth we now take for granted. It’s astonishing how close he came to disappearing entirely, and even more astonishing how much of our world depends on a few fragile pages surviving long enough to be recognized. A beautifully strange origin story for something that now feels inevitable.
Writer:

How Sober Should a Writer Be? F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Ambivalence of American Drinking Culture — The Yale Review

The relationship between writing and drinking has always carried a tragic–glamorous allure. We mythologize the drunk writer the same way we romanticize the tortured artist — all haze, heartbreak, and half-finished manuscripts. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bukowski: the whole lineage of men who wrote like angels and drank like demons. This essay explores what happens as that era fades. Americans are drinking less, middle-aged women hate hangovers, and mocktails have replaced martinis; even writers no longer lean into the old practice of literary intoxication. The author finds this shift everywhere: nonfiction that no longer praises wild nights, fiction where drunk characters are not charming but dangerous. Fitzgerald’s little book On Booze becomes a window into a vanished age, painting him as both dazzling and doomed, his art soaked (beautifully, tragically) in alcohol. The writer calls it dazzling and painful — and it is. We raise a glass to Fitzgerald, the eternal cautionary tale and patron saint of literary intoxication, who proved that some writers can handle the bottle, and some definitely cannot.
Writer:

Are we doomed? — London Review of Books
This is a riveting, unsettling look at global depopulation and why collapsing birth rates may shape the twenty-first century even more than climate change. The essay begins in Japan, where nearly one hundred thousand people are over the age of one hundred and almost no children are being born, a demographic pyramid flipped entirely upside down. From there, the writer explores why modern life makes parenthood feel impossibly expensive, why no country has successfully reversed a falling birth rate, and how climate pressures and migration will collide with aging societies in unpredictable ways. The final section turns philosophical, suggesting that humanity’s demographic decline may have begun centuries ago and is now accelerating. It’s a sobering, beautifully argued piece about the quiet future taking shape around us.
Writer:

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.

featured this week: a reporter’s fresh reading of moby-dick, an economist essay on the changing sociology of relationships, a sharp analysis that uses julius caesar to explain america’s legal system, two pieces on linguistics and art deco, and a reflection on jane austen’s craft for her 250th birthday.

each issue will arrive every sunday throughout november. i hope to continue through december and beyond.

read last week’s guide:

[November, 10 - 16 2025]

The Best Essays from the Past Week

“the great relationship recession” — the economist
this was pretty funny and shocking to me. relationships are no longer sought after. vogue has declared that for the modern woman, having a boyfriend was actually embarrassing. modern life increasingly makes partnership feel optional, expensive, or even burdensome. no modern girl needs a partner who, for instance, might need to be taught how to respect women, be faithful, be an adult. turns out for 100 million people, that’s not so attractive anymore. it also reflects upon the changing conventional landscape of our times: back in the day, when marriage was a big deal for women who couldn’t fend for themselves due to the strict societal family roles, endured all kinds of nonsense from men: infidelity, violence, just plain disrespect. today, turns out, nobody wants to deal with it anymore. it’s a sober, unsentimental reminder that sociology is changing in its face. it also ends on a haunting not that there’s a chance ai will replace boyfriends for many. ai is kind, compassionate, loyal. i guess i get it.

“toward a university of repair” — public books
i love reading about education. this is a powerful essay on the modern university. using the recent congressional hearing on haverford college as its frame, the author shows how a small quaker-rooted campus became a proxy battleground for national anxieties about antisemitism, protest, and free expression. but the deeper argument is larger: the author states that america is addicted to punishment, a playground that treats disagreement as dangerous, and conflict as moral failure, instead of treating these as the raw material of learning. by looking at haverford college’s restorative model, which might be more easy to mock than dismiss, the essay explores what it would mean to build institutions that repair harm rather than exile the harmed and the harming alike. a humane read about justice and community.

“what’s the difference between a god and a monster?” — los angeles review of books
a fascinating review of brandon grafius’s scared by the bible, a book that reads scripture through the lens of horror, by taking the text’s seeming violence, dread, and ambiguity seriously. i haven’t read the book but found it fascinating that the reviewer argues that the bible’s most unsettling passages, from demonic possession to genocidal warfare to the terror of the divine, have always lived closer to monster studies than sunday school. grafius treats horror films as a key to understanding these stories, showing how fear, revulsion, and awe can illuminate the divine as both comforter and threat. the author writes, “this is a book that takes both the bible and horror movies seriously. not only is it normal to be scared by the bible, but that also may be the best way to read it.”

“another cruise” (lapham’s quarterly)
i’ve read moby-dick as a “sea adventure” before but it really is america’s philosophical epic, it’s own divine comedy. if i read it now, i’d probably figure that the whale was god, nature, fate, trauma, the unknowable, the “you” you cannot escape. it’s endlessly interpretable. this essay caught my eye as a deep literary reflection on re-reading moby-dick at the age ahab was when he met his doom. the writer drifts through emerson’s journals, obscure 19th-century references, mutiny, homoerotic subtexts, and melville’s own oddities as an autodidact. it also marvels at how the novel’s “errors” and repetitions reveal a deeper anxiety about identity and consciousness. how terrifying is it to have consciousness without an identity? pretty terrifying if you read the book through that lens. it’s criticism and personal meditation at once, making you reflect how much you may have already changed as a person, when you revisit a classic at a later age after having visited it for the first time as a younger reader.

“choosing the word of the year is no easy feat” — lit hub
a funny, nerdy peek behind the curtain of how a single word comes to define an entire year. stefan fatsis traces the chaotic, oddly democratic process that runs from dictionary boardrooms to hotel ballrooms full of linguists arguing over vibes, memes, suffixes, and the political temperature of the moment. prepare for lexical trivia as well as a portrait of how language metabolizes culture, including our fears, jokes, and collective breakdowns. full of great anecdotes that show how the words we elevate say as much about who we are.

“why anglophones use the alphabet so oddly” — (the economist)
a charming little history lesson disguised as a puzzle about the letters we think we already understand. this is a book review that traces how english inherited an alphabet from elsewhere and then bent it, misshaped it, mispronounced it, and kept all the quirks. why c and g split into hard and soft, why h is named aitch, why the order we chant as children is basically arbitrary. it’s all a reminder that english is a magpie language, stitched together from invasions, accidents, monks, printers, and centuries of improvisation. the result is strangely beautiful: a mongrel alphabet that reveals how cultures collide and languages evolve.

“art deco at 100: why the ‘machine age’ aesthetic endures” (the conversation)
a graceful, generous walk through the century-old style that still feels strangely futuristic. the piece traces art deco from its 1925 paris debut, with all its optimism, geometry, and the shimmer of the machine age, to its american reinvention in skyscrapers, liners, and lavish theaters. the piece reminds you how thoroughly deco seeped into culture, from the great gatsby to tamara de lempicka’s angular heroines to the neon sweep of radio city. a century later, the style continues to resurface everywhere, from miami architecture to mercedes concept cars. a lovely reminder that the future once had sharp , bright-colored angles as well as a dazzling belief in progress.

“jane austen perfected the love story – but kept her own independence” (the conversation)
happy 250th, jane. a crisp, affectionate exploration of the tension at the heart of austen’s legacy, who wrote the definitive romantic arc, yet chose a life outside marriage. the piece follows pride and prejudice as both its blueprint and critique, showing how austen herself refused the compromises her heroines often had to make. through scholars and a regency-ball re-creation, we see that austen wasn’t simply writing about love but about constraint, money, reading the world correctly, and finding happiness without losing yourself. the result is a portrait of a woman who invented the modern love story by insisting on something radical for her time: agency.

an older piece that i stumbled upon this week and felt worthy sharing:

“the lessons of due process in julius caesar” (jstor daily)
a sharp, unsettling read that uses julius caesar to illuminate the stakes of due process in america right now. the author traces how shakespeare’s play obsessively returns to the question of punishment — who decides it, why, and according to what procedure. two small scenes, often skipped over in performance, become devastating: cinna the poet torn apart by a mob for a crime he didn’t commit (and then, chillingly, for being a “bad poet”), and the triumvirate casually “pricking” names for execution. the essay links these moments to modern visa revocations, deportations, and arbitrary executive power, arguing that the danger isn’t only mistaken identity — it’s the ability of authorities to change their reasons on the fly. without due process, justice collapses into whim, and this was true back in rome and it is true now.

guided reflection prompts

what invisible rules shape the worlds in these pieces?
look for: social scripts, gender norms, design codes, political illusions, industry pressures, historical accidents.

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i’m starting a weekly reading syllabus for the month — a series where i’ll share a curated list of the best pieces of writing i’ve read that week — alongside brief reflections on the spine of each argument so you can decide what to read and how to think with it.

it can be overwhelming to know where to start, and i understand the urge to read everything, and the paralysis that comes with it, especially given the the sheer abundance of good and semi-good writing out there.

each issue will arrive every week throughout november. if all goes well, we’ll continue through december and beyond.

[November 3 - 9]

The Best Essays of the Week

Note: the pieces below span every corner of thought — newspapers, a catholic magazine, a left-wing journal, faith, politics, pop culture, literature, arts — ideas from home and abroad. each brings its own light. the aim is to think well, notice where ideas meet and where they part.

“why even basic ai use is so bad for students” (the new york times)
a thoughtful op-ed from a concerned philosophy professor reflecting on ai use in her classroom. she describes watching students become what she calls “subcognitive” — outsourcing basic mental work of outlining and summarizing, which she argues is actually the most pernicious part. thinking happens through language, and if students aren’t practicing shaping their own sentences and ideas, they slowly lose the ability to understand, reason, or form judgment at all.

“why do we allow child marriage in america” (the new york times)
this piece breaks down how child marriage is still legal in 34 states. personal stories illustrate how minors in these marriages often can’t access shelters, lawyers, or basic protections because of their age. and how even groups like planned parenthood and the aclu in states like california won’t fight to ban it — citing various bizarre reasons. it’s shocking, paralyzing, and heartbreaking. written with real heart.

“james watson exemplified the best and worst of science – from monumental discoveries to sexism and cutthroat competition” (the conversation)
a balanced portrait of james watson, co-discoverer of dna. the article revisits his achievements alongside his prejudice and arrogance. what is even science without morality? idk. shout out to rosalind franklin, who should have been awarded a posthumous nobel for the discovery of dna’s molecular structure.

“put the mona lisa in its own building — for its sake and the visitors” (washington post)
argues that the mona lisa’s massive popularity has ended up working against it. the louvre forces visitors through crowded hallways only to encounter a tiny painting behind glass, with barely any time to actually look at it. after a recent jewel theft at the museum raised security concerns, the author suggests placing the mona lisa in its own transparent, climate-controlled building in the tuileries garden, making it both easier to see and harder to harm, while also relieving the louvre from its constant bottleneck of selfie-seekers.

“why doesn’t anyone trust the media?” (harper’s magazine)
four sharp media thinkers pick apart the collapse of trust in the press — the speakers point to the decline of local news, the rise of partisan silos, corporate cowardice, covid-era mistakes, and the growing pressure to please audiences rather than challenge them. they also note how lawsuits and political intimidation have made newsrooms more cautious and less confident. if traditional media continues to weaken, what essential public role disappears with it?

“two ways of disliking poetry” (public books)
looks at why poetry can feel both irresistible and irritating at the same time. it begins with marianne moore’s famous line, “i, too, dislike it,” and traces how poems invite us in but also pushing us away. the writer then turns to diane seuss, whose poems rough up traditional forms but still cling to poetry as something necessary. the piece suggests that disliking poetry is part of loving it.

“we used to read things in this country” (the baffler)
part lament, part satire, this essay mourns the shrinking attention span of the american public and the corporatization of reading culture. it rails against the algorithmic flattening of intellect, reminding readers that reading was once an act of resistance, not recreation. Its title feels like both an elegy and an accusation.

“the uggo police” (the lamp)
a cultural critique on the online obsession with sydney sweeney. the politicization of beauty standards and how public figures can become screens onto which people project broader cultural tensions. a great piece to reflect using the prompts below.

“the lost ending of gaslight that you didn’t know you needed” (public books)
a fascinating essay on the origins of the term “gaslighting.” the author traces the many stage and film versions of it, uncovering a lost version — one where the wife reclaims her perception and narrative, exposing the truth herself. reframes gaslighting as psychological abuse, and empowers the possibility of resistance and trusting what you see.

guided reflection prompts
questions to help you read this week’s pieces slowly and critically.

1. what argument lies beneath the facts?
   is the writer persuading, warning, mourning, or reminding?

2. how does power show up?
   — in law (revenge prosecutions), technology (ai in classrooms), gender (child marriage), politics (the center), knowledge (watson), or culture (art and reading).

3. where does history echo today?
   connect the “world war” framing of the revolution to current global entanglements, or the baffler essay’s nostalgia to your own reading habits.

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