the weekly reading guide (vol. 3)
(nov 17-23) — the week's essential essays, op-eds, and discussions
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: Jay Nordlinger
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: Nicolás Medina Mora (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: Peter Hitchens
“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: Adam Smyth
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: Sloane Crosley
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: David Runciman
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the london jazz topped this all off for me. i’ll get to reading this list, and i’m saving this post too! :)
just read "how sober should a writer be", wonderful read. author has a playful tone and it's quite an informative piece. i love how you are uplifting others writers through this series tulipe! and i love that you have compiled some good reads for us. since i am new here i'm looking for new and interesting reads and writers to support.