Ursula K. Le Guin
Le Guin proposes that the first tool was the container, not the spear, and that most real stories are bags of gathered things rather than a hero's arrow. A few pages that quietly rearrange what you think a story is.
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Donald Knuth
Three short paragraphs on why Knuth stopped using email in 1990 so he could do his job well. The argument is simple; the thirty years he's held to it are the real case.
view similar →James Baldwin
Baldwin's essays on race in America, written with a moral clarity that never once simplifies the people involved, himself included. The title essay, set around his father's funeral, is some of the great American prose.
view similar →Joan Didion
Didion on California in the late sixties, when the stories people told to make sense of things stopped holding. 'We tell ourselves stories in order to live' is the first line, and she spends the rest doubting it.
view similar →George Orwell
Orwell, a colonial policeman, shoots an elephant he doesn't want to kill because the crowd expects it, and sees the whole machinery of empire in the moment. He indicts himself as fully as anyone.
view similar →Tracy Kidder
Kidder embeds with a team racing to build a minicomputer and catches the texture of hard technical work better than any startup myth since. The pinball metaphor for why they keep doing it has never been bettered.
view similar →Virginia Woolf
Woolf's argument that a woman needs money and a room to write, built around the invented, doomed figure of Shakespeare's sister. Speculation, history, and anger braided so smoothly you barely feel the seams.
view similar →E. B. White
White's short portrait of New York as three cities layered on one island, ending on a line about its fragility that reads very differently now. A whole place captured without a single statistic.
view similar →Susan Sontag
Sontag's attack on the reflex to decode art into meaning instead of letting it work on you. 'In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art' — a sentence that's been annoying and freeing people for sixty years.
view similar →David Foster Wallace
Wallace on how television absorbed irony so completely that irony lost the power to criticize anything. Written about TV, and uncannily early about the internet.
view similar →George Orwell
Orwell separates patriotism from nationalism — the habit of identifying with a unit and judging everything by its prestige. He's after a pattern of mind, and the pattern keeps finding new flags.
view similar →Neal Stephenson
Stephenson treats operating systems as cultures, anchored by a long, funny digression about cars-as-OSes. Dated in its specifics and dead-on about the bargain you strike for a friendly interface.
view similar →Martin Luther King Jr.
King answers white clergymen who'd called him impatient, writing on newspaper margins from a jail cell with total command of the argument. Moral reasoning under pressure, worked out in real time.
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