E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction
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.
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EssayCulture & Society1986
The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction
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.
view similar →EssayCulture & Society1990
Email (since 1990)
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 →BookCulture & Society1955
Notes of a Native Son
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 →BookCulture & Society1979
The White Album
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 →EssayCulture & Society1936
Shooting an Elephant
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 →BookCulture & Society1981
The Soul of a New Machine
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 →BookCulture & Society1929
A Room of One's Own
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 →EssayCulture & Society1949
Here Is New York
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 →EssayCulture & Society1964
Against Interpretation
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 →EssayCulture & Society1945
Notes on Nationalism
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 →EssayCulture & Society1999
In the Beginning Was the Command Line
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 →EssayCulture & Society1963
Letter from Birmingham Jail
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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