what essays do you keep finding yourself returning to?

dice

dice

is a Tiering Contributoris a Tutor Alumnus
here are a couple of my favorites.

https://www.vogue.co.uk/article/florence-welch-on-addiction-and-sobriety

the candid discussion of suicidality, coping mechanisms, diet culture, alcoholism, youth.. i really love florence anyway but i found her words particularly poignant in this piece.

https://thebodyisnotanapology.com/magazine/romantic-love-is-killing-us/

i can feel the pain in each keystroke. the way that the author's fatness excludes them not only from physical spaces, but also interpersonal ones. i always come back and read it every so often because it really makes me recalibrate my care and focuses. who do i love? why? how am i being loved? how am i loving? what are the political and interpersonal impacts? how can i love better? how can i create a world in my life which everyone is loved adequately? what does that look like? how is it enacted?

hbu
 

Asek

Banned deucer.
i do not know if its quite in the vein of what ur looking for as a more academia type piece, but Connolly - the evangelical capitalist resonance machine is an essay i thought was completely undecipherable puff when i first read it 5(?) years ago but was fascinated by and kept returning to - and increasingly found myself seeing the connections being made and sympathising with the ideas contained within as a way of critiquing american (and to some degree australian) politics
 
Crux

Crux

Banned deucer.
https://www.pitt.edu/~mthompso/readings/mmp.pdf

This is a combination of an incredibly funny smack down of almost all post Aristotle philosophers and probably the gem of the Golden Age of women philosophers at Oxford, as well as being responsible for the revitalisation of modern virtue ethics. Seminal but also a banger of a read.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/8980528_The_Normalization_of_Queer_Theory

Current trends in understanding of queer theory are the worst, here is why.

https://www.scribd.com/book/3624999...mmunity-Responsibility-and-the-Duty-of-Repair

This is a book, but Scribd is doing free stuff because of COVID-19. If you are a leftist engaged in current activism, then I think that there is no more important book for you to read. Truly brilliant.

https://bullybloggers.wordpress.com...o-liberal-rhetoric-of-harm-danger-and-trauma/

See above, but much briefer and less wide in scope.

https://bullybloggers.wordpress.com...al-or-the-masters-toolkit-by-jack-halberstam/

A wider and more personal study dealing with issues in the last two, but quite compelling.
 
Myzozoa

Myzozoa

to find better ways to say what nobody says
is a Top Tiering Contributor Alumnusis a Past WCoP Champion
I could post about a lot of essays, but on the theory side "Betrayal: An Analysis In Three Acts" by the g.o.a.t Kamala Visweswaran, and https://www.scribd.com/document/350174794/Joan-Scott-Evidence-of-Experience-pdf Joan Scott "The Evidence of Experience" is a classic, lastly Sarah Ahmed's "Happy objects" is another stellar piece.
Crux said:
https://www.pitt.edu/~mthompso/readings/mmp.pdf

This is a combination of an incredibly funny smack down of almost all post Aristotle philosophers and probably the gem of the Golden Age of women philosophers at Oxford, as well as being responsible for the revitalisation of modern virtue ethics. Seminal but also a banger of a read.
Click to expand...
as a big aristotle person, id like to think of myself as more of an anti-philosopher
 
Whydon

Whydon

Asek said:
i do not know if its quite in the vein of what ur looking for as a more academia type piece, but Connolly - the evangelical capitalist resonance machine is an essay i thought was completely undecipherable puff when i first read it 5(?) years ago but was fascinated by and kept returning to - and increasingly found myself seeing the connections being made and sympathising with the ideas contained within as a way of critiquing american (and to some degree australian) politics
Click to expand...
Not related to the thread but I'm actually taking a class with this professor right now, fascinating individual and extremely knowledgeable.
 
rattlesnakeacrobat

rattlesnakeacrobat

maybe not an ESSAY essay, but i for some reason find this nyt article about wolf reintroduction in washington state to be immensely fascinating as somebody with a big interest in politics. and wolves, i guess. i live in iowa, so i know quite a bit about rural politics, but i guess before reading this i never really put much thought to the way that politics would affect the idea of predator reintroduction in places where it's more relevant.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/magazine/whos-afraid-of-the-big-bad-wolf-scientist.html

this one is more of an essay. it's called the grand unified theory of female pain, by leslie jamison. maybe i'm just an ess-jay-doubleyou tm™ but i think there is something to be said about like. the way women's emotions are portrayed and addressed in pop culture. there are definitely parts of this essay that i think sort of teeter on the edge of like. white feminist gender essentialism kinda stuff and that makes me side eye it but there's also a lot that i think is genuinely insightful and applies to trans women just as much as cis women
https://www.vqronline.org/essays-articles/2014/04/grand-unified-theory-female-pain

the last one i really like is a video essay by oliver "philosophytube" thorn called witchcraft, gender, and marxism, and like, man, if you want a way to get my attention fast, it's making a youtube video entitled "witchcraft, gender, and marxism". you know? like fuck dude, those are the only three things i know about. it's about how witchcraft was feminized as a way to excuse persecuting women, and how this persecution was a means of altering the gender status quo at the end of the feudal era to make way for a capitalist structure where women are confined to the home to raise the next generation of laborers. really interesting shit
 
Myzozoa

Myzozoa

to find better ways to say what nobody says
is a Top Tiering Contributor Alumnusis a Past WCoP Champion
I don't want to spam this thread, but I would be extremely remiss not to mention Kristin Dombek's long essay turned into a book: On The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism. It contains about 100 pages of uninterrupted passages like this:

"Something that might bother you, if you know someone who you think might have the new selfishness, and pause to consider the narcissism story's logical claims, is this: If he is empty inside, this narcissist, who or what is it, inside of him, that is imitating having a self? If he is nothing but a performance, who or what is doing the performing? Is he animating his selfiness with another, also fake, part of his selfiness? But what, then, is animating that part? If the descriptions of narcissism sometimes don't exactly make sense, in this way, how can they describe so creepily well most ex-boyfriends and so many bosses? Why is having a boyfriend or boss so much like having your own personal villain, anyway? If the uncannily accurate descriptions of your personal villain imply that he or she is outside the empire of normal mental health, flickering eerily at the edge of pathology, having the same disorder, or at least traits of the same disorder, as a man who would chase children across an island and murder each one that he can catch, why do these descriptions also (in moments you quietly bury deep inside you) remind you, sometimes, of an entirely different person-- that is, you? And why does the nightmare described by the Internet, of encountering people who look and sound real but are fake, remind you so much of the feeling of reading the internet itself?"

have a lovely day out there on the webs
 
brightobject

brightobject

there like moonlight
is a Top Artistis a Community Contributoris a Smogon Media Contributoris a Forum Moderator Alumnus
Ian Ingram, a phenomenal hyperrealist artist who has been doing incredible surreal self-portraits for decades now, has been uploading a kind of retrospective on his pieces on his instagram @mysteryningram, each accompanied by a short paragraph or two on how the piece reflects on his journey as a maker or a human being in that point in time. Hypnotic guy whose work very much meshes with his way of writing, and it is at the least a look into the mind of a guy whose work I find really fascinating
 
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Prisoner of Sugar

Wrote bachelor on the importance of autobiographical memory in development of life narrative and personal identity, and such stuff, and oddly enough, I keep looking up if there is anything new (essays, research papers) in that field
 
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