best essays 2023

10 Essays To Read Again in 2023

A list of our staff’s favorite essays from the past year.

Hello, New Lines readers,

We hope you’re enjoying a much-needed holiday break. We have a lot in store for 2023, particularly the launch of our print edition. In the meantime, as has become tradition, we wanted to share with you a list of our staff’s favorite essays from the past year. We hope you’ll find something of interest in this eclectic collection of stories.

Wishing you a Happy New Year from the New Lines team!

The Day My Wartime Cat Went Missing, by Rasha Elass

Riada asimovic akyol, strategic initiatives editor.

Many of my close friends tell me that, despite my irrational fear of cats, I’d be a perfect “cat person,” once I dared to confront those fears. I’ve acknowledged the joy and glow in their eyes, when my friends speak of their pets. I’ve observed such bonds curiously and in a more mindful way in the last few years, especially after becoming a mother, responsible for someone else’s life. 

The essay “The Day My Wartime Cat Went Missing” was published early in 2022, and was an instant classic. Our Editorial Director, Rasha Elass, writes masterfully about her adventures with adopted cats Pumpkin and Gremlin, whom she first met in Abu Dhabi. She beautifully depicts how they survived a tough war, and the different challenges they’ve been through in the Middle East and the United States. She shares her genuine love and nurturing care, as well as her dread at the possibility of losing them, whether in peacetime or war. 

The essay is a gorgeous reminder of the bonds that matter. Check it out for yourself.

How I Survived a Syrian Gulag, by Jaber Baker

Rasha al aqeedi, middle east deputy editor.

The terms “dictatorship,” “fascism,” “authoritarianism” and “totalitarianism” are thrown around today to describe various ruling systems in the world to such an extent that they have lost their actual meaning. Inconveniences such as losing access to a social media platform are compared to the conditions that led to the Holocaust, while wearing a pandemic-imposed mask is akin to living in a gulag. 

The Syrian author Jaber Baker takes us on a dark journey through his time in an actual gulag run by Bashar al-Assad’s Baath Party. For me personally, the essay is a masterclass in storytelling and struck more chords and triggered more memories of my childhood and adolescence in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq than I wish it had. The true experiences and traumas of dictatorship face the threat of being drowned out by the noises of victimhood culture. While no one has a monopoly on trauma, Syrians have the right to tell the stories of their torture and suffering. It is a reminder that not all injustices are created equal. 

The Last of the Bougainvillea Years, by Zeina Hashem Beck

Erin clare brown, north africa editor.

When faced with an impending move to Paris from Dubai in search of more stability for her family, poet Zeina Hashem Beck is suddenly filled with the pangs of loss — not for the Emirates, where she’d lived since 2006, but for her home in Lebanon. She explores this abstract sense of displacement and longing in her gorgeously crafted essay, written in a pitch-perfect prose that carries the music of poetry through her attempts to sort her belongings, prepare her children, and reassure herself that the displacement is the right call. Through it all Hashem Beck mourns the impending loss of her bougainvillea vines, whose clouds of pink blossoms and wicked thorns come to symbolize in turns her beloved hometown, her Mediterranean identity and in ways, the author herself. 

It’s a beautiful meditation on loss and longing, displacement and belonging that reminds us that when we are the right amount of thirsty, we blossom.

What Ukraine Means for Lithuanians Haunted by Soviet Past, by Inga Rudzinskaite-Colman

Amie ferris-rotman, global news editor.

When reading this essay, one feels that an entire generation of Eastern Europeans is speaking, in a single, defiant voice, suddenly with renewed urgency. The globe is so focused on Russia’s horrific assault on Ukraine, and the grim atrocities the Russian military commits practically every day, that we often forget, or perhaps do not realize, the impact the war has on Moscow’s previous victims. In this essay, the analyst Inga Rudzinskaite-Colman, who was born and raised in Vilnius, dives into complicated issues like collective trauma and self-identity. She tells us, in poignant detail, how she and her fellow countrymen and women strived for decades to disassociate themselves from Russia and their Soviet past. But belonging to the Western “club” has also meant uncomfortable compromises, like being “Russiasplained” to. Read this beautifully written essay to peer into the new realities facing the Baltics, Poland and other countries once in Russia’s orbit, who are now finding themselves united by survival. 

Rushdie Is India’s Forgotten Child of Midnight, by Pratik Kanjilal

Surbhi gupta, south asia editor.

Earlier this year, when Salman Rushdie was attacked before his talk in western New York, his supposed safe haven, much of the discussion in the media and reports in the news cycle focused on the politics of that infamous fatwa by the Ayatollah Khomeini calling for the writer’s death and its repercussions on the Muslim world. Yet, despite the fact Rushdie has roots in India and the subcontinent has been a constant source of inspiration for his writing, I could find no essay that delved into this relationship and work with South Asia — before this one.

While many were focused on the backlash against Rushdie’s novel, “The Satanic Verses,” the South Asian connection in the story was being overlooked. The first protests against the book happened not in Iran but in Pakistan, and this prompted the Indian government to ban its import from the U.K. It was, indeed, in a review in an Indian magazine that the Ayatollah is said to have first learned of the book. That’s why I loved this essay by Pratik Kanjilal, a veteran journalist and books editor in India, who has followed Rushdie’s journey closely through the years and was the best person to write it. He packs a lot into this essay: He writes about Rushdie, critiques his work, discusses what his Booker Prize wins meant for English writing in India, his relationship with India and Pakistan, and the irony of the attack, coinciding as it did with the 75th Independence Day celebrations in India. 

Faith and Vengeance: the Islamic State’s War in Afghanistan, by Fazelminallah Qazizai and Chris Sands

Tam hussein, associate editor.

This piece tells the story of the rise of the Islamic State of Khorasan Province (ISKP), and its fall and rebirth, told through the character of Abu Omar Khorasani, “the most feared and despised prisoner in Directorate 40.” It takes you on a journey from the Afghan Jihad in the 1980s all the way to the present. I love deep dives and investigations. This particular piece is very original and will no doubt populate the citations of many books on the topic for years to come. To produce an essay of such quality requires a supportive editorial team and journalists willing to follow the story all the way. For me, that is embodied in this investigation. When I read it, I can almost see the legwork and local knowledge put in by Fazelminallah Qazizai. I see the crisp writing style of Qazizai’s co-author Chris Sands, the beautiful artwork of Joanna Andreasson and the background work that the editorial team puts in months before publication. And so it’s not just an enjoyable and interesting read, it’s what our managing editor Ola Salem says the best essays are — a work of art.

When Uganda Expelled Its Asian Population in 1972, Britain Tried to Exclude Them, by Saima Nasar

Kwangu liwewe, africa editor.

When I read this essay, it reminded me of the writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s The Danger of a Single Story. For five decades, the narrative about the expulsion of Uganda’s Asians has been that they went to Britain, were welcomed there and lived as refugees, then successfully assimilated into society and have contributed to all spheres of British life.

This essay puts the spotlight on how the narrative changed from unwanted Asian immigrants to one of a humanitarian response, when the plight of Asians became international news and Britain feared a backlash. The writer Saima Nasar lifts the lid on this narrative and tells the story of how, in actual fact, the Asians were British passport holders and were initially not welcome in Britain.

Nasar writes, “While Ugandan Asians have no doubt shaped Britain’s economic, political and socio-cultural landscapes, it is important to avoid celebratory narratives that overlook histories of struggle and discrimination.” 

It is an important essay that challenges society to re-examine historical narratives.

A Film Critic Reflects on the Artistic Journeys and Vision of the Late French Director Jean-Luc Godard, by Jonathan Rosenbaum

Danny postel, politics editor.

When I saw the news on Sept. 13 that the legendary filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard had died, I immediately called Jonathan Rosenbaum, the longtime film critic for my local alt-weekly newspaper, the Chicago Reader, and the author of multiple books on world cinema. Rosenbaum had written extensively about Godard’s films over the years and had interviewed the grand poobah of French cinema’s New Wave movement on more than one occasion. I was thrilled that Rosenbaum agreed to write for us, despite being unfamiliar with New Lines (he later informed me that Sight and Sound, the magazine of the British Film Institute, also asked him to write something on Godard but we got to him first). 

In the essay, he discusses several of Godard’s films — “Breathless” (1960), “Alphaville” (1965), “Tout Va Bien” (1972), “Every Man for Himself” (1980), “Passion” (1982), “Nouvelle Vague” (1990) and “Histoire(s) du Cinéma,” an eight-part experimental video series made between 1988 and 1998 — but it’s far from a survey of the late director’s filmography. Instead, it’s a deeply personal meditation on his poetic vision and colossal global influence, and on the relationship between art and commercial success and failure. “Marketplace value has little or nothing to do with the love of art,” Rosenbaum writes, and “there’s no way of gauging the latter via the former, especially insofar as the intensity of the love and the qualities of the audience experiencing and expressing it aren’t even remotely quantifiable.” Godard once said to Rosenbaum: “I like to think of myself as an airplane, not an airport.” Reflecting on that quip, Rosenbaum writes that “vehicles that take us places, and the destinations of those who make them don’t have to be the same as the destinations of those who climb into those vehicles.”

Between Two Rivers, Between Two Myths, by Sophus Helle

Lydia wilson, culture editor.

I wanted to choose a history essay for two reasons: It’s one of the genres that we do particularly well and, second, this type of long-form history is not given much space in other outlets. Our history essays are always deep-dive explorations of stories from the past from experts on the subject, showing us something new about the world, whether a new perspective on a familiar topic or a previously hidden gem. 

“Between Two Rivers,” by the Mesopotamian scholar Sophus Helle, exemplifies what we’re trying to do. It is based on deep expertise, exploring the identities of societies going back millennia in the territory now called Iraq. Helle looks at the labels these cultures gave themselves and were given by later invaders or historians. But it does not only tell the story of the historical material. Crucially, it explains why these facts, controversies and debates about old identities are relevant today, and the obfuscation of the past realities on the ground in Iraq does not serve its present inhabitants. History matters, and this essay brings that home. 

An Exile Returns to Find Syria Changed Forever, by Nizar Kinaan

Faisal al yafai, international editor.

It’s been a year of war — as too many of the past few years have been — this time dominated in Europe by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. At the magazine, we’ve certainly published a lot about the Ukraine war, but we’ve also kept a close eye on other conflicts.

This essay by Nizar Kinaan, a pseudonym for obvious reasons, is one of those, revisiting the still-simmering Syrian conflict. The author returned to the coastal city of Latakia after years away and found a city, and country, drastically changed by the war. We called the essay “No Country for Young Men” because of the profound changes in gender roles wrought by the war.

“‘Where are the young men?’ I asked my friends in the cafe bar we were drinking in. ‘They are dead, in the army or they left like I should have done.’”

“The taboos against women working in certain specific jobs have definitely been broken,” wrote Kinaan, quoting a Syrian woman who said, “I am not saying all taboos have been completely shattered … but things have definitely shifted. Now women can work in most jobs, stay out late, and be a little bit more independent.”

Many will applaud that change, but the reasons that brought it about have destabilized the entire society. This is what makes Kinaan’s encounter with Latakia so interesting; he doesn’t judge what has happened by any moral standard except that of Syria itself. He doesn’t applaud changes in isolation without understanding what it took to make them change.

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The French Soldiers Who Disobeyed Orders in Algeria

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The Best American Essays 2023

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For any essay lover , a highlight of the literary calendar is the publication of the year’s Best American Essays volume. The 2023 edition is the thirty-eighth in the series, and it matches the standard of excellence set by its predecessors. While every year’s selection is different, the organizing principle behind each one remains the same. Series editor Robert Atwan scans the periodical literature for what he describes as “a selection of the year’s outstanding essays.” He’s looking for “works of literary achievement that show an awareness of craft and a forcefulness of thought.” A list of around one hundred possibilities is then passed on to a guest editor, who decides what should be included in the volume. 

Vivian Gornick, 2023’s guest editor, is the most recent in a long line of distinguished literary figures who have taken on this role. As well as making their selections, guest editors contribute an introduction that says something about how they handled their assignment, and their take on the mercurial genre with which the series is concerned. In fact, it would be hard to find a better introduction to the art of the essay than what is provided in the guest editors’ introductions (and the series editor’s forewords) over the course of the years. Cumulatively, they cast a great deal of light on the nature of the essay form.

To say what an essay is “about” always undersells it. Yes, in one sense, The Best American Essays 2023 contains essays that are about addiction, adoption, aging, anorexia, Bambi, bereavement, concision, gender, Los Alamos, marriage, mental illness, prison life, racism, sex, and writing. Although giving such a raw listing of subject matter may indicate the volume’s pleasingly diverse spread of material, it also risks creating a kind of Procrustean bed—where the idea of an essay is stretched or trimmed to fit a topic, with the expectation that it will address it in the manner of an article. That essays, whatever they are (and they are notoriously hard to define), are not articles becomes quickly evident when you read good ones, like the selection offered here.

In the preface to what remains a key reference book for the genre—the Encyclopedia of the Essay , edited by Tracy Chevalier—Graham Good suggests that “at heart, the essay is the voice of the individual.” That catches something important about the nature of this kind of writing. It is the individuality—and authenticity—of the voices speaking to us, the particular personal perspectives they offer on whatever it is their speakers are concerned with, that gives the twenty-one essays in The Best American Essays 2023 their power, rather than their topics per se. Echoing Good’s point, Vivian Gornick ends her introduction by assuring readers that the selection she has chosen is full of voices, “ real voices.” Listening to them is like being invited to share in a whole range of conversations. The turns they take are enlightening, amusing, unexpected, and sometimes shocking. The talk is easy and informal, always clear, often lyrical—a world away from the specialized jargon of a scholarly article. The authors are from all sorts of backgrounds. They represent a very varied range of interests and insights. But they share one vital characteristic: they know what they’re talking about and have the ability to share it in an engaging and accessible manner. Without exception, these are voices worth listening to.

Robert Atwan notes in his foreword that “literary magazines form the foundation of our creative writing.” In addition to showcasing twenty-one fine pieces of prose, The Best American Essays 2023 , like its sister volumes, provides readers with a stimulating sampler from the many literary magazines that flourish in North America. The twenty-one essays selected for reprinting in the volume are drawn from eighteen different magazines (with two essays apiece coming from the Chicago Quarterly Review , New England Review , and Sewanee Review ). The selection of the year’s “Notable Essays and Literary Fiction,” compiled by Robert Atwan and occupying the final pages of the book, identifies many more of the magazines that play such an important role in fostering good essay writing. World Literature Today is, unsurprisingly, among the publications listed.

After initiating the series in 1986 and overseeing its publication every year since then, Robert Atwan is finally stepping down. The 2024 volume will see Kim Dana Kupperman taking over as the new series editor. To have guided the series so successfully over so many years is an impressive literary achievement. One hopes that retirement from his editorial role may allow Mr. Atwan time to write more on a form that’s obviously close to his heart and about which he has unrivaled knowledge.

Looking back to the first volume in the series, The Best American Essays 1986 , Elizabeth Hardwick—the inaugural guest editor—made the point that the word “best” in the book’s title should be thought of as “some of the best.” The same point is echoed by the present guest editor, who is pleasingly open about the fact that the essays chosen “are simply the ones that gave me great pleasure, or moved me for reasons I can’t readily articulate, or were so indisputably well written I had no choice but to include them.” Vivian Gornick surely speaks for any of the series’ thirty-eight guest editors when she stresses that “another editor might, with equal justification, have chosen an entirely different set of selections that would have been as satisfying as this one.” This, she says, is because we’re fortunate to be living at a time when “there is an abundance of superior essay writing being done.” 

Robert Atwan can, I think, take some of the credit for fostering this abundance and, through the pages of this splendid series, bringing it to the attention of a wider audience.

Chris Arthur St. Andrews, Scotland

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Hà Nội at Midnight Bảo Ninh. Trans. Quan Manh Ha & Cab Tran

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Monica Daniel Clowes

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Family Style: Memories of an American from Vietnam Thien Pham

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Free Radicals Rosa Beltrán. Trans. Robin Myers

Dragon Palace Hiromi Kawakami. Trans. Ted Goossen

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Motherland: A Memoir Paula Ramón. Trans. Julia Sanches & Jennifer Shuye

My Heavenly Favorite Lucas Rijneveld. Trans. Michele Hutchison

About People Juli Zeh. Trans. Alta L. Price

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With a cover illustration by Edel Rodriguez,  “Writing the Polycrisis”  headlines the March/April 2024 issue of  World Literature Today , showcasing contributions by nine writers, mainly from the Global South. Additional highlights include interviews, creative nonfiction, booklists, essays, and more! Plus a book review section brimming with the latest must-reads also enliven the issue, making it your latest passport to the best new reading from around the world.

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Table of Contents

Writing the polycrisis: dispatches from a calamitous planet, in every issue, creative nonfiction, book reviews.

New Times, New Thinking.

The best New Statesman Ideas essays of 2023

Our pick of the finest writing from the past year.

By New Statesman

The rise of the new tech right Quinn Slobodian A cult – one that worships a genetically determined meritocracy has Silicon Valley in a chokehold. Slobodian unpacks the racial science of IQ, and the growing far-right threat of a future shaped by high-tech-hierarchy.

The new politics of time Hettie O’Brien Jenny Odell’s  Saving Time  is concerned with bewildering disjunctions. A recursive, impressionistic discussion of clocks, capitalism and the climate crisis, her book is composed of anecdotes, cut-and-pasted histories and cultural criticism. How should we spend our hours in the age of burnout? Arguably not by reading Odell’s frustrating new book, Saving Time .

What it means to be Jewish now Various Writers With anti-Semitism rising and divisions on the left over the Hamas-Israel war, 17 writers reflect on being Jewish now.

Settling scores with God: Leszek Kolakowski at the end of history Madoc Cairns An orphan. A Marxist. A Catholic-conservative. Leszek Kolakowski holds a 50-year-career as one of Europe’s leading, and most controversial public intellectuals. In conversation, he unpacks a troubled history: of paradox, of collapse, and of transcendence; of finding belonging in belief, and being haunted by the absolute.

The realists were right about the war in Ukraine Lily Lynch Far from the flashy, hope filled “David vs Goliath” narratives of resistance and reclamation of its first months, the Ukraine-Russia war has slowed to a drivel – and alongside it domestic morale, foreign support and US funding. Initially ignored warnings of Ukrainian “false hope” were not so incorrect, Lynch suggests, as she questions what version (if any) of Ukraine’s future is actually attainable.

The Saturday Read

Morning call.

Going Native Oliver Eagleton People who study cults sometimes end up joining them. Has this fate befallen Matthew Goodwin, one of Britain’s most visible scholars of the hard right? Eagleton looks at how Goodwin became part of the right-populist movement he once sought to explain.

Who is afraid of Martin Heidegger? Lyndsey Stonebridge In the rootless world of the 1920s, Heidegger’s ideas about Being (with a capital B, signifying the full meaning of human existence) ripped up the ground of philosophy. The truth exists only in our Being. “Being-there” – “ Dasein ”, in Heidegger’s distinctive terminology – is what matters; there in history, gliding on nothingness, with no other certain knowledge than that of our own death. There is no plot to follow, save the “hidden primordiality” of Being itself. This essay looks at why the most radioactive philosopher of the 20th century still speaks to us.

The New Age of Tragedy Robert D Kaplan, John Gray and Helen Thompson For this wide-ranging exchange, we asked Kaplan, the  Cambridge  political economist Helen Thompson and the philosopher John Gray to explore what we are calling this new age of tragedy, and how societies might navigate and endure the gathering storms.

Gramsci in Florida Alberto Toscano While talk of a “Gramscian vanguard” is largely a conspiratorial fabrication of the right, it could also serve as a spur for a somewhat rudderless left to reflect on what hegemony might look like today, on what it would take to become the threat to capitalism, patriarchy and white nationalism that the right already takes it to be.

Arno J Mayer’s 20th Century Enzo Traverso The American historian Arno J Mayer belongs to an extraordinary generation of German-speaking Jewish scholars – George L Mosse, Raul Hilberg, Peter Gay and Fritz Stern among others – who were born in Europe between the end of the First World War and Hitler’s rise to power, reaching their maturity during the Second World War. The cataclysms of the 20th century forged their mental  habitus  and gave them a sharp sense of  history . Mayer helped transform the writing of history – and with it our understanding of the modern world.

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Top Reads 2023 | Essays

With 2023 coming to a close, we have collected together our most-read essays of the year.

On Beyoncé | Okechukwu Nzelu

‘Renaissance gives back, by reminding Black queer people what it’s like to be in our most sacred spaces.’

Okechukwu Nzelu on Beyoncé.

My Time Machine | Arthur Asseraf

‘How do we imagine the past of those we love?’

Arthur Asseraf on family and fractured memories.

For the Love of Losing | Marina Benjamin

‘Winning, it turns out, was the cracking whip that meant gamblers had to stay where they were until they lost their money all over again.’

Marina Benjamin on losing.

Jealous Laughter | Joanna Biggs

‘She could not make me see my best qualities, but she could sit with me.’

Joanna Biggs on literary friendships between women.

Reproducing Paul | Des Fitzgerald

‘Having a child, I came to see, was more a kind of haunting.’

An essay by Des Fitzgerald.

Beyond Deep Throat | Part I | Saskia Vogel

‘The eye wants to see its fill, the I wants to see how it feels.’

Saskia Vogel on the foundational stories of pornography.

Last Week at Marienbad | Lauren Oyler

‘The only thing on the schedule was spa.’

Lauren Oyler on her trip to Marienbad.

Cairo Song | Wiam El-Tamami

‘I see this everywhere. The creativity, resourcefulness and incredible talent for improvisation in Egypt.’

Wiam El-Tamami on returning to Cairo.

The Killing of a Berlin Power Broker | Peter Richter

‘Why does the centre of Berlin look like an abandoned shopping mall on the edge of Omaha?’

An essay from Peter Richter, translated by Shaun Whiteside.

Particular Matter | Amitava Kumar

‘India, as we know it, is changing. What will it become?’

Memoir by Amitava Kumar.

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Granta 167: Extraction Online

You Are the Product

‘The anglophone world, we have to infer, has run out of words for its own feelings.’ Daisy Hildyard on the wisdom of scarecrows.

‘What is the read receipt for?’ Lillian Fishman on texting, power and the ethics of leaving a friend on read.

‘Like pretty much everyone who uses the internet, I have seen many terrible things that I did not search for and that I cannot unsee.’ Rosanna McLaughlin on what the internet thinks she wants.

‘I have a pathological addiction to the internet, which I indulge with the excuse of making art. It rarely translates to anything good and mostly leaves me overstimulated and afraid.’ Paul Dalla Rosa on excess and the internet.

‘rumors of bees on speedwell, / no oxidative stress just / effortless pollination’ Two poems by Sylvia Legris.

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More on granta.com, podcasts | issue 165, podcast | lauren oyler, lauren oyler.

‘You are what you do, and you are what you write, to some extent, I believe that at least.’ Lauren Oyler on personality, intention and the collapse between private and authorial selves.

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Personal growth, marina benjamin.

‘Refusal is the last recourse of the powerless.’ Marina Benjamin on her years of not eating, and not growing.

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In conversation, saskia vogel & jen calleja.

‘Narrative is control, dominance, purposeful withholding, flirting’

Jeanette Winterson | Podcast

Jeanette winterson & saskia vogel.

Jeanette Winterson reads from her new memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal, and her story ‘All I Know About Gertrude Stein’ from Granta 115: The F Word.

Fiction | Issue 169

Piranhas and us.

‘An enormous black form rose from the water. Uncle Feng told me in a low voice to run fast.’ Fiction by Can Xue, translated by Annelise Finegan.

Fiction | The Online Edition

Carol farrelly.

Winner of the Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize from the region of Canada and Europe.

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Best of 2023: Reported Essays

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Reported essays reflect the great craft involved in blending fact, anecdote, and personal observation to tell a compelling story. These are the pieces we can’t stop thinking about, the ones we will forever recommend to friends, the ones that surprised and delighted us—all drawn from our vast and deep pool of editors’ picks . Enjoy!

The Great Forgetting

Summer Praetorius | Nautilus | December 19, 2022 | 3,975 words

This piece by paleoclimatologist Summer Praetorius, which is part memoir and part science writing, was published in mid-December last year in that overlooked period that made it too late to include in our Best of 2022 collection, yet technically ineligible for this one. But I’m making an exception. (As Praetorius notes about the Great Unconformity—the gap of a billion years of Earth’s unrecorded history between 1,600 and 600 million years ago—there’s much to be discovered about seemingly forgotten periods of time.) I’ve read many poignant climate stories on the melting of glaciers and the razing of ancient forests, but I keep returning to this one because of Praetorius’ vast understanding of the Earth’s history across hundreds of millions of years; she simplifies complex concepts about geological amnesia, resilience, and system collapse so they’re more accessible to a general reader. I love the beautiful way she describes the Earth’s memory, recorded in layers of sediment and held within its disappearing ice sheets, which she refers to as “the great brains of our planet.” But she also weaves a deeply personal account of her late brother Jebsen’s mental deterioration after a snowboarding accident, another example of a complex system pushed too far out of equilibrium to recover effectively. This parallel story helps to make the piece relatable on a more intimate scale. Recalling the ride home from the woods when she notices the first signs of Jebsen’s memory loss as he sat in the back seat, she realizes now that he was forever changed from that moment and never recovered. “I fixate on our immobility; on the lack of actions we took to assess the larger damages that may have been hiding beneath that hole in his memory,” she writes. It wasn’t that she and her mother didn’t care about his well-being, but perhaps they didn’t initially believe it was anything serious. As Praetorius shifts between her family’s story and scientific research, you can’t help but ask: How resilient is Earth? Are we seeing and acting on the warning signs? — CLR

The Ones We Sent Away

Jennifer Senior | The Atlantic | August 7, 2023 | 13,585 words

So many families, mine and likely yours, have things they just don’t talk about, experiences and events rooted in regret and shame, where everyone concerned wants to forget or remain silent. But does silence bring solace or does it ensure irreparable harm, perhaps greater than the pain of confronting the past? This is just one of the weighty themes Jennifer Senior considers in “The Ones We Sent Away,” a brilliant essay I have not stopped thinking about since reading it in August. At the heart of the piece is Senior’s aunt Adele, who was institutionalized in 1953 at 21 months old. Adele was diagnosed with microcephaly and removed from those who loved her the most in this world on the advice of medical doctors who meant well. This story is chiefly about loss and trauma, primarily the trauma Adele endured while institutionalized and the incalculable loss of not receiving enlightened care. Adele’s family suffered too, deprived of Adele’s lively spirit in their lives. With deep care and nuance, Senior examines the systemic and societal failures that deemed it best to separate Adele from her family. In writing this essay, she looks closely at the decision makers of the past and turns the microscope on herself: as a journalist writing about an aunt unable to give consent, Senior realized she faced an ethical dilemma not unlike the doctors who suggested Adele be institutionalized in 1952. She, like they, meant well. By sharing Adele’s story, Senior wants not just to avoid harm, but to do good, possibly for other families facing similar decisions today, possibly for anyone who sits in silence, afraid to face an unpleasant and painful past. Through Adele’s incredible story, Senior suggests that to do better as humans, we first need to be brave enough to talk about it. — KS

A Good Prospect

Nick Bowlin | The Drift | July 9, 2023 | 7,602 words

Here’s an endorsement: I am prone to ranting about Teslas not (only) because of the waste of space that is Elon Musk and the shoddy construction of his EVs, but also because of this essay. In March, writer Nick Bowlin attended an annual conference in Toronto, Ontario, where the “institutions that constitute the global metal-mining industry commiserate in the bad times and celebrate the good.” In a perverse twist, Bowlin found that 2023 is a decidedly good time for mining not in spite of climate change, but  because  of it. A world hungry for electric batteries, solar panels, and other essentials of a decarbonized economy means there is escalating demand for metals, and mining interests are seizing the moment to make over their image—and to make bank. “To stop global warming,” one conference speaker says, “you need us.” But boosting the profits of some of the world’s most notoriously exploitative concerns comes at a terrible cost: to the earth, to mine workers, to the inhabitants of metal-rich land. Bowlin doesn’t suggest that mining can’t be part of green solutions. Rather, his essay brilliantly illuminates the perils of trying to save the world by relying on the blunt tools and maximalist mindset of late-stage capitalism. — SD

The Horrors of Pompeii

Guy D. Middleton | Aeon | July 4, 2023 | 4,000 words

Reported essays cover a broad spectrum, with historical reporting being oft-overlooked. It’s a difficult skill: conjuring events from hundreds—or even thousands—of years ago is no mean feat. But when it works, a history piece is engaging and fascinating reportage. In this essay on ancient Pompeii for  Aeon , Guy D. Middleton grabs attention with a piece of graffiti scrawled on the vestibule wall of a well-to-do house owned by two freedmen, the Vettii: “Eutychis, a Greek lass with sweet ways, 2 asses.” Explaining how “graffiti . . . comes not from the literature of the elite, or the inscriptions of the powerful, but from a wider cross-section of society, ” Middleton leads us into the bowels of Pompeii to try and discover who Eutychis was. Expect back-stabbing brothels, brutal slavery, and sexual abuse. The meaning of every word of the crude advertisement is examined, along with writings, paintings, and artifacts that add further insight into this grim world. (Particularly revealing is a lead collar inscribed: “This is a cheating whore! Seize her because she escaped from Bulla Regia.”) Through clever tools, rather than dumbing down, Middleton makes history accessible—and Eutychis can call out to us from nearly 2,000 years ago. — CW

In Search of Lost Time

Tom Vanderbilt  |  Harper’s Magazine  |  March 20, 2023  |  5,339 words

Despite the fact that I’m one of those clean-but-messy people, I also love precision. Exactitude. The idea of a constant. That spills over into a fascination with measurement in general. It’s not a  hobby —I don’t collect rulers or, like, assemble Ikea shelves with a torque wrench—just an abiding curiosity. And it’s one that Tom Vanderbilt seems to share, judging from his quest in  Harper’s  to find the ground truth of the second. Like so much of his writing, he sets about answering a question (in this case, what drives clock time?) as genially as possible. Characters don’t just talk, they do so “with weary resignation” or “[nodding] excitedly”; they call statistical noise “jiggly wigglies.” That seasoning, Vanderbilt knows, becomes all the more crucial when the rest of the recipe comprises chewy concepts like dematerialization or the ephemeris second. Who wouldn’t get the tiniest thrill knowing that researchers had to travel to France to compare their kilograms to the platinum-iridium cylinder once deemed the “official” kilogram? Who’s not just a little bit awed by the idea that the official second doesn’t actally exist, but is essentially spit out by a nine-billion-step Rube Goldberg machine made of cesium atoms? It’s science writing that reads like a travelog:  Look to your left and see the world’s smallest ruler!  If you’re going to guide readers through the world of the abstract, you’ve gotta make the concrete part fun. — PR

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The Best American Essays 2023 Audio CD – MP3 Audio, October 17, 2023

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[ MP3 CD Format ]

In her introduction to this year’s The Best American Essays , guest editor Vivian Gornick states that her selections "contribute materially to the long and honorable history of the personal essay by way of the value they place on lived experience." Provocative, daring, and honest at a time when many writers are deliberately silencing themselves in the face of authoritarian and populist censorship movements, the twenty-one essays collected here reflect their authors’ unapologetic observations of the world around them. From an inmate struggling to find purpose during his prison sentence to a doctor coping with the unpredictable nature of her patient, to a widow wishing for just a little more time with her late husband, these narratives -- and the others featured in this anthology -- celebrate the endurance of the human spirit.

The Best American Essays 2023 includes Ciara Alfaro • Jillian Barnet • Sylvie Baumgartel • Eric Borsuk • Chris Dennis • Xujun Eberlein • Sandra Hager Eliason • George Estreich • Merrill Joan Gerber • Debra Gwartney • Edward Hoagland • Laura Kipnis • Phillip Lopate • Celeste Marcus • Sam Meekings • Sigrid Nunez • Kathryn Schulz • Anthony Siegel • Scott Spencer • Angelique Stevens • David Treuer

• Print length 1 pages
• Language English
• Publisher HarperCollins B and Blackstone Publishing
• Publication date October 17, 2023
• ISBN-13 979-8212698405
• See all details

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• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0C9NQ724T
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ HarperCollins B and Blackstone Publishing; MP3CD Audio edition (October 17, 2023)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Audio CD ‏ : ‎ 1 pages
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 979-8212698405
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.82 ounces
• #13,890 in American Fiction Anthologies
• #25,500 in Essays (Books)
• #66,277 in Short Stories Anthologies

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