The Electric Typewriter
Great articles and essays by the world's best journalists and writers.10 Essential Essays about Writing
Why I Write by Joan Didion - Exploring the art of writing, and what it means to the author
Autobiographical Notes by James Baldwin - I was born in Harlem thirty-one years ago. I began plotting novels at about the time I learned to read…
Write Till You Drop by Annie Dillard - “Do you think I could be a writer?” “I don’t know… . Do you like sentences?”
The Nature of the Fun by David Foster Wallace - “A book-in-progress is a kind of hideously damaged infant that follows the writer around wanting love, wanting the very thing its hideousness guarantees it’ll get: the writer’s complete attention.”
That Crafty Feeling by Zadie Smith - “What I have to say about craft extends no further than my own experience, which is what it is - 12 years and three novels.”
How To Write With Style by Kurt Vonnegut - Why should you examine your writing style with the idea of improving it?
Where Do You Get Your Ideas? by Neil Gaiman - A meditation on inspiration
Why They Aren’t Writing the Great American Novel Anymore by Tom Wolfe - A treatise on the Varieties of Realistic Experience
Everything you Need to Know About Writing Successfully - in Ten Minutes by Stephen King - Short, sharp advice on everything from talent and self-criticism to having fun and entertaining your audience
Write Like a Motherfucker by Cheryl Strayed - Raw, emotional adivce on the role of humility and surrender in the often tortured world of the writer
Ten Great Essays about Scientific Method
But is it Science? by Jim Baggott - There is no agreed criterion to distinguish science from pseudoscience, or just plain ordinary bullshit…
The Problem with P-values by David Colquhoun - Academic psychology and medical testing are both dogged by unreliability. The reason is clear: we got probability wrong
Saving Science by Daniel Sarewitz - Science isn’t self-correcting, it’s self-destructing. To save the enterprise, scientists must come out of the lab and into the real world
The Mistrust of Science by Atul Gawande - What it means to be a scientist in a time of increasing mistrust toward the scientific community…
The Tyranny of Simple Explanations by Philip Ball - Imagine you’re a scientist with a set of results that are equally well predicted by two different theories. Which theory do you choose?
Why Do Many Reasonable People Doubt Science? by Joel Achenbach - We live in an age when all manner of scientific knowledge—from climate change to vaccinations—faces furious opposition. Why?
Scientific Method Man by Joseph D'Agnese - Will verifiers revolutionize the scientific method and help solve other seemingly unsolvable mysteries, such as the origins of the universe or the cause of Alzheimer’s disease?
The Mouse Trap by Daniel Engber - On the dangers of using one lab animal to study every disease
Sex, Drugs, Disasters, and the Extinction of Dinosaurs by Stephen Jay Gould - Science, in its most fundamental definition, is a fruitful mode of inquiry, not a list of enticing conclusions…
The Consolidation-Disruption Index Is Alarming by Derek Thompson
- Science has a crummy-paper problem.
The Stupidity of AI by James Bridle - Artificial intelligence in its current form is based on the wholesale appropriation of existing culture, and the notion that it is actually intelligent could be actively dangerous
The Jessica Simulation by Jason Fagone
- The death of the woman he loved was too much to bear. Could a mysterious website allow him to speak with her once more?
What Happens When an AI Knows How You Feel? by Will Coldwell - Technology used to only deliver our messages. Now it wants to write them for us by understanding our emotions
What Has Feelings? by Kristin Andrews and Jonathan Birch - As the power of AI grows, we need to have evidence of its sentience. That is why we must return to the minds of animals
Give the Drummer Some by Jack Stilgoe
- As AI drum machines embrace humanising imperfections, what does this mean for ‘real’ drummers and the soul of music?
How to Sleep by James Hamblin - Should you drink more coffee? Should you take melatonin? Can you train yourself to need less sleep? A physician’s guide to sleep in a stressful age
While We Sleep, Our Mind Goes on an Amazing Journey by Michael Finkel - Our floodlit society has made sleep deprivation a lifestyle. But we know more than ever about how we rest—and how it keeps us healthy
Goodnight. Sleep Clean. by Maria Konnikova
- Sleep seems like a perfectly fine waste of time…
The End of Night by Rebecca Boyle
- An eternal electric day is creeping across the globe, but our brains and bodies cannot cope in a world without darkness
Bed Habits by Rachel Handler - One insomniac’s descent into the world of sleep research to understand what screens before bed are doing to our brains
Insomnia by Elizabeth Gumport
- In which we’re up all night
Up All Night by Elizabeth Kolbert - The science of sleeplessness
Snooze or Lose by Po Bronson - Overstimulated, overscheduled kids are getting at least an hour’s less sleep than they need, a deficiency that, new research reveals, has the power to set their cognitive abilities back years
The Racial Inequality of Sleep by Brian Resnick
- Black Americans aren’t sleeping as well as whites. Here’s why that’s a public-health problem—and what can be done to fix it
No, Mornings Don’t Make You Moral by Maria Konnikova - No, Mornings Don’t Make You Moral
Why Music? by The Economist - Biologists are addressing one of humanity’s strangest attributes, its all-singing, all-dancing culture
Why Does Music Make Us Feel Good? by Philip Ball - No one knows why music has such a potent effect on our emotions. But thanks to some recent studies we have a few intriguing clues
Why Do We Even Listen to New Music? by Jeremy D. Larson - Our brains reward us for seeking out what we already know. So why should we reach to listen to something we don’t?
One More Time by Elizabeth Margulis - Why do we listen to our favourite music over and over again? Because repeated sounds work magic in our brains
Music is Not for Ears by Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis - We never just hear music. Our experience of it is saturated in cultural expectations, personal memory and the need to move
10 Essential Sports Articles
Friday Night Lights by Buzz Bissinger - Outside, the August night was cool and serene, with just a wisp of West Texas wind. Inside, there was a sense of excitement and also relief, for the waiting was basically over…
The Trading Desk by Michael Lewis - For the past four years, working with one of the lowest payrolls in the game, the Oakland A’s have won as many regular-season games as almost any other team. How on earth did they do it?
Federer as Religious Experience by David Foster Wallace - The world of top-flight tennis, and arguably its greatest exponent
Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer - I understood on some dim, detached level that it was a spectacular sight, but now that I was finally here, standing on the summit of Mount Everest, I just couldn’t summon the energy to care
The Last American Hero Is Junior Johnson. Yes! by Tom Wolfe - Ten o'clock Sunday morning in the hills of North Carolina. Cars, miles of cars, in every direction, millions of cars…
The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved by Hunter S. Thompson - I got off the plane around midnight and no one spoke as I crossed the dark runway to the terminal. The air was thick and hot, like wandering into a steam bath..
A History of Flight by Wright Thompson - Michael Jordan might not be the most famous person on the planet anymore, decades after he last put on those shorts and took the court, but as the person has faded, the idea of him has somehow remained powerful and bright…
Off Diamond Head by William Finnegan - To be thirteen, with a surfboard, in Hawaii
The Istanbul Derby by Spencer Hall - Soccer, fire and a game at the world’s crossroads
The Sea of Crises by Brian Phillips - On sumo, ritual suicide and the death of samurai culture
Ten Great Essays about Mathematics
What Is Math? by Dan Falk - A teenager asked that age-old question on TikTok, creating a viral backlash, and then, a thoughtful scientific debate…
How Natural is Numeracy? by Philip Ball - Where does our number sense come from? Is it a neural capacity we are born with — or is it a product of our culture?
Infinity Plus One, and Other Surreal Numbers by Polly Shulman - In the whole intellectual history of humankind, says Kruskal, there have been only a handful of genuine totally ordered number systems: the naturals, the integers, the rationals, the cardinals, the ordinals and now the surreals.
Encounter with the Infinite by Robert Schneider - How did a minimally trained, isolated mathematician, with little more than an out-of-date elementary textbook, anticipate some of the deepest theoretical problems of mathematics—including concepts discovered only after his death?
The Mind-Bending Math Behind Spot It! by Linda Rodriguez McRobbie - The simple matching game has some deceptively complex mathematics behind the scenes
A Most Profound Math Problem by Alexander Nazaryan - On August 6, 2010, a computer scientist named Vinay Deolalikar published a paper with a name as concise as it was audacious: “P ≠ NP.”
The Chaos of the Dice by Raffi Khatchadourian - A backgammon hustler’s quest to gain an edge…
Titans of Mathematics Clash Over Epic Proof of ABC Conjecture by Erica Klarreich - Two mathematicians have found what they say is a hole at the heart of a proof that has convulsed the mathematics community for nearly six years…
Your Handy Postcard-sized Guide to Statistics by Tim Harford - The case for everyday practical numeracy has never been more urgent…
The Most Irrational Number by Jordan Ellenberg - The golden ratio is even more astonishing than Dan Brown and Pepsi thought
The Machine Always Wins by Richard Seymour
- Social media was supposed to liberate us, but for many people it has
proved addictive, punishing and toxic. What keeps us hooked?
What Was Twitter, Anyway? by Willy Staley
- Whether the platform is dying or not, it’s time to reckon with how exactly it broke our brains
The 2010s Broke Our Sense Of Time by Katherine Miller
- How everything from TV to Trump to Instagram messed with your head just enough that time feels like it melted…
Dayna Tortorici by My Instagram
- We all die immediately of a Brazilian butt lift
Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid by Jonathan Haidt
- Social media’s empowerment of the far left, the far right, domestic
trolls, and foreign agents is creating a system that looks less like
democracy and more like rule by the most aggressive…
All My Exes Live in Texts by Maureen O'Connor
- Why the Social Media Generation Never Really Breaks Up
How Twitter Changed Music by Eric Harvey - Hashtag rap! Kanye rants! Terrifying stan pile-ons! For better and worse, Twitter has forever altered the music landscape
The Age of Instagram Face by Jia Tolentino
- How social media, FaceTune, and plastic surgery created a single, cyborgian look
#Manhunt by James Gleick - “Total Noise,” Only Louder
The Medium Really Is the Message by Ezra Klein
- It is an abdication of responsibility for technologists to pretend
that the technologies they make have no say in who we become…
The Tyranny of the Ideal Woman by Jia Tolentino - How we became suckers for the hard labor of self-optimization
The Diet Industrial Complex Will Never Let Me Go by Sarah Miller I did not see the body positivity movement coming, not at all
Rise of the Ripped by Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore - With bodies sculpted to look like comic-book heroes, today’s muscle men create an impossible template for masculinity
On Maintenance by Nora Ephron
- Maintenance is what you have to do just so you can walk out the door
knowing that if you go to the market and bump into a guy who once
rejected you, you won’t have to hide behind a stack of canned food
The Female Body by Margaret Atwood
- Beautiful mental snapshots, stunningly crafted by a master essayist
About a Boob or The Hermeneutics of a Woman’s Body by Lidia Yuknavitch - Let’s talk about boobs
The Broken Country by Molly McCully The fall I was nineteen, I came into my college dining hall in California just in time to overhear a boy telling a table of our mutual acquaintances that he thought I was very nice, but he felt terribly sorry for me because I was going to die a virgin
Brazilian Butt Lift by Sophie Elmhirst
- Behind the world’s most dangerous cosmetic surgery
Saying Goodbye to My Chest by Naomi Gordon-Loebl - I never hated my chest. It’s a perfectly fine chest; a good one, and I’m fond of it, even. But it needs to go now, not because it is wrong, or something worth despising, but simply because it is standing in the way of a life I can no longer postpone
Autobiography of a Body by Lucy Grealy I began my seductions incognito, as a boy
Click through for our full list of 25 Great Essays about Body Image
Why Are Young People Having So Little Sex? by Kate Julian - Despite the easing of taboos and the rise of hookup apps, Americans are in the midst of a sex recession.
Afterglow by Tove K Danovich - The intensity of orgasm is sublime, but the gentle love cocktail that follows is what helps relationships to endure
The Limits of Sex Positivity by Angela Chen - American culture still treats disinterest in sex as something that needs to be fixed. What if any amount of desire—including none—was okay?
My Life as a Sex Object by Jessica Valenti - Should you laugh off a lifetime of objectification – or get angry?
Speaking in Tongues by Sarah Prickett
- The numbers in my phone don’t belong to the men who were best at fucking
me, but the ones who were, and are, best at telling me how they would
fuck me…
Friends Without Benefits by Nancy Jo Sales - How dating apps, social media and porn are reshaping tennager’s lives
Pornucopia by Maria Konnikova - Critics say that porn degrades women, dulls sexual pleasure, and ruins authentic relationships – are they right?
Secret Museums by B. Pietras - Struggling with the world’s, and his own, homophobia, one queer young man searches for intimacy in the world of internet porn.
Hands Off by Emily Witt - Why men are quitting masturbation
Cockblocked by Redistribution by Katie J.M. Baker - A pick-up artist in Denmark
Click through for 50 more great articles and essays about sex!
