10 Amazing Short Articles and Essays

Want to read something great? Short on time? We have you covered:

Things We Think We Know by Chuck Klosterman - We all hate stereotypes. Except we don’t…

Crazy Love by Steven Pinker - Why love is like insanity…

Small, Yes, but Mighty by Natalie Angier - The molecule called water

Why You Are Unhappy by Tim Urban - Happiness = reality - expectations

Keep Your Identity Small by Paul Graham - Politics, like religion, is a topic with no threshold of expertise for expressing an opinion…

What No One Else Will Tell You About Feminism by Lindy West - Guess what? You’re a feminist

Adventures in Depression by Allie Brosh - Some people have a legitimate reason to feel depressed, but not me…

The Onset by My Ngoc To - When I was about six weeks old and still inside my mother, my milk lines formed…

Phoning It In by Stanley Bing - She gave me this long and involved story about a huge slight that was inflicted on her operation by some other entity someplace, and I was looking out the window and thinking, whoa, look at that BMW Z8

A Brief History of Forever by Tavi Gevinson - Forever is the state, exclusive to those between the ages of 13 and 17…

10 Great Essays by Nora Ephron

On Maintenance - 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…

A Few Words about Breasts - I was boyish. I wanted desperately not to be that way, not to be a mixture of both things, but instead just one, a girl. As soft and as pink as a nursery. And nothing would do that for me, I felt, but breasts…

The Graduate - It was gritty and glamorous and everything I’d been longing for—to begin my life in New York as a journalist…

The D Word - The most important thing about me, for quite a long chunk of my life, was that I was divorced. Even after I was no longer divorced but remarried, this was true…

I Remember Nothing - Once I went to a store to buy a book about Alzheimer’s disease and forgot the name of it…

Be the Heroine of Your Life - Whatever you choose, however many roads you travel, I hope that you choose not to be a lady…

My Life as an Heiress - The will that wouldn’t…

Moving On, a Love Story - To move into the Apthorp was to enter a state of giddy, rent-stabilized delirium…

My Mother’s Mink Coat - Nora Ephron never wanted a mink coat until her mother died. Then she wanted her mother’s coat. So did her sister…

The Lost Strudel - FOOD vanishes. I don’t mean food as habit, food as memory, food as biography, food as metaphor, food as regret, food as love. I mean food as food. Food vanishes…

5 Great Essays by Jia Tolentino

The Tyranny of the Ideal Woman by Jia Tolentino - How we became suckers for the hard labor of self-optimization…

Somewhere Worse by Jia Tolentino - We are entering an era not just of unsafe abortions but of the widespread criminalization of pregnancy

The Age of Instagram Face by Jia Tolentino - How social media, FaceTune, and plastic surgery created a single, cyborgian look

Losing Religion and Finding Ecstasy in Houston by Jia Tolentino - Christianity formed my deepest instincts, and I have been walking away from it for half my life

No Offense by Jia Tolentino - The offense is supposed to go somewhere and do something. Of course, in practice, that’s not what happens at all

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

10 Essential Essays by Joan Didion

Slouching Towards Bethlehem - The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled…

Goodbye to All That - When I first saw New York some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever heard about New York, informed me that things would never be quite the same again…

Holy Water - Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive…

Why I Write - Exploring the art of writing, and what it means to the author…

The Women’s Movement - To those of us who remained committed mainly to the exploration of moral distinctions and ambiguities, the feminist analysis seemed a particularly narrow and cracked determinism…

The Santa Ana - There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension. What it means is that tonight a Santa Ana will begin to blow…

After Life - In the aftermath of her husband’s death, Didion meditates on the fickle fragility of life…

On Self Respect - Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself…

Fixed Opinions, or The Hinge of History - A startlingly insightful account of the ideological aftermath of 9/11…

On Keeping a Notebook - A beautiful meditation on keeping notes that explores the heart of the writing process…

5 Great Articles about Future War

The AI-Powered, Totally Autonomous Future of War Is Here by Will Knight - Ships without crews. Self-directed drone swarms. How a US Navy task force is using off-the-shelf robotics and artificial intelligence to prepare for the next age of conflict.

Putin has Redrawn the World - But Not the Way He Wanted by Allan Little - We are living in new and more dangerous times.

The Age of American Naval Dominance Is Over by Jerry Hendrix - The United States has ceded the oceans to its enemies. We can no longer take freedom of the seas for granted.

How an Entire Nation Became Russia’s Test Lab for Cyberwar by Andy Greenberg - Blackouts in Ukraine were just a trial run. Russian hackers are learning to sabotage infrastructure—and the US could be next.

The Most Devastating Cyberattack in History by Andy Greenberg - Crippled ports. Paralyzed corporations. Frozen government agencies. How a single piece of code crashed the world.

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.