My Favorite 25 Essays of 2018
- “The Silence: The Legacy of Childhood Trauma” by Junot Díaz in The New Yorker
- “The Rage of the Incels” by Jia Tolentino in The New Yorker
- “One Year of #MeToo: A Younger Generation’s Remedy for Rage” by Amanda Petrusich in The New Yorker
- “Unheard Grief, Unmovable Men: How an Old Mexican Folktale Speaks to Our Pain Today” by John Paul Brammer in Catapult
- “How Fairy Tales Teach Us to Love the Unknowable” by Cate Frick in Catapult
- “I Used to Insist I Didn’t Get Angry. Not Anymore” by Leslie Jamison in The New York Times Magazine
- “Gillian Flynn Peers Into the Dark Side of Femininity” by Lauren Oyer in The New York Times Magazine
- “Is Television Ready for Angry Women?” by Sophie Gilbert in The Atlantic
- “Do Beyoncé Fans Have to Forgive Jay-Z?” by Hannah Giorgis in The Atlantic
- “How Famous Women Clean Up After Men” by Soraya Roberts in Longreads
- “The Miracle of the Mundane” by Heather Havrilesky in LongReads
- “Sharp Objects Finale Recap: Don’t Tell Mama” by Angelica Jade Bastien in Vulture
- In Conversation: Kathleen Turner in Vulture
- “Why 536 was the worst year to be alive” by Ann Gibbons in Science Magazine
- “When Priyanka Met Nick: A Love Story” by Abby Aguirre in Vogue
- “The Female Price of Male Pleasure” by Lili Loofbourow in The Week
- “We Need to Start Taking Young Women’s Love Stories Seriously” by Marian Crotty in Electric Literature
- “Female Agency in Movies” by Kellie Herson in The Outline
- “Mourning for the Void” by Hazel Cills in Jezebel
- “Cracked Fairy Tales and the Holocaust” by Sabrina Orah Mark in The Paris Review
- “How to Be Pretty On TV” by Elisa Gabbert in LitHub
- “Your American Dream Baby” by Vivian Zhu on her personal blog
- “We Prioritize Boys’ Suffering At Girls’ Expense” by Shannon Keating in BuzzFeed
- “You Owe Me An Apology” by Brittany Packnett in Elle
- “Why is our quest for validation online becoming so desperate?” by Emily Reynolds in HuckMag
“…I said, ‘I am an artist,’ which I won’t take back, because it’s self-evident that what that word implies is looking for something all the time without ever finding it in full. It is the very opposite of saying, ‘I know all about it, I’ve already found it’ As far as I am concerned, the word means, ‘I am looking, I am hunting for it, I am deeply involved.’”
— Vincent Van Gogh, from The Complete Letters
Diary of a Shinjuku thief (1969), Nagisa Oshima
detail: hands
“Who knows but that we may go walking at the seaside together this summer?”
— Vincent van Gogh, from a letter to Theo van Gogh wr. c. February 1877
“The more ugly, old, vicious, ill, poor I get, the more I want to take my revenge by producing a brilliant colour, well arranged, resplendent.”
— Vincent Van Gogh, from a letter to his sister
“…the most beautiful paintings are those which you dream about when you lie in bed smoking a pipe, but which you never paint.”
— Vincent Van Gogh, from The Complete Letters