Debate over another flood, the Noachian, catalyzed the development of paleontology; in 1669 Nicholas Steno published an essay on how the remains of living organisms could be trapped in layers of sediment and mineralized to produce fossils.
And it's palpable when, on his birthday, he turns around and gives America the gift of this essay on how to be a feminist, even – and maybe especially – as a powerful man.
It was also the 250th anniversary of Thomas Bayes' essay on how humans can sequentially learn from experience, steadily updating their beliefs as more data become available (1).
No matter how many times an artist re-imagines Snow White as a size 14 (because that's what a real woman looks like, OK?), or a writer pens an essay on how ahead of the feminist curve Pocahontas was, there's escaping the fact that we're still using the cartoon characters from our childhoods to express ourselves.
James Fallows A'A Damaged Culture' is definitely a touchy, frustrating and well-written essay on how a culture of dependence and corruption should be held responsible for the despairing conditions of America's (former and sole) Asian colony, the Philippines.
He is the 17-year-old Long Island high school student who was accepted to all EIGHT Ivy League colleges, wowing admissions offices (and everyone all over the world) with his essay on how his love of music sparked his intellectual curiosity.
Have they, maybe, chosen a reasonable response to their condition in life?" This essay reminds you of how good Mr. O'Rourke can be, and makes you wish he'd write close to the bone more often.
In explaining how songlines work, James wrote in her 2015 essay Tjukurpa Time, of how Nganyinytja, a Pitjantjatjara woman of elder high degree, learned to read her people's history written in the land.
In the essay, Captain Khan wrote of how "liberty requires vigilance and sacrifice" and that those who are "beneficiaries of liberty must always bear this in mind, and keep it safe from attacks".
But that's the joy of reading these essays: his accounts of how we've been blind to, say, the antisemitism of the texts Stravinsky chose for his Cantata, or his argument that John Adams's opera The Death of Klinghoffer is a piece that privileges the terrorists' discourse on the Achille Lauro over their Jewish victims, are issues that can only inspire heated debate.
