(Criticism of the Wharton essay rounded on Franzen's observation that Wharton "wasn't pretty", something he suggested, not unreasonably, fed into her fictional disquisitions on the complicated currency of female beauty).
In an essay making the rounds this week, the Year We Broke the Internet, writer Luke O'Neil notes the recent spate of hoaxes and lousy journalism – including the bogus snow on the Pyramids picture and Elan Gale's airplane fiction-tweeting – and chalks it all up to the "traffic-at-all-costs mentality – veracity, newsworthiness, and relevance be damned".
More than two or three people doing this, and there's likely an infestation of the same essay doing the rounds.
I'd asked, after all, for Essay Writing Lab to round out the hot take with a little moral takeaway.
A publication -- an online essay based on a round-table discussion -- of the American Council on Education in Washington this spring seems to echo Mr. Milton's contention, reporting a "rapidly developing injection of free-market principles and practices into the once-buffered world of academe".
Now, leaving aside the fact that it's pretty wonderful that such a thing as a "notorious political essay" is doing the rounds in the UK, the fact remains that all people who have a desire for a public profile and an audience believe in their ability and right to have power over others.
I've saved the last word in this round of essays for the anthropologist with the most direct knowledge of this topic: Fuambai Ahmadu, a native of Sierra Leone, who grew up in America and then went back to her homeland as an adult to undergo the rite along with fellow members of the Kono ethnic group.
As Atul Gawande points out in his hand washing essay, on typical morning rounds, a resident will see 20 patients in an hour; nurses, the same.
"The Chinese government are building 10 million new homes a year," Marr essays, as he walks round a bright and airy new apartment that has just been built by the State for a Shanghai couple of former slum-dwellers, complete with energy-efficient lighting and gleaming taps.
I would forget there were places like London that were not centred round libraries and essays.
Then there are the lapses (I discovered at least one work in the exhibition not included in the catalog checklist) and clichés, like this one rounding out the essay by the museum director and exhibition co-curator, Constance Schwartz: "And so nearly a century after his birth, this bigger-than-life human being died.
