Tagged “essay”
218 pages · most loved first · page 7 of 10
The Man Who Carried Computer Science on His Shoulders
A profile of Edsger Dijkstra, the influential and often controversial computer scientist, tracing his ideas, personality…
The Many Faces of Mean Field Theory
A physics essay exploring how mean field theory shows up across statistical mechanics and related fields, one idea viewe…
The Missing Missing Reasons
An influential essay on family estrangement that explores why parents often fail to see the reasons their adult children…
The Moral Impetus of Tove Jansson
An essay on Tove Jansson, creator of the Moomins, tracing how her island life, paintings and children's books carry a qu…
The Original Affluent Society
A 1979 Fifth Estate piece on hunter-gatherer societies and Marshall Sahlins's argument that early peoples enjoyed leisur…
The Other Epidemic
A long first-person essay about the author's struggle to get off benzodiazepines, mixing memoir, medical history and a f…
The past was not that cute
A thoughtful essay arguing that pretty vintage aesthetics are not history, and that romanticizing the past erases how ha…
The Perils of Audience Capture
Gurwinder's essay on audience capture, showing through vivid case studies how online creators slowly reshape their perso…
The Radical Theology of Mr. Rogers
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg looks at the ideas behind Mister Rogers Neighborhood and argues that his gentle lessons on feelin…
The Remarkable Story of Ona Judge
An essay from the White House Historical Association on Ona Judge, who was born into slavery at Mount Vernon, served the…
The Singularity Will Occur on a Tuesday
A tongue-in-cheek essay that fits curves to AI progress data and concludes the singularity will hit on a specific Tuesda…
The Solivagants
A playful essay-game about how videogames fail at character context, where you walk through a Bitsy world that argues it…
The Spell That Wouldn't Leave
A warm personal essay about discovering Terry Pratchett at sixteen in a French classroom and the single sentence that ha…
The Strange Resurrection of Lonesome Dove
An essay on why Larry McMurtry's 1985 cowboy epic is finding a new generation of readers online and what its revival say…
The Subjective Grounds the Physical
A philosophy essay arguing that the view from nowhere is nonsense, and that subjective experience rather than physics is…
The Tree in Our Backyard
Alexis Madrigal investigates the old tree in his Oakland backyard, digging into the people who tended it before him and…
The Tyranny of the Marginal User
A sharp, much-cited essay explaining why consumer software tends to get worse over time, and how chasing the marginal us…
The User Condition
Silvio Lorusso's online essay on computer agency and behavior, asking how users can evade automatisms inside software bu…
The Value of Not Getting to the Point
Ken Arneson's essay on why rambling, wandering writing and conversation can lead to better ideas than blunt efficiency,…
The Wada Test
Linda Button's essay that won the 2025 Annie Dillard Creative Nonfiction Award in Bellingham Review, built around the st…
The Website Obesity Crisis
Maciej Ceglowski's classic talk on bloated web pages, arguing that page weight and needless complexity are making the we…
The Word of the Year Is: Sophistry
A Ted Gioia essay arguing that sophistry deserves to be the word of the year, on clever arguments that win attention wit…
The Zombocom Problem
An essay using the old joke site Zombocom, where you can do anything, to ask why unlimited freedom in software often lea…
There Are Only Three Memes
A playful essay arguing that every internet meme fits into just three formats, then making the case that they all boil d…
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