An exploration of scale, limits, and care—featuring our new essay “By All Measures” and this week’s Top 5 reads.
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Best of 2022: Personal Essays
Five notable personal essays published this year, on friendship, loss, war, endings, and metaphors.
Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art
“To create a novel or a painting, an artist makes choices that are fundamentally alien to artificial intelligence.”
Variations on the Theme of Silence
“Without stretches of silence, you cannot hear yourself or anyone else.”
Costco in Cancún
“This is the Costco psychology: quality over brand; value over status. To be ripped off is to be taken for a sucker. It is to have your resources wasted, your hard-earned cash sucked into a delusion of taste, timeliness, or class.”
Beloved Bother
A typo in my great-uncle’s obituary held the key to understanding him.
Object Relations
“In Vermont, a person is not beholden to the restrictions of private property: anyone may walk anywhere, pass through anyone’s land.”
Letter to My Teenage Self: An Incarcerated Man Interrogates the Person He Once Was
“From his prison cell, Hector Ortiz reexamines the traumas, hardships, and bad choices that led to his lengthy sentence—and ultimately taught him about the man he needed to be.”
Home for a Season
“Maybe there is no tension between settling down and leaving.”

