Tag: essays

Elizabeth Greenwood decides to give everything: time, money, praise, forgiveness. But when does generosity become a mania for giving?

Here are the best stories we thought deserved more attention this year.

The personal essays, original reporting, and collaborations that were our most-read stories of the year.

We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in essays.

The allure and shame of watching America’s last public hanging.

Jeannie’s father never spoke of his daughter who had died at 16, the mysterious half-sister who shared her name.

Nicole Chung reflects on the burden of engaging with racism and educating white people, including some in her own family.

An ephemeral birthmark is a rare gift, connecting me to generations spanning the centuries.

What do we get from our parents? An inheritance always comes with a tax.

While snowed in on the West Coast, Frances Badalamenti grapples alone with her father’s death on the other side of what feels like a dying country.

On journeys to Rikers Island in New York City and Robben Island in South Africa, Roohi Choudhry examines issues of incarceration and racism, and envisions a day when the convicted are no longer exiled to penal colonies.

The rickety ’98 Volvo wagon didn’t look like much, but it provided Debbie Weingarten and her children safe passage to a new life.

For Alex DiFrancesco, coming out as transgender—even to themself—wasn’t possible without first disappearing.

Anna Furman interviews Sarah Manguso about the process of writing her new book 300 Arguments, her writing influences, failure and thwarted ambition, and how Sarah’s sleeping post-inauguration.

Breaking up is hard to do.

Why would a tenure-track professor find himself selling his plasma to make rent? A story about debt in the academic world.

Conservative political commentator Andrew Sullivan recently became a United States citizen. In New York magazine, Sullivan reflects on how he learned to embrace the U.S.’s flaws and virtues as he watched the country go through social and political shifts over the last three decades.

When does fact become fiction? William Deresiewicz on essays, embellishment, and the slippery slope of “truthiness.”

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here, the best in essays and criticism.

How learning to swim at 24 led Syam Palakurthy to first-hand lessons in gentrification.

A travel writer confronts her battle with chronic pain.

In pregnancy, writer Judy Tsuei found herself confronting the eating disorder she’d recovered from and her Chinese-American upbringing—and in the process, rebirthing herself as the kind of mother her daughter would need her to be.

After returning home to Nashville following many years away, Susannah Felts assesses the city’s changing face through the eyes of a native, and as a woman raised in the South.

As an avid solo traveler—and proponent of the empowerment traveling alone can offer women—Laura Yan has been conflicted about revealing she was raped in Bolivia.

When her challenging, cancer-ridden mother suffers a psychotic break, Jane Demuth searches for the wherewithal to help the person who once demanded the most of her.

Revel in all the feels with these 14 (get it?) essays and interviews.

So often, we hear stories of people who get help just in time. They hit rock bottom and manage to climb back up.

Joe Berkowitz has been writing a series for the Awl about modern relationships, and his final installment was published this week.

Over at New York magazine, Boris Kachka has a piece looking at how the tiny, Minnesota-based Graywolf Press became a major player in book publishing. As the publisher of books like Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (read the first chapter here!) and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Graywolf Press has helped turn “the previously unprepossessing genre of the ‘lyric essay’ into a major […]

“On the last day of my old job, I stumbled out the door, holding aloft that iconic emblem of termination: The Box. Though from the outside it might look wholly indistinct, we who have felt its symbolic weight know this is no ordinary box; this is a box that can make grown men cry.”