Essays
-
The lists of “100 Authors to Read Before Graduation” and the “50 Classics All School Learners Should Read” I came across recently compel me to reply to those who compile them. There is something faintly absurd about a list called “The 100 Greatest Authors of All Time” that contains 20 or 30 writers from Britain…
-
Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics were written as science fiction in the 1940s. Today, they look increasingly like an early attempt to grapple with a problem we are only beginning to understand. The first law was simple enough: a robot may not injure a human being, or allow a human being to come to…
-
This week, I found myself sitting for hours in a packed public hospital waiting room. The queue barely moved. Plastic chairs scraped on the floor, babies cried somewhere in the distance, and every few minutes someone would sigh loudly and ask, “Who’s the last one in the line?” It was the kind of scene that…
-
There is a particular kind of reading experience that is difficult to explain without sounding as though something improbable has occurred. You are reading as you always do, moving through sentences, following an argument, inhabiting a voice, and then something shifts. A line stops you. Not because it is especially beautiful, or clever, or even…
-
What must we think when a president, during a press conference, can hone in on a journalist doing her job and say, “she’s a horror show”, and the moment simply passes? Not merely passes politically, but morally. No visible discomfort from those around him. No meaningful defence of the journalist’s dignity. No national conversation about…
Jenn Writes 