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Favorite Articles

Favorite Articles Issue 4 – China

April 16, 2025

China This week I have dug up three articles on the one country at the forefront of people’s minds: China. Despite my best efforts to understand the country, China remains a mystery. Like my own birth country (the USA), China is too large to easily understand at a glance. Although I have read much about China and tried to understand some of its nuance, I still feel as though I am the proverbial blind man piecing together an elephant. Thus, having only touched the surface, I must admit that I have no idea what China is. However, I hope that the three articles linked below provide some insight and help you understand what China might be and what it may have become. Chabuduo James Palmer’s 2016 essay, “What Chinese Corner-Cutting Reveals about Modernity”, offers insight into China’s economic boom and its potential for bust. Palmer’s essay centers on the mandarin term chabuduo meaning ‘good enough’. Read more…

Favorite Articles

Favorite Articles Issue 3 – Food

October 25, 2024

Food Food. We need it. We live for it. We love it. Food is an integral part of existence–but it’s not just physical dependence that makes it important; food also plays a significant role in our inner lives, becoming associated with pleasure, pain, joy, and grief. Food fits occasions and colors our moods, and somehow it also identifies us regionally, politically, and economically. The four articles below highlight our strange and complicated relationships with food offering a bit of fun, a touch of heartbreak, and a wallop of intrigue. Overindulgence Two essays by B.R. Meyers, his 2011 “The moral crusade against foodies” and 2007’s “Hard to swallow” look at the gluttony driving popular food culture. Although written more than a decade ago, Meyers’ writing is more relevant now than ever, for in the afterglow of the invention of mukbangs, it’s hard to argue that Meyer didn’t hit the nail on the head when he wrote Read more…

Favorite Articles

Favorite Articles Issue 2 – Disasters

July 10, 2023

Disasters This week I gathered three articles that highlight disasters. One disaster is entirely man made, and the other two are forces of nature. However, it is the human component of each story that makes them unforgettable. Fallout John Hersey’s (1946) “Hiroshima” gives a vivid account of the horrors suffered by the atomic bomb. This disaster, born out of war, bears scars inflicted by human hands (a scientific-technological elite consisting of physicists, chemists, politicians, and generals), but Hersey’s article focuses on the survivors to put the human toll into perspective. Like no other writer, Hersey humanizes the other and makes their pain our pain. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima Wave “The Clock is Ticking: Inside the Worst US Maritime Disaster in Decades” by William Langewiesche (2018) details the disappearance of a cargo ship, the El Faro, after it sailed into the eye of a hurricane. Langewiesche puts together emergency distress audio recordings, interviews with experts, and information gleaned from Read more…

Favorite Articles

Favorite Articles Issue 1 – Exploration

May 11, 2021

When I was young my grandfather stayed in contact through the post, but rather than send letters expressing the personal, he sent his favorite articles clipped out of the Los Angeles Times. The clippings, which arrived in plain white envelopes, were an expression of what my grandfather found valuable: new scientific discoveries, modern engineering marvels, or anything related to space and flight. At the time, I didn’t have the same zeal for those topics as my grandfather, but I later learned to love reading what other people find fascinating, and eventually took on reading as a hobby before making it a livelihood. As such, although my grandfather’s mail never included an accompanying note, the act of cutting out the articles, stapling the related sections together and putting them in the post spoke volumes about the importance of sharing one’s passions.  My grandfather’s newspaper-clipping is admittedly old fashioned, but in like manner I would like to Read more…

NonFictionEscapism, All rights reserved, Daniel Speechly

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