Having lost trust in most authority figures and institutions which once were responsible for entertaining healthy discourse around important topics (see what happened with covid19), making sense of "the truth" requires monumental effort from individuals given that even experts in the same camp disagree.

Unlike some of the other reviewers here, I don't think I could really tease out the connection between the essays, but I enjoyed each for what they were. The Anthropocene is the current geologic age, in which humans have profoundly reshaped the planet and its biodiversity. Evan Puschak in his first published book, an essay collection, brings something deeply relatable to this art form.Quincy Jones, Diane Keaton, Gloria Steinem, Julia Roberts, John Cleese, and David Bowie are just a few of his celebrity alumni.

Learning, you learn, is not really a process of expanding your mind, but of watching it shrink against all there is to know. Think of the guts it took to deliver a fiery critique of Christianity to the Harvard Divinity School ! His most popular videos include his thoughts on Donald Trump’s speech patterns and Bong Joon-ho’s 2019 film, “Parasite. Caring about something so deeply felt rebellious, and that’s the place where Emerson gave me permission to care. By turns poignant, relatable, and mind-bending, the definitions include whimsical etymologies drawn from languages around the world, interspersed with otherworldly collages and lyrical essays that explore forgotten corners of the human condition - from astrophe, the longing to explore beyond the planet Earth, to zenosyne, the sense that time keeps getting faster.I find that once I articulate something in speech, it sticks in my mind more or less intact—but only for a little while. The title, in retrospect, seems to be ironic as one of the things Puschak states is that he doesn't believe there is any meaning to anything. When Experts Disagree was a particular offender; it doesn't address how the concern between selecting between "both" sides of a debate can miss whose expertise or how expertise is even constructed (beyond a glib statement that expertise isn't relevant for aesthetic subjects), and it conflates support of a certain politics with bias in favor of those politics without actually constructing that bridge. Now, how do you review an essay collection that doesn’t have an overarching theme to properly speak of? I hope not, but I don’t know how to fix it, so I should probably leave the indictments to those who do.

He’d grown increasingly frustrated with the Church’s teaching, believing it to be stale and doctrinaire, so he started to develop his own philosophy. A conversion from video essays to actual written essays was a natural leap for him to make and it's exactly what he did with his ever sharp and utterly personal debut collection Escape Into Meaning. By the end, exposing someone’s address was an act of emotional violence, and nobody picked up their new cell phone if they didn’t know who it was. What makes this essay so great is how he captures an experience that I — and I suspect many others — have felt.The first chapter is arguably important because it explains the why of the book but at first it reads a bit like a college essay on Emerson. The chapters are full of intelligent references to Emerson, Camus, Woolf, John Stuart Mill, Erik Erikson, Yeats (my favorite) and so many more. Perfect for fans of Trick Mirror and the writing of John Hodgman and Chuck Klosterman, Escape into Meaning is a compendium of fascinating insights into obsession.

Everything I’ve written since that afternoon in Kenmore, including this book, I owe to his inspiration. All great leaders of history have known this, and were successful because of the risks they dared to take. Although I’m not well-versed in Emerson, this essay rang true and empowering to me as it discussed literature almost as this virus that makes people more engaged with life and all around better. In What We Owe The Future, philosopher William MacAskill argues for longtermism, that idea that positively influencing the distant future is a key moral priority of our time. That’s the crux of what is likely his most famous essay, “Self-Reliance,” a fullhearted plea for the individual to “Trust thyself.Wisdom should be the compensation for failure and loss: “To know a little, would be worth the expense of this world. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. The Hidden Habits of Genius explores the meaning of this contested term, and the unexpected motivations of those we have dubbed "genius" throughout history, from Charles Darwin and Marie Curie to Leonardo Da Vinci and Andy Warhol to Toni Morrison and Elon Musk.