Essays

Daily news explains what happened. The essay explains why it matters. There is no informational urgency here, there is time to think a subject through to the end, without the pressure to publish before anyone else or to summarise in two paragraphs what demands a full development. A well written essay does not compete with current events, it deliberately ignores them for as long as careful thought requires.

The texts gathered in this section address culture, politics and history from a critical distance that current events rarely allow. They do not aim to inform about a specific event, they aim to place that event within a wider structure of meaning, the one that explains why it happened that way and not another, and why it will probably happen again.

Not everything deserves an essay. Only what survives a second reading, what still says something once the outcome of the event that inspired it is already known. A good essay ages better than the news that gave rise to it, because it does not depend on novelty but on the quality of the reasoning, and that is exactly the criterion by which every text in this section is chosen.