Essays
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Essays 2011
Personal Stories
Ever since Nelson Mandela became president of South Africa after winning his country’s first democratic elections in April 1994, the national anthem has consisted of two songs spliced—not particularly mellifluously—together. One is “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika,” or “God Bless Africa,” sung at black protest rallies during the forty-six years between the rise and fall of apartheid. The other is “Die Stem,” (“The Call”), the old white anthem, a celebration of the European settlers’ conquest of Africa’s southern tip.
Nelson Mandela's Legacy
In Which We Consider The Macabre Unpleasantness Of Roald Dahl - Home - This Recording
The stories are brilliant and the imagination is fabulous.
Christopher Hitchens, along with Robert Hughes and Spy magazine's Michèle Bennett, first started me imagining that I would like someday to be a journalist and critic. These jaundiced observers of the follies of the late 1980s and early 1990s had in common an elegant style of attack, and a positive relish in the peppering, roasting, carving and dishing up of sacred cows.
I Love You Christopher Hitchens, You Irritating Bastard | The Awl
Last week I asked the readers a simple question: Where are you right now in your life, at this exact moment?
Our Lives Are Not What We Think | Raptitude.com
Philip Gould is boiling the kettle, chatting casually about football, when he says something that chokes me.
Philip Gould: 'If you accept death, fear disappears' | Politics | The Guardian
A Hanging | The Orwell Prize
This material remains under copyright and is reproduced by kind permission of the Orwell Estate and Penguin Books . It was in Burma, a sodden morning of the rains.
Mother’s boys: conversations with the parents of Russia’s neo-Nazis | openDemocracy
I often observe them in court. They sigh and observe how their son – accused of 15 murders – has lost weight.When I tell people what we are doing, they want to hear about the room where you produce.
The Age of Mechanical Reproduction - The Morning News
'Free Sperm Donors' and the Women Who Want Them - The Daily Beast
For months, Beth Gardner and her wife, Nicole, had been looking for someone to help them conceive. They began with sperm banks, which have donors of almost every background, searchable by religion, ancestry, even the celebrity they most resemble. But the couple balked at the prices—at least $2,000 for the sperm alone—and the fact that most donors were anonymous; they wanted their child to have the option to one day know his or her father.
Things I have learnt from and about IVF — Crooked Timber
Encouraged by Belle & Tedra’s recent posts, and just loving Jim Henley’s recent comment: “I’d just like to say that all the ladyblogging about ladyparts and ladyissues only of interest to ladies around here lately has been awesome. I’m learning a lot from it” ;T rent Arsenault was in the Borg Cube when he heard the knock. “Trent,” his father called through the door. The Borg, tucked into a canyon southeast of San Francisco, consists of a modest two-bedroom ranch house plus a few tents Trent has erected in the backyard.