A Note and a List

But really a collection of great articles and essays...

Note

A few years ago I started filling a Microsoft word document with some of the best articles I have ever laid eyes on. I intend to keep it going until its long enough to bind. But why wait to share whatever wisdom is found in these dark, and bright, and mystifying articles. Some of them are somber. Some of them are about medicine. Some of them are just simply brilliant.

Hitchens will always be my favorite. There is nothing like his work. I stumbled upon Christopher Hitchens in the days after his death in 2011. I was studying late one night at my undergraduate university’s library. The thick of exam season had arrived. I got back to my parent’s home and everyone was asleep. I had a habit of turning on the news at that time and watching CNN. Anderson Cooper had run a short clip from a longer interview with Hitchens in commemoration of his life, as he had died just hours earlier. I watched the clip and remember feeling that something had shifted in my mind. Cooper taunted the audience by reserving the full interview until the end of the hour. I obviously stayed up.

The ease with which he spoke and articulated his own thoughts was breathtaking. The turn of phrase, the use of irony, and of humor, were all revolutionary at the time. Most of all was the savagery though. Hitchens reminds you that its okay to be angry and decided against some force in the world you see as evil. As time wore on, I consumed more and more of his work. Over that time, I’ve learned so much about thinking and logic and one’s interaction with one’s conscience and ego.

Hitchens leaves a mark on anyone who reads or listens to him. If you’re unfamiliar, or if you never have, its well worth the dive. While I love the Hitchens selection below, Oliver Sacks’ piece on Spalding Gray is another wowzer. I hope you enjoy them both, and the others. -d.

The List

Spalding Gray’s Catastrophe by Oliver Sacks (The New Yorker) (2015)

Intimacy with the Inevitable by William Harless (The American Scholar) (2013)

As They Lay Dying by Joshua D. Mezrich and Joseph Scalea (The Atlantic) (2015)

Topic of Cancer by Christopher Hitchens (Vanity Fair) (2010)

The Things I Would Never Do by Caitlin Flanagan (The Atlantic) (2021)

The View from Mrs. Thompson’s by David Foster Wallace (Rolling Stone) (2001)