The Best American Essays 2015

tetw:

The Best American Essays 2015 was released this week. We went through the list of nominations, and picked our ten favourites – all free to read online:

Find Your Beach by Zadie Smith – Across the way from our apartment—on Houston, I guess—there’s a new wall ad. The site is forty feet high, twenty feet wide. It changes once or twice a year. Whatever’s on that wall is my view…

The Case for Reparations by Ta-Nehisi Coates – Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole

The Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie by John Jeremiah Sullivan – On the trail of the phantom women who changed American music and then vanished without a trace.

The Crooked Ladder by Malcolm Gladwell – The criminal’s guide to upward mobility

The Real Roots of Midlife Crisis by Jonathan Rauch – What a growing body of research reveals about the biology of human happiness—and how to navigate the (temporary) slump in middle age

Poor Teeth by Sarah Smarsh – If you have a mouthful of teeth shaped by a childhood in poverty, don’t go knocking on the door of American privilege

Difficult Girl by Lena Dunham – Growing up, with help.

Word Magic by Adam Gopnik – How much really gets lost in translation?

Final Forms by Kathryn Schulz – What death certificates can tell us, and what they can’t

The Remains of the Night by Elizabeth Royte – Sex, trash and nature in the city

The Best American Essays 2015