essay on life of 21st century

Essay on Life In 21st Century

Students are often asked to write an essay on Life In 21st Century in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

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100 Words Essay on Life In 21st Century

Introduction.

Life in the 21st century is marked by rapid changes and advancements. It’s a time of technology, innovation, and global connections. We have seen improvements in many areas, from communication to healthcare.

The 21st century is known as the digital age. We use smartphones, laptops, and the internet daily. These tools have changed how we work, learn, and connect with others. They offer convenience and open up new opportunities.

Globalization

Our world has become a global village. We can communicate with people from different cultures and backgrounds. This has increased our understanding and appreciation of diversity.

Advancements in healthcare have improved our lives. New treatments and medicines have been developed. Diseases that were once deadly can now be cured or managed.

Despite these advancements, the 21st century also presents challenges. Issues like climate change, inequality, and cyber threats require our attention and action.

Life in the 21st century is exciting but also challenging. We must use the advancements wisely and work together to overcome the challenges.

250 Words Essay on Life In 21st Century

The 21st century lifestyle.

The 21st century is a time of rapid change and progress. We live in a world where technology is at our fingertips, making our lives easier and more comfortable.

Technology and Communication

One of the most significant changes in the 21st century is the advancement in technology. Today, we can communicate with anyone, anywhere in the world, in just a few seconds. Smartphones, the internet, and social media platforms have transformed the way we interact.

Education and Learning

Education has also seen a massive transformation. Online learning is now a reality, allowing students to learn at their own pace from anywhere. This has made education more accessible to everyone, regardless of their location or circumstances.

Health and Medicine

The field of health and medicine has also evolved. New treatments and medicines have been developed, increasing the average lifespan. People are now more aware of their health and are taking steps to lead healthier lives.

Challenges of the 21st Century

Despite all these advancements, the 21st century also brings new challenges. Environmental issues like pollution and climate change are major concerns. There is also a growing gap between the rich and the poor, leading to social problems.

In conclusion, life in the 21st century is a mix of advancements and challenges. We have the tools to make our lives better, but we also have the responsibility to use them wisely for the benefit of all.

500 Words Essay on Life In 21st Century

Life in the 21st century is full of excitement and challenges. It is a time of rapid change and amazing progress. We live in an era where technology has become a key part of our lives.

One of the most important parts of life in the 21st century is technology. It has made our lives easier in many ways. We can now talk to friends and family who live far away by using our phones or computers. We can also use the internet to learn new things and find information quickly. But, it’s important to remember that too much screen time can be bad for our health. We need to balance our use of technology with other activities.

Education has also changed a lot in the 21st century. Now, not only do we learn in classrooms, but we also have the option to learn online. This has made education more accessible to everyone. We can learn from the best teachers and experts from all over the world without leaving our homes.

Health and Lifestyle

Life in the 21st century is also different because of changes in our health and lifestyle. We now know more about how to take care of our bodies. We understand the importance of eating healthy food and exercising regularly. But, the busy pace of life can make it hard to find time for these things.

Environment

One of the biggest challenges we face in the 21st century is taking care of our environment. We now understand that our actions can harm the Earth. We need to find ways to live that are good for the environment. This means using less energy, recycling, and finding new ways to make things that don’t harm the Earth.

Life in the 21st century is full of both challenges and opportunities. We have amazing technology and access to information. But, we also face problems like taking care of our health and the environment. It’s an exciting time to be alive, and we all have a part to play in shaping the future.

Remember, the 21st century is our time. Let’s make the most of it!

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How to Thrive in the 21st Century

• Posted November 22, 2016
• By Heather Beasley Doyle

When Fernando Reimers , a professor of international education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), talks and writes about what he wants children around the world to learn, the conversation runs deep and reaches far. Individual success, he says, increasingly depends upon students’ interpersonal dexterity, creativity, and ability to innovate. And our collective success — our ability to navigate complexities and to build and sustain a peaceful world — also hinges on these kinds of skills. Together, these skills form the basis of an emerging set of core competencies that will influence education policy and practice around the world.

In Teaching and Learning for the Twenty-First Century , Reimers and his co-editor, HGSE lecturer Connie K. Chung , explore how school systems in six countries are defining and supporting these global competencies. Their aim is to develop a shared framework for promoting the skills students will need in order to thrive as global citizens in a sustainable world in the decades ahead.

“Young people are in a context where they’re saturated and inundated with issues from around the world,” says Chung. Between new technologies, multiplying media, and layers of intercontinental connection, “global citizenship education is a ‘must have’ and not a ‘nice to have’ — for everyone,” says Chung.

Reimers and Chung used the National Research Council’s 2012 report, Education for Life and Work: Developing Transferable Knowledge and Skills in the 21st Century , as a jumping off point for their investigation of policies and curricula that are best positioned to nurture global citizens. That report (read the research brief here) identifies three broad domains of competence: cognitive, intrapersonal, and interpersonal. “This is not just talking about knowledge,” says Chung. Rather, it includes such strengths as intercultural literacy, self-discipline, and flexibility in social and work domains.

The Cognitive Competencies

As Chung suggests, the 21st-century global citizen’s cognitive skill set includes traditional, testable basics such as math and literacy, but extends beyond that to encompass a particularly strong emphasis on the world in which we live. “Current events highlight some of the fears around otherness,” she says. The key to informed citizenship is getting to know other cultures — and valuing them.

In addition to rounding out kids’ knowledge base to include a nuanced understanding of world geography and cultures , schools must teach them the skills to use this knowledge as active and engaged citizens.

That means being able to:

• Communicate effectively and listen actively
• Use evidence and assess information
• Speak at least one language beyond one’s native tongue
• Think critically and analyze local and global issues, challenges, and opportunities
• Reason logically and interpret clearly
• Become and remain digitally literate, including the ability to “weigh and judge the validity of the content that’s in front of you,” Chung says.

In some ways, digital literacy is a linchpin of the other competencies. “Technology gives us humans the possibility to collaborate in ways that are unprecedented, to think and produce things no one could produce individually,” Reimers says.

The Interpersonal Competencies

Empathy is a cornerstone 21st-century global competency. We’re all familiar with empathy between individuals: someone’s hurt, and another person deeply understands the pain. But Reimers and Chung envision the concept on a global scale. Empathy resides in the ability to consider the complexity of issues , Chung says — in an interconnected worldview that recognizes that “what we do impacts someone else.”

Anchored in tolerance and respect for other people, interpersonal intelligence breaks down into several overlapping skills, including:

• Collaboration
• Teamwork and cooperation
• Leadership and responsibility
• Assertive communication
• Social influence

As Reimers says, “We need to make sure that we can get along, and that we can see our differences as an opportunity, as a source of strength.” Both regionally and nationally, students need the skills to transcend the limits of fragmentation, “where people can only relate to those who they perceive to be like them.”

The Intrapersonal Competencies

A particular blend of honed personal characteristics underpins the cognitive and intrapersonal competencies. Reimers points to an ethical orientation and strong work and mind habits, including self-regulation and intellectual openness , as traits that 21st-century educators must nurture in their students.

The world is less predictable than it used to be: “People know that half of the jobs that are going to be around 10 years from now have not been invented,” Reimers says. That means teaching young people in such a way that makes them flexible and adaptable . It means enabling them to think of themselves as creators and inventors who feel comfortable taking the initiative and persevering — the skills necessary for starting one’s own business, for example.

Instilling in students the value of thinking beyond the short term will give them the best chance to tackle some of the world’s most daunting challenges, including climate change. For example, educators in Singapore were challenged to imagine their country not five, 10, or 15 years down the road, but 30 years in the future, Chung says. Encouraging students to think on that kind of a time scale helps them to grasp the reverberations of their actions and decisions.

Values, Attitudes, and Moving to Pedagogy

In Teaching and Learning for the Twenty-First Century  (which has been published in Chinese, Portuguese, and Spanish editions as well), Reimers, Chung, and global colleagues interviewed education researchers and stakeholders in Chile (in a chapter by Cristián Bellei and Liliana Morawietz), China (by Yan Wang), India (by Aditya Natraj, Monal Jayaram, Jahnavi Contractor, and Payal Agrawal), Mexico (by Sergio Cárdenas), Singapore (by Oon-Seng Tan and Ee-Ling Low), and the United States (by Chung and Reimers). They explored curriculum frameworks, seeking to understand how values and attitudes unique to each country and region were informing policy goals and ultimately shaping students’ learning opportunities.

Drawing on that survey of 21st-century competencies and the frameworks for their support, Reimers, Chung, and their digitally connected global network of educators are now teasing out a pedagogy for educators everywhere. Reimers and Chung co-authored (with Vidur Chopra, Julia Higdon, and E.B. O’Donnell) another new book, Empowering Global Citizens, which lays out a K–12 curriculum for global citizenship education called The World Course. Its aim is to position students and communities to thrive amid globalization — to lead, to steward, and to safeguard this complex world in the current century and beyond.

Additional Resources

• The Think Tank on Global Education , a professional education program with Fernando Reimers that invites teachers to experiment with a new curriulum on empowering global citizens
• The Global Education Innovation Initiative , a multi-country exploration of education for the 21st century, led by Reimers
• The introduction [PDF] of Teaching and Learning in the 21st Century , which describes the rationale for the book’s comparative study
• Fifteen Letters on Education in Singapore , in which U.S. educators visit Singapore to learn how that country’s education innovations have fueled a prosperous knowledge economy — and what lessons may apply. (Available as a f ree Kindle book .)
• Reflections on turning students into global citizens
• Creating a Course for the World  (a Harvard EdCast exploring the new global curriculum)

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20 Memorable Moments of the 21st Century So Far

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We are now, already, two decades deep into the 21st century. In the past 20 years, Earth-shaking, mind-bending, being-altering changes have upended the way we live and work. We eat differently. We play differently. We communicate differently. We, in many, many ways, simply are different from how we were in the last days of the late 20th century . At this rate, we won't even recognize our world in 2040.

Things have changed, all right; some for the better and some, undoubtedly, for the worse. Here are 20 groundbreaking developments of the first two decades in the 21st century, in no particular order.

Smartphones Are Everywhere

Social media sites take off, we now connect via wifi, memes and emojis spread like wildfire, streaming takes over the airways, gps goes mainstream, 9/11 sparks the war on terror, the great recession almost breaks us, the sharing economy helps us rebound, the u.s. elects a new kind of president, more women are in power politically, same-sex marriage becomes legal, people are still food insecure, the international space station goes online, climate change poses global threat, but recycling hits its stride, and electric cars race to the future, scientists find water on mars, physicists confirm the higgs boson, doctors are cracking the genetic code.

Apple rolled out its first smartphone — a hand-held computer and mobile phone mashed into one — in 2007. Since the iPhone's debut, (the first Android smartphone debuted a year later) smartphones have grown bigger, more sophisticated, smarter and more ubiquitous than anyone would have imagined. Your average smartphone has more than 100,000 times the processing power of the computer that guided Apollo 11 to the moon. In the past decade in America, the percentage of people who use a smartphone has more than tripled , to more than 71 percent. Already, more than 3.2 billion people worldwide use smartphones ... closing in on half the human race.

With the handiness of a computer in our pockets, social media became the method of communication for billions around the world. The biggest social network, Facebook, launched in 2005 and now has 2.45 billion monthly active users worldwide. Twitter now has 330 million monthly active users. Instant messaging service WhatsApp has 1.6 billion . Chinese messaging app WeChat boasts more than 1 billion . And don't forget online dating sites. According to eHarmony, 40 percent of Americans use online dating websites. The social media good: a more interconnected world. The bad: misinformation, bullying and a loss of privacy.

"We stand," declared Wired magazine in 2003, "at the brink of a transformation." The article was titled "The Wi-Fi Revolution," and the technology, indeed, was ground-shaking. The ability to take hard-wired internet from an internet service provider (ISP) and access the web without being physically plugged in — via radio waves on a local network — enabled the internet to go mobile, whether in your home (a laptop on the couch), in the local coffee shop (your smartphone in the corner booth), or at school (in the back row watching videos). Even with the rise of increasingly faster cellular technologies , WiFi rules. According to the Wi-Fi Alliance , WiFi is the most commonly used wireless technology in the world and the primary way the internet is accessed globally. Some 13 billion WiFi devices were in use in 2018.

That smiley face, that shrugging guy , the finger gun, the tears of joy. We know them like the alphabet now. In fact, they often replace words in our digital-centric lifestyles. Emojis started in the late 1990s in Japan and are now standard issue on every smartphone in the world. Texting your approval of something? Use a thumbs-up. Think something stinks? The smiling pile of poop is always popular. Related to emojis in an Instagram/Twitter kind of way is the internet meme, an oft-doctored, meant-to-be-shared short video or graphic designed to recognize, poke fun at, or otherwise comment on the latest cultural blip. The Nancy Pelosi clap . Sad Keanu . Crying Michael Jordan . The Distracted Boyfriend . Sometimes, words aren't enough.

The ability to send all sorts of media to consumers via the internet took its first buffering, stub-toed steps in the late 1990s . Since the turn of the 21st century, though, streaming not only has learned to walk, it's also learned to fly. Music services ( Pandora , Spotify, Apple Music, etc.) have all but knee-capped the sales of CDs . The same is true for video streamers (YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, Disney+ , etc.) and the sales of DVDs, the viewership numbers of more traditional TV , and the health of the movie industry . Netflix began as a mail-order DVD company but turned to streaming in 2007. It then produced its first full-length feature film in 2017, and now has more than 158 million paid memberships worldwide .

The Global Positioning System used to be strictly the realm of the U.S. government, run by the Air Force. But in 2000, President Bill Clinton ordered that a feature of it that fuzzied the picture for nongovernment types be discontinued. Now, GPS (among other more unconventional uses ) shows us the way while we're driving, tells us where we are when we're lost , points out the closest coffee shop, gives us the yardage to the pin on the golf course, and tells us how long it'll take us to get places. The constellation of at least 24 satellites provides worldwide coverage. Once a GPS device homes in on a signal from at least four of those satellites, it can determine where you are in longitude, latitude and altitude.

The new century had barely begun when an unthinkable horror shook the world and fundamentally altered the way that we live. When al-Qaida-linked terrorists hijacked four commercial airplanes on Sept. 11, 2001 , and used them as weapons to kill almost 3,000 Americans, a so-called war on terror launched across the globe, centrally in Iraq ( 2003-11 ) and in a conflict in Afghanistan that continues today. The campaign cost the U.S. trillions of dollars. Thousands more have died, personal privacy and human rights have been strained, yet al-Qaida remains strong today, despite the killing of 9/11 mastermind, Osama bin Laden by Navy SEALS in Pakistan on May 2, 2011.

When it comes down to it, greed was the root cause of the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression. "[I]t was the collapse of the housing bubble — fueled by low interest rates, easy and available credit, scant regulation and toxic mortgages — that was the spark that ignited a string of events, which led to a full-blown crisis ...," an official government report in 2011 concluded. The Great Recession (late-2007 to mid-2009) was not just an American phenomenon; it produced financial ripples throughout the world. But the unemployment rate in the U.S. jumped from 5 percent to 9.5 percent. Almost 8.7 million jobs were lost. Home prices fell by 30 percent , and the S&P 500 plummeted by 57 percent. Though the U.S. is now enjoying the longest run of economic growth in its history, the memory of the Great Recession is never far from anyone's mind.

If you had too much to drink at a party in 2008, you had only so many options to get home. Then, in 2009, the ride-sharing company Uber came along — all you have to do is pop on your smartphone and buy a ride in someone's personal car — stunning taxi companies and jump-starting the " sharing economy ." Need a place to stay, or have a room to rent? (Airbnb, founded in 2008.) Need to buy some junk, or sell it? (EBay, which began in the late 1990s.) Rent your car, or someone else's? (Getaround, 2009.) Crafts to buy or sell? (Etsy, 2005.) The possibilities are endless. These peer-to-peer companies put about $14 billion into the economy in 2014. The Brookings Institution expects that to jump to as much as $335 billion by 2025.

On a January day in 2008, almost 219 years after George Washington became the first president of the United States, a Senator from Illinois, Barack Hussein Obama, was sworn in as the United States' first African-American president . In a country still grappling with the stain of slavery, Obama's ascension to America's highest office marked for many a high point of hope. "I have asserted a firm conviction, a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people," Obama said in a famous speech on race during his campaign, "that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice if we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union." He was re-elected to a second term in 2012.

After Obama's historic election, the U.S. just missed out on another history making election: voting its first female president into office in 2016. But even though Hillary Clinton was defeated in the U.S., more women politicians worldwide are on the move up . A 2017 Pew Research Center study showed that the number of countries with female leaders has more than doubled since 2000, led by Germany's Angela Merkel , widely viewed as the most powerful woman in the world. Merkel has been chancellor since 2005, making her the longest-serving incumbent leader in the European Union. And back in the U.S., 126 women are currently serving in either the U.S. Senate or House of Representatives, an all-time high . That's an improvement, but women still make up just 23.6 percent of the total seats in Congress.

In 2019, governing bodies in Northern Ireland, Austria, Ecuador and Taiwan all legalized same-sex marriage, adding to a growing list of countries to OK the legal union of partners regardless of sex. As of late 2019, 30 countries around the world have granted legal marital rights to same-sex couples, a movement that began in The Netherlands in 2000. (The U.S. legalized same-sex marriage in 2015, after a Supreme Court ruling.) Notable holdouts include all of Central and Eastern Europe, Italy, Switzerland, all of Africa (except South Africa) and almost all of Asia.

We're eating more than we did even a few years ago — no surprise there — yet, still, some 795 million people in the world don't have enough to eat. In 2018, 9.2 percent of the world population was severely food insecure, meaning they didn't have regular access to nutritious and sufficient food. Hunger is most prevalent — and increasing — in almost all subregions of Africa, Latin America and Western Asia. But hunger also affects 8 percent of the populations of Northern America and Europe. In October 2015, the Food and Agriculture Organization for the United Nations adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development to end world hunger by focusing on rural development, and investing in agriculture, including crops, livestock, forestry, fisheries and aquaculture.

In November 2000, astronaut Bill Shepherd joined cosmonauts Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev as the first crew to inhabit the International Space Station . The ISS is a collaboration between five space agencies representing 15 countries that began with an edict in 1984 from President Ronald Reagan. The ISS has been continually occupied since the turn of the 21st century. As of late 2019, some 239 people from 19 countries had spent time on the outer-space station, which boasts six bedrooms, two bathrooms and a gym , where astronauts work out at least two hours a day in order to lessen the effect that weightlessness has on muscle and bone mass.

Humans have been wrecking the planet for time immemorial. Two decades into the 21st century, the damage is becoming crystal clear. Because of record levels of greenhouse gases — which largely come from fossil fuel and agricultural uses — we are, according to the World Meteorological Association , in the hottest five-year and 10-year period in human history. Every decade since 1980 has been warmer than the previous one. That has led to hotter seas, higher sea levels, a loss in Arctic ice, and more severe weather patterns. "These impacts make for a more unstable world," University of Manchester scientist Grant Allen told The Guardian . Many have tried to sound the alarm: the Kyoto Protocol , which went into effect in 2005. " An Inconvenient Truth ," in 2006. The 2015 Paris Agreement . Many, sadly, remain unconvinced.

The idea of recycling waste stretches back well into the 20th century, but the actual act of it has begun to hit its stride only over the past 20 years. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, more than 53 million tons of solid waste — consumer throwaways — was recycled in 2000. By 2017 that number had jumped to 67.1 million tons. Today we know it takes hundreds of years for a single plastic bag to degrade, but Americans still use 100 billion of them a year. And even though single-use plastics continue to be a scourge on the planet, only unthinking clods don't know that it's better to take your own bags to the grocery, recycle those plastic bottles, cans and paper, and strive for something closer to zero waste .

Convinced that the use of fossil fuels poses a grave threat to life on Earth, South African engineer Elon Musk launched an electric car company, Tesla , in 2003 that has rattled the automotive industry. The Tesla Roadster rolled out from its California factory in 2008 and by 2010, only a few thousand EVs were sold. But by 2018, the number was up to 2 million worldwide, and Bloomberg New Energy Finance predicts that by 2040, more than 56 million electric passenger vehicles will comprise 57 percent of the passenger vehicle sales in the world. Tesla is a leader in the U.S., but China is the planet's leader in manufacturing and sales. Other car manufacturers have taken notice. Volkswagen (which also owns Audi and Porsche) is planning almost 70 new electric models by 2028. In November 2019, Ford launched its first-ever electric Mustang, the Mach E . And Volvo says its goal is to have 50 percent of its car sales to be fully electric by 2025.

Humankind, for millennia, has looked to space in wonder. When photos of gullies on Mars in 2000 suggested water at one time flowed on the surface there, we turned our focus specifically toward the red planet. In 2018, scientists discovered that liquid water — not ice, not gas — still flows under the southern ice cap of Mars. What's the big deal? Water, at least on Earth, means life is possible. And if climate change does to Earth what many fear, finding another place where human life can be sustained is critical to our very survival.

Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider — a 17-mile (27-kilometer) circular tunnel under the border of France and Switzerland that physicists use to accelerate beams filled with particles that they smash into each other to see how they act — discovered in 2012 what they believed was proof of a long-rumored subatomic particle. The Higgs boson (subatomic particle) was known as the "God particle," reportedly because it had been so elusive . The idea that the Higgs existed was theorized in the '60s by Peter Higgs and François Englert. Until 2012, the Higgs boson was the "missing piece" of the Standard Model of particle physics , which explains how all matter in the universe should work. Both Higgs and Englert received the Nobel Prize in Physics 2013 after the discovery.

The idea was hatched back in 1988, but the goal was so overtly, audaciously ambitious — the " complete mapping and understanding of all the genes in human beings " — that the Human Genome Project wasn't finished until 2003. The project, run by the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy, provides the world with a blueprint of the structure and function of some 20,500 human genes. And scientists have only begun to discover what they can do with all this newfound knowledge. One possibility, according to Francis Collins, the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute in 2001: "[I]t's a transformative textbook of medicine, with insights that will give health care providers immense new powers to treat, prevent and cure disease."

While there's been no shortage of monumental events — both good and bad — during the last 20 years, imagine what we can expect in the next five, 10 and 20 years. NASA says it will put another human on the moon by 2024 . Could we be living there soon after? The U.S. could experience a new industrial revolution of sorts — the kind where robots and AI take our jobs. Cars could eventually drive themselves. Deep fake videos may one day have us believing things that don't exist. Super-bugs could become resistant to the most powerful antibiotics, but biotechnology could allow us to create designer babies immune to disease. The bottom line is nobody knows what the next 20 years could bring, but we know one thing: It will be here before you know it.

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How to Live Forever

By David Owen

A friend of mine knew a wealthy man who had decided to live forever. That made him hard to be around, my friend told me, in an e-mail, because he was “always dropping to the floor to do ab crunches or running out for bottles of water or falling asleep or outgassing Chinese herbs.” Immortality is attractive to rich people because simple arithmetic shows that if they live a normal lifespan they won’t have time to spend enough of their money. Peter Thiel , the billionaire venture capitalist, has expressed interest in receiving blood transfusions from young donors, an intervention that apparently adds weeks to the lives of laboratory mice. Jeff Bezos’s chiselled physique suggests a similar concern. The longevity evangelist Bryan Johnson, who sold a company he’d started to PayPal for eight hundred million dollars, wears a device that monitors the quality of his nighttime erections.

Life extension is a trade-off, though. You have to weigh the time you stand to gain against the time you lose while trying to gain it. When Jackie Onassis learned that she was dying, of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, she is said to have regretted having done so many pushups. There’s also the discouraging fact that extra years, if any, come at the end of life, when even many rich people have begun to think about winding down. A wealthy bridge partner of mine, now deceased, told me as she approached ninety that she was already feeling a bit bored.

Einstein wrote that “the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” He presumably didn’t mean that, after death, he expected to travel back and forth through his life, as though riffling the pages of a book. Or maybe he did. At any rate, his statement hints at a better strategy, one that I myself have practiced for decades. The simplest, most foolproof way to extend life is to do so backward, by adding years in reverse.

During the summer of 1975, following my sophomore year in college, I got a job as a secretary at a book-publishing company in New York. My main task was typing letters from editors to authors. I used a typewriter, because there were no personal computers yet, and to create duplicates I used copy sets, which were sandwiches of carbon paper and thin regular paper. Carbon paper—for those too young to have any idea what I’m talking about—is paper or plastic film that is coated on one side with semi-gelatinous ink; when you press something against the un-inked side, the inked side leaves a mark. Carbon paper barely exists nowadays, except at some rental-car counters and in the etymology of the “cc” (which stands for “carbon copy”) in e-mails. At my publishing job, I placed a copy set behind a sheet of letterhead and rolled the two together into my machine. When I’d finished typing, I had an original plus one or two flimsy but legible facsimiles, for filing.

That same summer, inspired by my job, I began using carbon paper to make duplicates of my own letters. I was writing a lot of poetry at the time, and I believed that the copies would be useful to my biographers, whom I assumed I’d have someday. I gave up on poetry and literary immortality a year or two later, but I continued making carbons, and I saved letters that people wrote to me. Because of the pack-rat instincts of various members of my family, I also have the letters I wrote home from summer camp; the letters my father wrote home from the Second World War; the letters my wife, whose name is Ann Hodgman, wrote to my parents before and after we got married; the letters Ann’s mother wrote to her father when they were dating; and thousands of other letters, documents, e-mails, and texts. In recent years, I have digitized most of that stuff, so that I can search it.

When I was in high school, I tried several times to keep a diary—again, thinking of my biographers—but I was never able to stick with it for more than a week or two. This is a common problem. A dozen years ago, I found a diary that my daughter, Laura, had started when she was ten. It had a pink cover, more than a hundred ruled pages, and a lock on the front, which she hadn’t locked. The entry on the first page was about her piano lessons. It said:

EXTRA MINUTES PRACTICED Wednesday—1 min. Saturday—8 min.

All the other pages were blank.

Soon after I had begun making copies of my letters, I realized that if I saved them in chronological order I’d have the equivalent of a diary. I eventually bought an electric hole punch and filled many three-ring binders. In the late eighties, I started another kind of quasi-diary by making a written record on my computer of funny or interesting things my children had said or done. I got that idea when Laura was three and her brother, John, was in utero, but I was able to extend the entries back to the day of Laura’s birth by inserting material from letters I’d saved. I called it my “kid diary,” and I kept it going, with several lapses, for about ten years. The completed text contains almost ninety thousand words and is, by far, my favorite thing I’ve ever written. It’s the one thing I would save if I could save only one.

Of course, most of the real work on my kid diary was done not by me but by my kids. Laura, at four: “Dave, is cheese vegetables, or what is it?” (She began calling me Dave when she was three, and John eventually did the same.) John, at almost six: “God didn’t make people, Dave. Monkeys did.” Laura’s favorite feature in the children’s magazine Highlights was the advice column, and she used to make up readers’ questions and the editors’ replies. When she was four and a half, I overheard her, in the playroom, pretending to read aloud from a recent issue:

When I go to school I have a hole in my pants near my penis. My friends call me “penis-puh.” What should I do? Tom. I understand how you feel, Tom. Ignore your friends and find a nice quiet place where you can concentrate. Raise your hand if your friends have a problem with your penis.

Me, when John was two and a half:

My mother was reading John one of his dinosaur books and leaving out occasional paragraphs, so that she could get him to bed quicker, but he caught her. “You did not say ‘fleet-footed,’ ” he said.

Me again, when John was in kindergarten:

Yesterday, John sat at the kitchen table writing ransom notes, with spelling provided by Ann. One of his notes read “INQUISITIVE PERSON. 1,000,000 DOLLARS.” To write his notes, he put on snow boots, knee pads, and non-matching mittens.

Laura, when she was four:

Why am I not a grownup? I’ve been here for so many years.

And so on, for three hundred and fifty typed pages. I’m now keeping track, on a smaller scale, of funny or interesting things that my grandchildren have said or done. Alice, the eldest, when she was three: “Mom, I’m just going to relax and ring this bell.”

The final stages of Alzheimer’s disease have been described as living death: if you can’t remember your life, can you truly be said to be alive? I worry about that, of course, but I also worry about perfectly ordinary memory loss, which shortens a life more subtly, by allowing great swaths of it to leak away. My memory works pretty well, but writing things down has made it work better, and many of my favorite moments from the past forty years exist only because I kept a record. My kid diary has lengthened my life just as surely as rolling back my biological age would have, and it has done so without ab crunches, pushups, or erection monitoring. It has also lengthened the lives of Ann, Laura, and John, as well as reminding Ann and me that our children’s childhoods didn’t go by in a blur, as parents often feel when they look back. A friend told me recently, “If G.P.S. had existed from the time I got my driver’s license, I would have lived an entire second lifetime with the time I’d have saved not getting lost.” That’s the same idea, more or less.

Preserve too much, though, and you’d recreate the dilemma that Jorge Luis Borges explores in his story “Funes the Memorious,” from 1942. The title character is a young man who, after being thrown from a horse, discovers that he now remembers literally everything. “Two or three times he had reconstructed a whole day; he never hesitated, but each reconstruction had required a whole day,” the narrator explains. Funes “knew by heart the forms of the southern clouds at dawn on the 30th of April, 1882, and could compare them in his memory with the mottled streaks on a book in Spanish binding he had only seen once.” He’s so entranced by his new ability that he doesn’t realize it has impaired him. “To think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions,” the narrator reflects. “In the teeming world of Funes, there were only details, almost immediate in their presence.”

Funes is a fictional character, but there are real people with a similar ability. One of them is Jill Price, who can remember her life, from childhood on, in extraordinary detail. In her autobiography, “ The Woman Who Can’t Forget ,” she writes, “My memories are like scenes from home movies of every day of my life, constantly playing in my head, flashing forward and backward through the years relentlessly, taking me to any given moment, entirely of their own volition.” Price was the first person to receive a diagnosis of hyperthymestic syndrome, later renamed highly superior autobiographical memory, or HSAM . Both terms were coined by James McGaugh and his colleagues at the University of California, Irvine, where, starting in 2000, Price was studied extensively. Researchers would mention a news event, and without hesitating she would give them the date and the day of the week it occurred, or they would give her a date and she would give them an event. “And she was flawless,” McGaugh told me recently. He asked her if she knew what had happened to Bing Crosby . She said that he died on a golf course in Spain on Friday, October 14, 1977, when she was eleven. She remembered because his death had been mentioned on a news program she’d heard on the car radio that day, as her mother was driving her to soccer practice.

Price has been, at times, an obsessive journal-keeper, and some people have wondered whether she had simply memorized the entries. But she abandoned her journal on several occasions, once for years, then changed her mind and filled in the hundreds of missing days retrospectively, entirely out of her head. She makes the journals to tame the flood of her recollections, which she views as a torment. “If I didn’t write things down, I would get a swimming feeling in my head and would become emotionally overwhelmed,” she explains in her book.

McGaugh and his team eventually identified about a hundred people with HSAM . One is the actress and author Marilu Henner, who starred on the television show “Taxi” and was fired by Donald Trump on “The Celebrity Apprentice.” Henner, unlike Price, revels in her ability. “It’s something that makes me feel really good, and I can’t imagine not having it,” she told me. “My siblings will say, ‘Come on, Mar, do a week from our childhood.’ ” Henner’s book “ Total Memory Makeover ,” which was published in 2012, is an effort by her to help the rest of us develop what she refers to as our “brain muscle”—a desirable goal, since she agrees with me that memory can be a powerful time-expander and longevity-increaser. “By really exploring your past, or remembering it in some way, you get a piece of your life back,” she said. “Your life becomes longer and richer, and kind of stretches in the middle.”

Henner describes a good autobiographical memory as “a line of defense against meaninglessness.” For those of us who, unlike her, can’t do it all in our heads, old letters, diaries, and photographs are indispensable aide-mémoire. On Presidents’ Day in 1988, Laura came home from nursery school and said, “Abraham Lincoln was shot!” I said, “I know, honey,” and she said, “But I’m keeping him alive in my thoughts. Emmy is keeping him alive in her thoughts, too.” She and Emmy, a classmate, were three years old at the time, so they probably wouldn’t remember today that they had taken on that chore if I hadn’t written it down.

My mother will turn ninety-five in June. She was my family’s principal historian until I took over the position. She made two photo albums for me as I was growing up. The first covered my birth through sixth grade, and the second covered junior high through college. She invented analog image-enhancing techniques that anticipated, by decades, digital tools that are now standard: using nail-scissors and glue to replace my brother’s frowning face with a smiling one in our Christmas card from 1966, when he was four; using an X-Acto knife to give me a haircut and to slice an uninteresting background from a family photo a decade later; eliminating red-eye with a black Flair pen. I studied both my photo albums so often over the years that they began to fall apart. I have now preserved them by extracting the original pages and placing them in individual sleeves in large archival portfolios.

For many people, documenting family life in this way is no more appealing than doing pushups or ab crunches. But I don’t think of it that way, and neither did my mother. “I have been pasting my scrapbooks,” she wrote to Ann and me in 1980. “I get more fascinated with them every day. I don’t know when I’ve had a project I’ve enjoyed so much.” For her, documenting the history of our family was an immersive hobby, like making quilts (my sister), photographing birds (my brother), or gardening and playing ice hockey (Ann). By the time I graduated from college, my mother was mainly researching genealogies, writing reminiscences, and organizing ancestral photographs, documents, and ephemera. I’ve relied on her work several times when researching things that I’ve written, most recently an essay about her own family.

Nowadays, producing and saving images is so easy that few people bother with paper prints, photo albums, or even cameras. They hold up their phone and click away, hoping to end up with something decent, which they then post on Facebook or Instagram or whatever. But a digital camera roll containing thousands of unsorted, unedited, contextless images is not an intelligible narrative of a life. Turning the pages of a physical book is a different experience from swiping a finger across a screen, and, if you don’t store your memories on paper, you allow your past to be held hostage by a potentially obsolete digital format or by Google’s unpredictable commitment to the cloud.

I’ve made dozens of physical photo albums, first by gluing paper prints and other mementos into the kinds of blank scrapbooks my mother used, and, then, since 2006, by uploading images to companies that produce paper photo books. (My favorite is Mixbook .) In addition to making annual family scrapbooks, I’ve documented vacations, visits by grandchildren, moments from the life of a friend who had just died, two years that Ann and her parents spent living in Germany when she was a baby and her father was a U.S. Army doctor, the history of the place we visit every summer on Martha’s Vineyard, the wedding of our guinea pig and one of our dogs, and trips that my father’s parents took between the nineteen-forties and the nineteen-sixties. The project that I’m the proudest of is a hybrid: two eleven-by-fourteen volumes containing the complete text of my kid diary, illustrated with several hundred corresponding snapshots.

At some point during COVID , I realized that I could create a truly comprehensive chronicle of my life if I consolidated all the best parts of my hoard of digitized text into a single document. The result is a million and a half words long, and it grows by roughly five hundred words a day. My goal is to come as close as I can to a day-by-day record—but not one like Jill Price’s, which consists mostly of brief mentions of things like the weather, the names of TV shows she watched, and what errands she ran. I’m trying to do what Elmore Leonard said he tried to do with his novels: leave out the parts that readers skip. I’m the only reader so far, and I may be the only reader ever, but I don’t want even my own interest to flag. I haven’t added photographs yet, but someday I will.

One of my richest sources of material in recent years has been a small e-mail group that my wife and I are part of. It began around 1996 (no one remembers exactly when), and currently includes ten participants. We’re all within ten years in age: the youngest were in their thirties when we started; the oldest are in their seventies now. All but one or two of us are self-employed. Most are writers. In the early months, I often worried that the others would lose interest and disappear, but the group has never been in serious danger of disbanding, and the lineup has barely changed. No member has died yet, although one spouse died last year. Two children and eight grandchildren have been born. Several children have married. All the parents who were alive when we started have now died, except for Ann’s mother and my mother. Despite our long history, the ten of us have never all been in the same room at the same time, except online. The first full in-person gathering, if there ever is one, will probably be a funeral.

Ten people who’ve spent almost three decades getting to know one another turns out to be the ideal configuration for a social network; it’s the scale at which Facebook and X would feel like life-enhancing communities of human beings, rather than ego-driven, soul-destroying, democracy-undermining time-sucks. Our e-mail exchanges are the kinds of conversations that people who have worked together for years sometimes have over lunch or cocktails—and our exchanges are mostly coherent, even grammatical. I used to brood that civilization had suffered a huge loss when people switched from sending paper letters to sending e-mails, but I now think the real loss occurred when people switched from sending e-mails to sending texts, which young people in particular tend to fire off in bursts of unpunctuated sentence fragments. E-mails are actually superior to paper letters in many ways, because they easily accommodate thoughtful, extended multi-user back-and-forth, in real time.

In the early years of our group, it somehow almost never occurred to me to save anything. Eventually, though, I began preserving notable e-mails, which I later combined into PDFs. I now copy funny or interesting passages as they arrive, and paste them into my burgeoning chronicle—including that line I quoted at the beginning of this essay about outgassing Chinese herbs, and the later one about G.P.S. and getting lost. Also this, from Ann:

I helped at the Epiphany pageant at another church yesterday. The girl who played Mary carried a doll. After the pageant, she said, “Jesus looks hella real.” . . . I recently gave blood at the school she goes to. Two students, a girl and a boy, were staffing the snack table. An older boy who had just donated came and sat down. The girl told him, “We saw your blood.”

And this, from me:

I woke up at 3:00 this morning and lay awake for a long time. I would have thought I never fell back asleep except that I know Henry [our poodle] can’t talk. He told me that he thought some ants that were crawling inside a rotten tree trunk looked as though they were carrying parachutes. I didn’t think it was odd that he was talking—just odd that he would describe ant eggs that way.

I’ve also saved many serious, poignant, and distressing discussions—of life, work, children, pets, politics, religion, marriage, divorce, cancer, everything. Many of those discussions unfolded over days, and almost all of them are too personal to share with strangers. My solipsistic record has thus evolved into more than the story of my own life, and is now also a steadily growing group autobiography. Every so often, I’ll quote something back to the others and, even if it’s just a couple of years old, it usually turns out that everyone has forgotten it.

Someday, I’ll turn my archives over to my children and grandchildren. I hope they’ll be interested in at least some of it, because it’s important for young people to be reminded that old people had pre-decrepit existences. But I would continue collecting, organizing, and preserving even if I knew that no one but me would ever look. Thinking about my life and the history of my family is interesting to me—just as it was for my mother—and I agree with Marilu Henner, who writes, “We all owe it to ourselves as living beings to take full advantage of our own experiences.” My preservation projects have given me a nearly Einsteinian view of time and mortality. I picture myself in a nursing home—not soon, I hope!—surrounded by photo books and letters and e-mail excerpts and portable hard drives, busily adding images to text, reading and rereading everything, creating compilations of compilations, contentedly living forever, backward and forward, until the end. ♦

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50 Must-Read Contemporary Essay Collections

Liberty Hardy

Liberty Hardy is an unrepentant velocireader, writer, bitey mad lady, and tattoo canvas. Turn-ons include books, books and books. Her favorite exclamation is “Holy cats!” Liberty reads more than should be legal, sleeps very little, frequently writes on her belly with Sharpie markers, and when she dies, she’s leaving her body to library science. Until then, she lives with her three cats, Millay, Farrokh, and Zevon, in Maine. She is also right behind you. Just kidding! She’s too busy reading. Twitter: @MissLiberty

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I feel like essay collections don’t get enough credit. They’re so wonderful! They’re like short story collections, but TRUE. It’s like going to a truth buffet. You can get information about sooooo many topics, sometimes in one single book! To prove that there are a zillion amazing essay collections out there, I compiled 50 great contemporary essay collections, just from the last 18 months alone.  Ranging in topics from food, nature, politics, sex, celebrity, and more, there is something here for everyone!

I’ve included a brief description from the publisher with each title. Tell us in the comments about which of these you’ve read or other contemporary essay collections that you love. There are a LOT of them. Yay, books!

Must-Read Contemporary Essay Collections

They can’t kill us until they kill us  by hanif abdurraqib.

“In an age of confusion, fear, and loss, Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib’s is a voice that matters. Whether he’s attending a Bruce Springsteen concert the day after visiting Michael Brown’s grave, or discussing public displays of affection at a Carly Rae Jepsen show, he writes with a poignancy and magnetism that resonates profoundly.”

Would Everybody Please Stop?: Reflections on Life and Other Bad Ideas  by Jenny Allen

“Jenny Allen’s musings range fluidly from the personal to the philosophical. She writes with the familiarity of someone telling a dinner party anecdote, forgoing decorum for candor and comedy. To read  Would Everybody Please Stop?  is to experience life with imaginative and incisive humor.”

Longthroat Memoirs: Soups, Sex and Nigerian Taste Buds  by Yemisi Aribisala

“A sumptuous menu of essays about Nigerian cuisine, lovingly presented by the nation’s top epicurean writer. As well as a mouth-watering appraisal of Nigerian food,  Longthroat Memoirs  is a series of love letters to the Nigerian palate. From the cultural history of soup, to fish as aphrodisiac and the sensual allure of snails,  Longthroat Memoirs  explores the complexities, the meticulousness, and the tactile joy of Nigerian gastronomy.”

Beyond Measure: Essays  by Rachel Z. Arndt

“ Beyond Measure  is a fascinating exploration of the rituals, routines, metrics and expectations through which we attempt to quantify and ascribe value to our lives. With mordant humor and penetrating intellect, Arndt casts her gaze beyond event-driven narratives to the machinery underlying them: judo competitions measured in weigh-ins and wait times; the significance of the elliptical’s stationary churn; the rote scripts of dating apps; the stupefying sameness of the daily commute.”

Magic Hours  by Tom Bissell

“Award-winning essayist Tom Bissell explores the highs and lows of the creative process. He takes us from the set of  The Big Bang Theory  to the first novel of Ernest Hemingway to the final work of David Foster Wallace; from the films of Werner Herzog to the film of Tommy Wiseau to the editorial meeting in which Paula Fox’s work was relaunched into the world. Originally published in magazines such as  The Believer ,  The New Yorker , and  Harper’s , these essays represent ten years of Bissell’s best writing on every aspect of creation—be it Iraq War documentaries or video-game character voices—and will provoke as much thought as they do laughter.”

Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession  by Alice Bolin

“In this poignant collection, Alice Bolin examines iconic American works from the essays of Joan Didion and James Baldwin to  Twin Peaks , Britney Spears, and  Serial , illuminating the widespread obsession with women who are abused, killed, and disenfranchised, and whose bodies (dead and alive) are used as props to bolster men’s stories. Smart and accessible, thoughtful and heartfelt, Bolin investigates the implications of our cultural fixations, and her own role as a consumer and creator.”

Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life  by Jenny Boully

“Jenny Boully’s essays are ripe with romance and sensual pleasures, drawing connections between the digression, reflection, imagination, and experience that characterizes falling in love as well as the life of a writer. Literary theory, philosophy, and linguistics rub up against memory, dreamscapes, and fancy, making the practice of writing a metaphor for the illusory nature of experience.  Betwixt and Between  is, in many ways, simply a book about how to live.”

Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give by Ada Calhoun

“In  Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give , Ada Calhoun presents an unflinching but also loving portrait of her own marriage, opening a long-overdue conversation about the institution as it truly is: not the happy ending of a love story or a relic doomed by high divorce rates, but the beginning of a challenging new chapter of which ‘the first twenty years are the hardest.'”

How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays  by Alexander Chee

“ How to Write an Autobiographical Novel  is the author’s manifesto on the entangling of life, literature, and politics, and how the lessons learned from a life spent reading and writing fiction have changed him. In these essays, he grows from student to teacher, reader to writer, and reckons with his identities as a son, a gay man, a Korean American, an artist, an activist, a lover, and a friend. He examines some of the most formative experiences of his life and the nation’s history, including his father’s death, the AIDS crisis, 9/11, the jobs that supported his writing—Tarot-reading, bookselling, cater-waiting for William F. Buckley—the writing of his first novel,  Edinburgh , and the election of Donald Trump.”

Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays  by Durga Chew-Bose

“ Too Much and Not the Mood is a beautiful and surprising exploration of what it means to be a first-generation, creative young woman working today. On April 11, 1931, Virginia Woolf ended her entry in A Writer’s Diary with the words ‘too much and not the mood’ to describe her frustration with placating her readers, what she described as the ‘cramming in and the cutting out.’ She wondered if she had anything at all that was truly worth saying. The attitude of that sentiment inspired Durga Chew-Bose to gather own writing in this lyrical collection of poetic essays that examine personhood and artistic growth. Drawing inspiration from a diverse group of incisive and inquiring female authors, Chew-Bose captures the inner restlessness that keeps her always on the brink of creative expression.”

We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy  by Ta-Nehisi Coates

“‘We were eight years in power’ was the lament of Reconstruction-era black politicians as the American experiment in multiracial democracy ended with the return of white supremacist rule in the South. In this sweeping collection of new and selected essays, Ta-Nehisi Coates explores the tragic echoes of that history in our own time: the unprecedented election of a black president followed by a vicious backlash that fueled the election of the man Coates argues is America’s ‘first white president.'”

Look Alive Out There: Essays by Sloane Crosley

“In  Look Alive Out There,  whether it’s scaling active volcanoes, crashing shivas, playing herself on  Gossip Girl,  befriending swingers, or squinting down the barrel of the fertility gun, Crosley continues to rise to the occasion with unmatchable nerve and electric one-liners. And as her subjects become more serious, her essays deliver not just laughs but lasting emotional heft and insight. Crosley has taken up the gauntlets thrown by her predecessors—Dorothy Parker, Nora Ephron, David Sedaris—and crafted something rare, affecting, and true.”

Fl â neuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London  by Lauren Elkin

“Part cultural meander, part memoir,  Flâneuse  takes us on a distinctly cosmopolitan jaunt that begins in New York, where Elkin grew up, and transports us to Paris via Venice, Tokyo, and London, all cities in which she’s lived. We are shown the paths beaten by such  flâneuses  as the cross-dressing nineteenth-century novelist George Sand, the Parisian artist Sophie Calle, the wartime correspondent Martha Gellhorn, and the writer Jean Rhys. With tenacity and insight, Elkin creates a mosaic of what urban settings have meant to women, charting through literature, art, history, and film the sometimes exhilarating, sometimes fraught relationship that women have with the metropolis.”

Idiophone  by Amy Fusselman

“Leaping from ballet to quiltmaking, from the The Nutcracker to an Annie-B Parson interview,  Idiophone  is a strikingly original meditation on risk-taking and provocation in art and a unabashedly honest, funny, and intimate consideration of art-making in the context of motherhood, and motherhood in the context of addiction. Amy Fusselman’s compact, beautifully digressive essay feels both surprising and effortless, fueled by broad-ranging curiosity, and, fundamentally, joy.”

Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture  by Roxane Gay

“In this valuable and revealing anthology, cultural critic and bestselling author Roxane Gay collects original and previously published pieces that address what it means to live in a world where women have to measure the harassment, violence, and aggression they face, and where they are ‘routinely second-guessed, blown off, discredited, denigrated, besmirched, belittled, patronized, mocked, shamed, gaslit, insulted, bullied’ for speaking out.”

Sunshine State: Essays  by Sarah Gerard

“With the personal insight of  The Empathy Exams , the societal exposal of  Nickel and Dimed , and the stylistic innovation and intensity of her own break-out debut novel  Binary Star , Sarah Gerard’s  Sunshine State  uses the intimately personal to unearth the deep reservoirs of humanity buried in the corners of our world often hardest to face.”

The Art of the Wasted Day  by Patricia Hampl

“ The Art of the Wasted Day  is a picaresque travelogue of leisure written from a lifelong enchantment with solitude. Patricia Hampl visits the homes of historic exemplars of ease who made repose a goal, even an art form. She begins with two celebrated eighteenth-century Irish ladies who ran off to live a life of ‘retirement’ in rural Wales. Her search then leads to Moravia to consider the monk-geneticist, Gregor Mendel, and finally to Bordeaux for Michel Montaigne—the hero of this book—who retreated from court life to sit in his chateau tower and write about whatever passed through his mind, thus inventing the personal essay.”

A Really Big Lunch: The Roving Gourmand on Food and Life  by Jim Harrison

“Jim Harrison’s legendary gourmandise is on full display in  A Really Big Lunch . From the titular  New Yorker  piece about a French lunch that went to thirty-seven courses, to pieces from  Brick ,  Playboy , Kermit Lynch Newsletter, and more on the relationship between hunter and prey, or the obscure language of wine reviews,  A Really Big Lunch  is shot through with Harrison’s pointed aperçus and keen delight in the pleasures of the senses. And between the lines the pieces give glimpses of Harrison’s life over the last three decades.  A Really Big Lunch  is a literary delight that will satisfy every appetite.”

Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me  by Bill Hayes

“Bill Hayes came to New York City in 2009 with a one-way ticket and only the vaguest idea of how he would get by. But, at forty-eight years old, having spent decades in San Francisco, he craved change. Grieving over the death of his partner, he quickly discovered the profound consolations of the city’s incessant rhythms, the sight of the Empire State Building against the night sky, and New Yorkers themselves, kindred souls that Hayes, a lifelong insomniac, encountered on late-night strolls with his camera.”

Would You Rather?: A Memoir of Growing Up and Coming Out  by Katie Heaney

“Here, for the first time, Katie opens up about realizing at the age of twenty-eight that she is gay. In these poignant, funny essays, she wrestles with her shifting sexuality and identity, and describes what it was like coming out to everyone she knows (and everyone she doesn’t). As she revisits her past, looking for any ‘clues’ that might have predicted this outcome, Katie reveals that life doesn’t always move directly from point A to point B—no matter how much we would like it to.”

Tonight I’m Someone Else: Essays  by Chelsea Hodson

“From graffiti gangs and  Grand Theft Auto  to sugar daddies, Schopenhauer, and a deadly game of Russian roulette, in these essays, Chelsea Hodson probes her own desires to examine where the physical and the proprietary collide. She asks what our privacy, our intimacy, and our own bodies are worth in the increasingly digital world of liking, linking, and sharing.”

We Are Never Meeting in Real Life.: Essays  by Samantha Irby

“With  We Are Never Meeting in Real Life. , ‘bitches gotta eat’ blogger and comedian Samantha Irby turns the serio-comic essay into an art form. Whether talking about how her difficult childhood has led to a problem in making ‘adult’ budgets, explaining why she should be the new Bachelorette—she’s ’35-ish, but could easily pass for 60-something’—detailing a disastrous pilgrimage-slash-romantic-vacation to Nashville to scatter her estranged father’s ashes, sharing awkward sexual encounters, or dispensing advice on how to navigate friendships with former drinking buddies who are now suburban moms—hang in there for the Costco loot—she’s as deft at poking fun at the ghosts of her past self as she is at capturing powerful emotional truths.”

This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America  by Morgan Jerkins

“Doubly disenfranchised by race and gender, often deprived of a place within the mostly white mainstream feminist movement, black women are objectified, silenced, and marginalized with devastating consequences, in ways both obvious and subtle, that are rarely acknowledged in our country’s larger discussion about inequality. In  This Will Be My Undoing , Jerkins becomes both narrator and subject to expose the social, cultural, and historical story of black female oppression that influences the black community as well as the white, male-dominated world at large.”

Everywhere Home: A Life in Essays  by Fenton Johnson

“Part retrospective, part memoir, Fenton Johnson’s collection  Everywhere Home: A Life in Essays  explores sexuality, religion, geography, the AIDS crisis, and more. Johnson’s wanderings take him from the hills of Kentucky to those of San Francisco, from the streets of Paris to the sidewalks of Calcutta. Along the way, he investigates questions large and small: What’s the relationship between artists and museums, illuminated in a New Guinean display of shrunken heads? What’s the difference between empiricism and intuition?”

One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter: Essays  by Scaachi Koul

“In  One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter , Scaachi Koul deploys her razor-sharp humor to share all the fears, outrages, and mortifying moments of her life. She learned from an early age what made her miserable, and for Scaachi anything can be cause for despair. Whether it’s a shopping trip gone awry; enduring awkward conversations with her bikini waxer; overcoming her fear of flying while vacationing halfway around the world; dealing with Internet trolls, or navigating the fears and anxieties of her parents. Alongside these personal stories are pointed observations about life as a woman of color: where every aspect of her appearance is open for critique, derision, or outright scorn; where strict gender rules bind in both Western and Indian cultures, leaving little room for a woman not solely focused on marriage and children to have a career (and a life) for herself.”

Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions  by Valeria Luiselli and jon lee anderson (translator)

“A damning confrontation between the American dream and the reality of undocumented children seeking a new life in the U.S. Structured around the 40 questions Luiselli translates and asks undocumented Latin American children facing deportation,  Tell Me How It Ends  (an expansion of her 2016 Freeman’s essay of the same name) humanizes these young migrants and highlights the contradiction between the idea of America as a fiction for immigrants and the reality of racism and fear—both here and back home.”

All the Lives I Want: Essays About My Best Friends Who Happen to Be Famous Strangers  by Alana Massey

“Mixing Didion’s affected cool with moments of giddy celebrity worship, Massey examines the lives of the women who reflect our greatest aspirations and darkest fears back onto us. These essays are personal without being confessional and clever in a way that invites readers into the joke. A cultural critique and a finely wrought fan letter, interwoven with stories that are achingly personal, All the Lives I Want is also an exploration of mental illness, the sex industry, and the dangers of loving too hard.”

Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish: Essays  by Tom McCarthy

“Certain points of reference recur with dreamlike insistence—among them the artist Ed Ruscha’s  Royal Road Test , a photographic documentation of the roadside debris of a Royal typewriter hurled from the window of a traveling car; the great blooms of jellyfish that are filling the oceans and gumming up the machinery of commerce and military domination—and the question throughout is: How can art explode the restraining conventions of so-called realism, whether aesthetic or political, to engage in the active reinvention of the world?”

Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump’s America  by Samhita Mukhopadhyay and Kate Harding

“When 53 percent of white women voted for Donald Trump and 94 percent of black women voted for Hillary Clinton, how can women unite in Trump’s America? Nasty Women includes inspiring essays from a diverse group of talented women writers who seek to provide a broad look at how we got here and what we need to do to move forward.”

Don’t Call Me Princess: Essays on Girls, Women, Sex, and Life  by Peggy Orenstein

“Named one of the ’40 women who changed the media business in the last 40 years’ by  Columbia Journalism Review , Peggy Orenstein is one of the most prominent, unflinching feminist voices of our time. Her writing has broken ground and broken silences on topics as wide-ranging as miscarriage, motherhood, breast cancer, princess culture and the importance of girls’ sexual pleasure. Her unique blend of investigative reporting, personal revelation and unexpected humor has made her books bestselling classics.”

When You Find Out the World Is Against You: And Other Funny Memories About Awful Moments  by Kelly Oxford

“Kelly Oxford likes to blow up the internet. Whether it is with the kind of Tweets that lead  Rolling Stone  to name her one of the Funniest People on Twitter or with pictures of her hilariously adorable family (human and animal) or with something much more serious, like creating the hashtag #NotOkay, where millions of women came together to share their stories of sexual assault, Kelly has a unique, razor-sharp perspective on modern life. As a screen writer, professional sh*t disturber, wife and mother of three, Kelly is about everything but the status quo.”

Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman  by Anne Helen Petersen

“You know the type: the woman who won’t shut up, who’s too brazen, too opinionated—too much. She’s the unruly woman, and she embodies one of the most provocative and powerful forms of womanhood today. In  Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud , Anne Helen Petersen uses the lens of ‘unruliness’ to explore the ascension of pop culture powerhouses like Lena Dunham, Nicki Minaj, and Kim Kardashian, exploring why the public loves to love (and hate) these controversial figures. With its brisk, incisive analysis,  Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud  will be a conversation-starting book on what makes and breaks celebrity today.”

Well, That Escalated Quickly: Memoirs and Mistakes of an Accidental Activist  by Franchesca Ramsey

“In her first book, Ramsey uses her own experiences as an accidental activist to explore the many ways we communicate with each other—from the highs of bridging gaps and making connections to the many pitfalls that accompany talking about race, power, sexuality, and gender in an unpredictable public space…the internet.”

Shrewed: A Wry and Closely Observed Look at the Lives of Women and Girls  by Elizabeth Renzetti

“Drawing upon Renzetti’s decades of reporting on feminist issues,  Shrewed  is a book about feminism’s crossroads. From Hillary Clinton’s failed campaign to the quest for equal pay, from the lessons we can learn from old ladies to the future of feminism in a turbulent world, Renzetti takes a pointed, witty look at how far we’ve come—and how far we have to go.”

What Are We Doing Here?: Essays  by Marilynne Robinson

“In this new essay collection she trains her incisive mind on our modern political climate and the mysteries of faith. Whether she is investigating how the work of great thinkers about America like Emerson and Tocqueville inform our political consciousness or discussing the way that beauty informs and disciplines daily life, Robinson’s peerless prose and boundless humanity are on full display.”

Double Bind: Women on Ambition  by Robin Romm

“‘A work of courage and ferocious honesty’ (Diana Abu-Jaber),  Double Bind  could not come at a more urgent time. Even as major figures from Gloria Steinem to Beyoncé embrace the word ‘feminism,’ the word ‘ambition’ remains loaded with ambivalence. Many women see it as synonymous with strident or aggressive, yet most feel compelled to strive and achieve—the seeming contradiction leaving them in a perpetual double bind. Ayana Mathis, Molly Ringwald, Roxane Gay, and a constellation of ‘nimble thinkers . . . dismantle this maddening paradox’ ( O, The Oprah Magazine ) with candor, wit, and rage. Women who have made landmark achievements in fields as diverse as law, dog sledding, and butchery weigh in, breaking the last feminist taboo once and for all.”

The Destiny Thief: Essays on Writing, Writers and Life  by Richard Russo

“In these nine essays, Richard Russo provides insight into his life as a writer, teacher, friend, and reader. From a commencement speech he gave at Colby College, to the story of how an oddly placed toilet made him reevaluate the purpose of humor in art and life, to a comprehensive analysis of Mark Twain’s value, to his harrowing journey accompanying a dear friend as she pursued gender-reassignment surgery,  The Destiny Thief  reflects the broad interests and experiences of one of America’s most beloved authors. Warm, funny, wise, and poignant, the essays included here traverse Russo’s writing life, expanding our understanding of who he is and how his singular, incredibly generous mind works. An utter joy to read, they give deep insight into the creative process from the prospective of one of our greatest writers.”

Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race by Naben Ruthnum

“Curry is a dish that doesn’t quite exist, but, as this wildly funny and sharp essay points out, a dish that doesn’t properly exist can have infinite, equally authentic variations. By grappling with novels, recipes, travelogues, pop culture, and his own upbringing, Naben Ruthnum depicts how the distinctive taste of curry has often become maladroit shorthand for brown identity. With the sardonic wit of Gita Mehta’s  Karma Cola  and the refined, obsessive palette of Bill Buford’s  Heat , Ruthnum sinks his teeth into the story of how the beloved flavor calcified into an aesthetic genre that limits the imaginations of writers, readers, and eaters.”

The River of Consciousness  by Oliver Sacks

“Sacks, an Oxford-educated polymath, had a deep familiarity not only with literature and medicine but with botany, animal anatomy, chemistry, the history of science, philosophy, and psychology.  The River of Consciousness  is one of two books Sacks was working on up to his death, and it reveals his ability to make unexpected connections, his sheer joy in knowledge, and his unceasing, timeless project to understand what makes us human.”

All the Women in My Family Sing: Women Write the World: Essays on Equality, Justice, and Freedom (Nothing But the Truth So Help Me God)  by Deborah Santana and America Ferrera

“ All the Women in My Family Sing  is an anthology documenting the experiences of women of color at the dawn of the twenty-first century. It is a vital collection of prose and poetry whose topics range from the pressures of being the vice-president of a Fortune 500 Company, to escaping the killing fields of Cambodia, to the struggles inside immigration, identity, romance, and self-worth. These brief, trenchant essays capture the aspirations and wisdom of women of color as they exercise autonomy, creativity, and dignity and build bridges to heal the brokenness in today’s turbulent world.”

We Wear the Mask: 15 True Stories of Passing in America  by Brando Skyhorse and Lisa Page

“For some, ‘passing’ means opportunity, access, or safety. Others don’t willingly pass but are ‘passed’ in specific situations by someone else.  We Wear the Mask , edited by  Brando Skyhorse  and  Lisa Page , is an illuminating and timely anthology that examines the complex reality of passing in America. Skyhorse, a Mexican American, writes about how his mother passed him as an American Indian before he learned who he really is. Page shares how her white mother didn’t tell friends about her black ex-husband or that her children were, in fact, biracial.”

Feel Free: Essays by Zadie Smith

“Since she burst spectacularly into view with her debut novel almost two decades ago, Zadie Smith has established herself not just as one of the world’s preeminent fiction writers, but also a brilliant and singular essayist. She contributes regularly to  The New Yorker  and the  New York Review of Books  on a range of subjects, and each piece of hers is a literary event in its own right.”

The Mother of All Questions: Further Reports from the Feminist Revolutions  by Rebecca Solnit

“In a timely follow-up to her national bestseller  Men Explain Things to Me , Rebecca Solnit offers indispensable commentary on women who refuse to be silenced, misogynistic violence, the fragile masculinity of the literary canon, the gender binary, the recent history of rape jokes, and much more. In characteristic style, Solnit mixes humor, keen analysis, and powerful insight in these essays.”

The Wrong Way to Save Your Life: Essays  by Megan Stielstra

“Whether she’s imagining the implications of open-carry laws on college campuses, recounting the story of going underwater on the mortgage of her first home, or revealing the unexpected pains and joys of marriage and motherhood, Stielstra’s work informs, impels, enlightens, and embraces us all. The result is something beautiful—this story, her courage, and, potentially, our own.”

Against Memoir: Complaints, Confessions & Criticisms  by Michelle Tea

“Delivered with her signature honesty and dark humor, this is Tea’s first-ever collection of journalistic writing. As she blurs the line between telling other people’s stories and her own, she turns an investigative eye to the genre that’s nurtured her entire career—memoir—and considers the price that art demands be paid from life.”

A Twenty Minute Silence Followed by Applause  by Shawn Wen

“In precise, jewel-like scenes and vignettes,  A Twenty Minute Silence Followed by Applause  pays homage to the singular genius of a mostly-forgotten art form. Drawing on interviews, archival research, and meticulously observed performances, Wen translates the gestural language of mime into a lyric written portrait by turns whimsical, melancholic, and haunting.”

Acid West: Essays  by Joshua Wheeler

“The radical evolution of American identity, from cowboys to drone warriors to space explorers, is a story rooted in southern New Mexico.  Acid West  illuminates this history, clawing at the bounds of genre to reveal a place that is, for better or worse, home. By turns intimate, absurd, and frightening,  Acid West  is an enlightening deep-dive into a prophetic desert at the bottom of America.”

Sexographies  by Gabriela Wiener and Lucy Greaves And jennifer adcock (Translators)

“In fierce and sumptuous first-person accounts, renowned Peruvian journalist Gabriela Wiener records infiltrating the most dangerous Peruvian prison, participating in sexual exchanges in swingers clubs, traveling the dark paths of the Bois de Boulogne in Paris in the company of transvestites and prostitutes, undergoing a complicated process of egg donation, and participating in a ritual of ayahuasca ingestion in the Amazon jungle—all while taking us on inward journeys that explore immigration, maternity, fear of death, ugliness, and threesomes. Fortunately, our eagle-eyed voyeur emerges from her narrative forays unscathed and ready to take on the kinks, obsessions, and messiness of our lives.  Sexographies  is an eye-opening, kamikaze journey across the contours of the human body and mind.”

The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative  by Florence Williams

“From forest trails in Korea, to islands in Finland, to eucalyptus groves in California, Florence Williams investigates the science behind nature’s positive effects on the brain. Delving into brand-new research, she uncovers the powers of the natural world to improve health, promote reflection and innovation, and strengthen our relationships. As our modern lives shift dramatically indoors, these ideas—and the answers they yield—are more urgent than ever.”

Can You Tolerate This?: Essays  by Ashleigh Young

“ Can You Tolerate This?  presents a vivid self-portrait of an introspective yet widely curious young woman, the colorful, isolated community in which she comes of age, and the uneasy tensions—between safety and risk, love and solitude, the catharsis of grief and the ecstasy of creation—that define our lives.”

What are your favorite contemporary essay collections?

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Essay, Paragraph, Speech on “Life in the 21st Century” Complete English Essay for Class 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, Graduation classes.

Life in the 21st Century

The new ‘scientific theories have their Origin-in the developed countries. It takes some time to transfer the new technology from the developed countries to the developing countries, like India. Let us now review the technologies which are likely to affect the present population. Computers are the part of the technology which ii is likely to affect the man most in the twenty first century.

A technologist has predicted; “A lady of twenty first century may have a computer in which she will be able. to programme her day’s programmes. A push-button combined freezer and oven could completely cook a. in 15 seconds with the help of the heat generated by microwaves. After a meal is finished, you would not need a dishwasher. Plates will be moulded on the spot for the meals and melted down again after the meals were over. Leftovers would be destroyed in the process.”

It is not an impossible dream when we consider the home appliances of today. We have fancy vegetable cutter, pressure cooker, non-sticking kitchen ware, mixer, grinder, juicer, etc. which do their jobs within no moment. The air-conditioning. of the homes, public halls and work places may be made so superior that the air enclosed therein may be freshened up with pure oxygen.

The day is not far-off when the housewife would have solved the problem of maid-servant. She would subscribe to a central computer service which would supply each household with a robot maid operated through a remote control. Computers would help us drive our car by giving us instructions as we drive.

We are entering in an era of science and technology. It may bring out certain undesirable changes also. Poverty levels would increase in the developing and undeveloped countries. Environment may become polluted threatening the very existence of humanity. Thus we have to develop environmentally sustainable technologies.

Many flybys would be sent to Mars, Venus and other planets. The decayed human organs would be replaced by those grown in the laboratory through cloning or other techniques. The experiments with drugs arc -going on which can changes one’s personality. It would soon be possible to plan the change of personality.

The global transit with the help of ballistics may become a reality. Human intelligence levels may be improved by the use of certain special drugs. The aging process in men and women might come under control. Animals for intelligent and. skilled labour might become a reality. In the twenty first century, humans would be cloned. Flying cars would he used for transportation and Internet would conduct most of the business.

A French oceanographer Jacques Yres Costeau has predicted that biotechnology would be able to graft a gill on human shoulders making hint’ completely amphibious. Man would be able to adjust to living under water also. Suitable techniques would be evolved to make sea water fit for drinking. Moon may by colonised by the end of twenty first century.

Thus, science and technology promise a future in which man can lead a healthy and satisfying life, but it will depend upon the wisdom with which we utilize science and technology.

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Twenty-first Century Must Be Century of Women’s Equality, Secretary-General Says in Remarks at The New School

Following are UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ remarks on “women and power” at The New School in New York today:

It is a great pleasure to be here today.  Thank you for honouring me with this degree, and, through me, the United Nations and our staff around the world.

The New School is a special place.

I am an engineer by training and physics has been the biggest intellectual passion of my life.  But I reserve my greatest admiration for artists, philosophers, social scientists and those who explain the world and make it more beautiful.  I thank the New School for helping to uplift us and give meaning to our lives.

No place is better than the New School for me to explain our view on women and power, and our very strong commitment to gender equality in everything we do.

As a man born in Western Europe, I have enjoyed many privileges.  But my childhood under a military dictatorship in Portugal opened my eyes to injustice and oppression.

As a student doing volunteer work in the slums of Lisbon, throughout my political career, and as the leader of the United Nations refugee agency, I have always felt compelled to fight against injustice, inequality and the denial of human rights.

Today, as Secretary-General of the United Nations, I see one overwhelming injustice across the globe; an abuse that is crying out for attention.  That is gender inequality and discrimination against women and girls.

Everywhere, women are worse off than men, simply because they are women.  Migrant and refugee women, those with disabilities, and women members of minorities of all kinds face even greater barriers.  This discrimination harms us all.

Just as slavery and colonialism were a stain on previous centuries, women’s inequality should shame us all in the twenty-first.  Because it is not only unacceptable; it is stupid.

Only through the equal participation of women can we benefit from the intelligence, experience and insights of all of humanity.  Women’s equal participation is vital to stability, helps prevent conflict, and promotes sustainable, inclusive development.  Gender equality is the prerequisite for a better world.

This is not a new issue.  Women have been fighting for their rights for centuries.  Five hundred years ago, Queen Nzinga Mbandi of the Mbundu waged war against Portuguese colonial rule in present-day Angola.  Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792, is often seen as the mother of western feminism.  Sixty years later, Sojourner Truth delivered an impassioned plea for women’s rights while she worked to abolish slavery.

The women’s rights movement came of age in the twentieth century.  Women Heads of State dispelled any doubts about women’s ability to lead.  The Universal Declaration of Human Rights asserted the equal rights of men and women, and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women outlined a vision of gender equality.

Today, young women like Malala Yousafzai and Nadia Murad are breaking barriers and creating new models of leadership.

But despite these advances, the state of women’s rights remains dire.  Inequality and discrimination are the norm, everywhere.  Progress has slowed to a standstill — and in some cases, been reversed.

There is a strong and relentless pushback against women’s rights.  Violence against women, including femicide, is at epidemic levels.  More than one in three women will experience violence in some form during her lifetime.

Legal protections against rape and domestic violence are being diluted or rolled back in some places.  Rape within marriage continues to be legal in 34 countries. Women’s sexual and reproductive rights are under threat from different sides.

Women leaders and public figures face harassment, threats and abuse, online and off.

The policing of personal freedom and dress are a daily reality for millions of women and girls.

From Governments to corporate boards to awards ceremonies, women are still excluded from the top table.

Policies that penalize women, like austerity and coercive reproduction, are back in fashion.

Peace negotiations still exclude women, 20 years after all countries pledged to include them.

And the digital age could make these inequalities even more entrenched.

Gender equality is fundamentally a question of power.  We live in a male-dominated world with a male-dominated culture.  We have done so for millennia.

The historian Mary Beard has identified the deep historical roots of patriarchy in Western culture.

In the Odyssey , written 3,000 years ago, Homer describes Telemachus telling his mother, Penelope, to be quiet and to leave the talking to men.  Unfortunately, Telemachus would not be out of place in some of my meetings today.

Patriarchy — a social system founded on inheritance through the male line — continues to affect every area of our lives.  We are all — men and women, girls and boys — suffering the consequences.

Male-dominated power structures underpin our economies, our political systems and our corporations.

Even Hollywood fame does not protect women from men who wield physical, emotional and professional power over them.  I salute those who have courageously spoken up and fought back.

A hidden layer of inequality is built into the institutions and structures that govern all our lives — but are based on the needs of just half the population.

The writer Caroline Criado Perez calls this “default man” thinking:  The unquestioned assumption that men are standard, and women the exception.  This has led to the biggest data gap in the world.  Very often, women are not counted, and their experiences don’t count.

The consequences are everywhere, from toilet facilities to bus routes.  Women are at higher risk of being injured in a car accident, because seats and safety belts fit default man.  Women have a higher fatality rate from heart attacks because diagnostic tools are designed around default man.

Default man thinking even extends into space, which is indeed the final frontier — for women.  More than 150 men have walked in space, but just a handful of women, particularly because spacesuits are designed for default man.  No woman has walked on the moon — although women mathematicians played an essential part in putting men there.

At last, we are finally celebrating the achievements of these women, including Katherine Johnson, who passed away this week.

All too often, alongside violence, control, male-dominated power structures and hidden discrimination, women and girls contend with centuries of misogyny and the erasure of their achievements.

From the ridiculing of women as hysterical or hormonal, to the routine judgement of women based on their looks; from the myths and taboos that surround women’s natural body functions, to mansplaining and victim-blaming — misogyny has been everywhere.

Conversely, across centuries and cultures, words like “genius” and “brilliant” are used far more often to describe men than women.

Which is less surprising when men have made the rules and banned women from participating in it.  The damage done by patriarchy and inequality goes far beyond women and girls.

Men have a gender too.  It is defined so rigidly that it can trap men and boys into stereotypes that involve risky behaviour, physical aggression and an unwillingness to seek advice or support.

As the writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie puts it:  “Masculinity is a hard, small cage, and we put boys inside this cage.”

Around the world, men have shorter life spans than women; they are more likely to be in prison and to use and experience violence; and they are less likely to seek help.  We have defined men’s power in ways that come at great cost — to men themselves.

Gender equality has enormous benefits for men’s personal relationships.  Men who share caregiving and spend more time with their families are happier and have happier children.

On a larger scale, transforming the balance of power is essential, not only as a question of human rights, personal development, health and well-being.

It is critical to solving some of the most damaging and intractable problems of our age, from deepening inequality and polarization to the climate crisis.

I see five areas in which achieving gender equality can transform our world.

First, conflict and violence.

There is a straight line between violence against women, civil oppression and conflict.

Trillions of dollars are spent every year on peace and security.  But we should be asking:  Whose peace?  Whose security?

Inter-State conflict makes headlines, but in some of the most violent parts of the world, levels of femicide — the killing of women — are comparable to a war zone. 137 women around the world are killed by a member of their own family every day. Impunity rates are above 95 per cent in some countries.

In other words, we have men waging war on women — but no one is calling for a ceasefire or imposing sanctions.

And how a society treats the female half of its population is a significant indicator of how it will treat others.

Rape and sexual slavery are routinely used as a tactic of war, and misogyny is part of the ideology of almost all violent extremist groups.

Conversely, involving women leaders and decision-makers in mediation and peace processes leads to more lasting and sustainable peace.

The United Nations is committed to putting women at the centre of our conflict prevention, peacemaking, peacebuilding and mediation efforts — and to increasing the numbers of our women peacekeepers.

Second, the climate crisis.

The existential emergency we are facing is the result of decisions that were taken mainly by men but have a disproportionate impact on women and girls.

Drought and famine mean women work harder to find food and water, while heatwaves, storms and floods kill more women and girls than men and boys.

Women and girls have long been leaders and activists on the environment, from Wangari Maathai and Jane Goodall to the Fridays for Future movement.

But the impact of gender inequality on climate action goes deeper.

Initiatives to reduce and recycle are overwhelmingly marketed at women, while men are more likely to put their faith in untested technological fixes.

There is plenty of evidence that women are more open than men to reducing their personal environmental impact.

And recent studies show that women economists and parliamentarians are more likely to support sustainable, inclusive policies.

There is a risk that safeguarding our planet is seen as “women’s work” — just another domestic chore.

I am grateful to young people, Generation Z, including many of you here in this room, who are working for climate action and gender equality, while recognizing the reality of non-binary identities and solutions.

Macho posturing will not save our planet.

Gender equality, including men stepping up and taking responsibility, is essential if we are to beat the climate emergency.

The third area in which women’s rights and equal opportunities can create a breakthrough is in building inclusive economies.

Worldwide, women still earn just 77 cents for every dollar earned by men.  The latest research by the World Economic Forum says it will take until 2255 to close the gender pay gap.

How can I tell my granddaughters that their granddaughters’ granddaughters will still be paid less than a man for the same work?

The gender pay gap is one reason why 70 per cent of the world’s poor are women and girls.

Another is that women and girls do some 12 billion hours of unpaid care work around the world every day — three times more than men.

In some communities, women can spend 14 hours a day cooking, cleaning, fetching wood and water and caring for children and the elderly.

Economic models classify these hours as “leisure time”.

Gross domestic product puts zero value on anything that happens in the home.  But this flawed metric is the baseline for economic decision-making, distorting policies and denying women opportunities.

Women who do have an income are more likely than men to invest in their families and communities, strengthening economies and making them more resilient.

Women also tend to take a longer view.  Corporate boards that include them are more stable and profitable.

The recent decision by one of the world’s biggest investment banks not to take a company public unless it has a woman board member was not made on moral grounds.  It was financial good sense.

Women’s equal economic rights and opportunities are a global imperative if we are to build a fair globalization that works for all.

Fourth, the digital divide.

When a couple complained last year that the man’s credit limit was 20 times higher than his wife’s, despite her higher credit score, the discrepancy was blamed on an algorithm.

But with women occupying just 26 per cent of jobs in artificial intelligence, it is no surprise that many algorithms are biased towards men.

Digital technology can be an enormous force for good.  But I am deeply concerned by the male domination of technological professions in the universities, start-ups and Silicon Valleys of this world.

These tech hubs are already shaping the economies and societies of the future, with a huge impact on the evolution of power relations.

Unless women play an equal role in designing digital technologies, progress on women’s rights could be reversed.

Lack of diversity will not only expand gender inequality.  It will limit the innovation and scope of new technologies, making them less useful for everyone.

Fifth and finally, political representation.

Women’s participation in parliaments around the world has doubled in the last 25 years — to one quarter.  Fewer than one tenth of States are led by a woman.

But women’s representation in government is not about stereotypical “women’s issues” like opposing sexual harassment or promoting childcare.  Women in government drive social progress and meaningful changes to people’s lives.

Women are more likely to advocate for investment in education and health and to seek cross-party consensus and common ground.

When the numbers of women reach a critical mass, Governments are more likely to innovate and to challenge established orthodoxies.

In other words, women in politics are redefining and redistributing power.

It is no coincidence that the Governments that are redefining GDP to include well-being and sustainability are led by women.

It is simple math.  Women’s participation improves institutions.

Doubling the resources, capacity and expertise we put into decision-making benefits everyone.

One of my first priorities as Secretary-General of the United Nations was to bring more women into leadership positions.  On 1 January this year, we achieved gender parity — 90 women and 90 men — in the ranks of full-time senior leadership, two years ahead of the target date I set at the start of my tenure.  We have a road map in place to achieve parity at all levels in the years ahead.

This long-overdue change is an essential recognition of the equal rights and abilities of women staff.  It is also about improving our efficiency and effectiveness for the people we serve.

The opportunity of man-made problems — and I choose these words deliberately — is that they have human-led solutions.

Thriving matriarchal societies throughout history and around the world show that patriarchy is not inevitable.

We have recently seen women, many of them young, demanding transformational change.

From Sudan to Chile to Lebanon, they are calling for freedom from violence, greater representation and urgent climate action, and questioning economic systems that fail to deliver opportunities and fulfilment for many.

We owe these young leaders our voices and our support.

Gender equality is part of the DNA of the United Nations.  The equal rights of women and men are included in the Charter — our founding document.  As we mark our seventy-fifth anniversary this year, along with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Beijing Conference on Women, we are redoubling our efforts to support women’s rights across the board.

Last month, the United Nations launched a Decade of Action to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals — the blueprint for our partnership with Governments to build peaceful, prosperous and inclusive societies on a healthy planet.

Gender equality is a goal in itself, and key to achieving the other 16 goals.

The Decade of Action is aimed at transforming institutions and structures, broadening inclusion and driving sustainability.

Repealing laws that discriminate against women and girls; increasing protection against violence; closing the gap in girls’ education and digital technology; guaranteeing full access to sexual and reproductive health services and rights; and ending the gender pay gap are just some of the areas we are targeting.

Women’s equal leadership and participation are fundamental.

That is why in the past, I always supported quotas — the most effective way to achieve a radical shift in the balance of power.  Now is the time for gender parity in Governments, parliaments, corporate boards and institutions everywhere.

Over the next two years, I intend to deepen my personal commitment to highlighting and supporting gender equality in all areas of our work.

I will contact Governments that have discriminatory laws on their books to advocate for change and offer our support; and urge each new Government to achieve gender parity in senior leadership.

I will explore ways to maximize the influence of the United Nations to make sure women have equal representation in peace processes and strengthen our work on the links between violence against women and international peace and security.

I will continue to meet women whose lives have been affected by violence.

I will also advocate for GDP to include measures of well-being and sustainability and for unpaid domestic work to be given its true value.

I am committed to ending “default male” thinking across the United Nations.  We are a data-driven organization; it is essential that our data does not make the ridiculous assumption that men are the norm and women are the exception.

We need women’s voices and contributions at the forefront in peace negotiations and trade talks; at the Oscars and the G20 (Group of 20); in board rooms and classrooms; and at the United Nations General Assembly.

Gender equality is a question of power; power that has been jealously guarded by men for millennia.  It is about an abuse of power that is damaging our communities, our economies, our environment, our relationships and our health.

We must urgently transform and redistribute power, if we are to safeguard our future and our planet.  That is why all men should support women’s rights and gender equality.  And why I am a proud feminist.

Women have equalled and outperformed men in almost every sphere.  It is time to stop trying to change women and start changing the systems that prevent them from achieving their potential.

Our power structures have evolved gradually over thousands of years.  One further evolution is long overdue.  The twenty-first century must be the century of women’s equality.

Let us all play our part in making it so.

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Home — Essay Samples — History — Contemporary History — 21St Century

Essays on 21st Century

Choosing 21st century essay topics.

As we navigate through the 21st century, the world around us is constantly evolving, and this evolution comes with a plethora of complex issues and topics that are ripe for exploration and discussion. When it comes to selecting an essay topic for your academic assignments, it's important to choose a subject that is not only relevant but also engaging and thought-provoking. In this article, we will delve into the importance of choosing a 21st-century essay topic, provide advice on how to select a topic, and offer a detailed list of recommended essay topics across various categories.

The Importance of the Topic

Choosing a relevant and impactful essay topic is crucial for several reasons. Firstly, it allows you to engage with current events and trends, fostering a deeper understanding of the world around us and its complexities. Secondly, a well-chosen topic can spark meaningful discussions and debates, both within academic circles and in society at large. Additionally, selecting a 21st-century essay topic can help you develop critical thinking and analytical skills, as you navigate through the complexities of contemporary issues.

Advice on Choosing a Topic

When it comes to selecting an essay topic, it's important to consider your interests, as well as the relevance and significance of the subject matter. Start by brainstorming a list of topics that intrigue you and align with your academic goals. Consider the potential impact of the topic and its relevance to modern society. Research the latest developments and debates surrounding the topic to ensure that you have access to current and credible sources. Lastly, make sure the topic is broad enough to provide you with ample research material, but also specific enough to allow for in-depth exploration.

Recommended Essay Topics

Social issues.

• The impact of social media on mental health
• Income inequality in the 21st century
• The rise of fake news and its implications
• The role of activism in contemporary society

Technology and Innovation

• The ethical implications of artificial intelligence
• The future of renewable energy sources
• Privacy and data protection in the digital age
• The impact of technology on the job market

Environmental Concerns

• The effects of climate change on global communities
• Sustainable practices for a greener future
• The role of activism in environmental conservation
• The intersection of environmentalism and social justice

Global Politics

• International responses to humanitarian crises
• Nationalism and its impact on global diplomacy
• The role of the United Nations in the 21st century
• The rise of populism and its implications for global governance

Cultural Identity

• The impact of globalization on cultural diversity
• The portrayal of gender and race in contemporary media
• The intersection of technology and cultural heritage
• The role of art and literature in shaping cultural identities

These are just a few examples of the myriad of topics that you can explore for your 21st-century essay. Remember to choose a topic that resonates with you and aligns with your academic interests. By delving into the complexities of contemporary issues, you can develop a deeper understanding of the world around us and contribute to meaningful discussions and debates.

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The beginning of the 21st century was the rise of a global warming, global economy and Third World consumerism, increased private enterprise and terrorist attacks. Many great and many bad things happened in the current century. Many natural and man-made disasters made their impact on the world.

In the 21st century the effects of social development have affected different countries and different social groups differently. Although social development upgraded life standards of population.

The main challenges in the 21st century are: climate change, plastic pollution in the oceans, natural hazards, air pollution, hunger and increased inequalities.

Technology in the 21st century has enabled to humans to make strides that our ancestors could only dream of. People in the 21st century live in a technology and media-suffused environment.

The world population was about 6.1 billion at the start of the 21st century and reached 7.8 billion by March 2020.

Economically and politically, the United States and Western Europe were dominant at the beginning of the century. By the 2010s, China became an emerging global superpower and the world's largest economy. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are increasing in popularity worldwide.

The 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers, Hurricane Katrina, Same-Sex Marriage Legalisation, Haiti Earthquake, The Arab Spring, Brexit

Relevant topics

• Jack The Ripper
• Roaring Twenties
• Green Revolution
• China Crisis
• 19Th Century
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• 20Th Century

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Crucial Scientific Discoveries in Twenty-First Century Essay

Introduction, automobile industry, communication sector, education and schools, works cited.

Scientists are making various inventions especially in the field of medicine and information technology. The need for people to live comfortable and easier lives has led to various inventions which are currently being adapted. America has become the center for such inventions as people adapt more sophisticated lifestyles. Even though the changes seem to impact positively on peoples lives, research has revealed that they have an impact on the health of individuals.

One thing about such inventions is that they never stand the test of time. Most of them excite their users for a particular period of time and there after they are replaced with new ones. Examples of such are the new inventions that are being done on mobile phones. Mobile phone companies are venturing into designs that will suit the needs of modern people. A mobile phone is currently being used to perform more function apart from the original design of calls and text messages.

Man is being transformed from being a social being to a person who mainly operates through machines. In the current world, it is more about how one knows how to operate machines than how they can relate with people. There is little interaction of people as everybody seeks to do their transactions digitally (Macionis 489). These improvements are already having negative impacts on people and there is still much that is expected.

The greatest need in the current society is health care; there is a need for more advanced health care facilities to cater for new complications that are related to changes in lifestyles. The use of automobiles travel even for shorter distances has led to obesity and heart complications. Complications that were previously known to affect the older generations are now being reported in the younger. Technology has also made people to adapt unhealthy eating habits. Fast foods are gaining popularity as people lack the time to make and eat healthy meals. Foods that are considered to be healthy have become tasteless as people look out for sweetness. Below are some of the major scientific innovations and their predicted effects in the 21 st century.

The automobile industry has led to the invention of modern cars that are meant to make transport easier. Compared to previous inventions that caused a lot of pollution on the environment, there has been a need for environmental friendly vehicles. There is also an extinction on fuel resources that has made fuel prices to be exorbitant. Technology is therefore looking for a means of adapting alternative fueling mechanisms that will be economical and also risk free.

Electricity has been considered to be another alternative except that it is very expensive. There are also other alternatives that are already being used only that they require a lot of money to install and maintain. It is hence expected than the living standards will be on the high as people will have no alternative but to adapt to the changes. There are certain engine vehicles that have already been banned in the market and it is expected that such bans will continue.

This is due to the need of conserving the environment which has a direct impact on people’s health. In the near future, there are certain engine cars that will be prohibited in the market and on roads. This will lead to increased expenses as people will be required to change what they are currently driving to something else that is considered better.

With the changes that are taking place in the field of information technology, we are looking forward to more sophisticated means of communication. People have also become too busy to even handle a short conversation. The use of voice mails enables people to listen to calls at their convenient time; it makes it possible for people not to miss out on their calls as they can easily leave a recorded message. The improvements that are being made will ensure that people who are talking over the phone see each other. The ability of a phone to record live pictures that will show where a person is and what they are currently doing are being facilitated.

They will have strong signals that will be able to tell the exact location of an individual. It will hence be easier to trap the location of the caller by simply reading through the signals (Macionis 503). The concept of people using mobile phones to cheat on their callers will be eliminated. There will however be call settings that will also enable a person to hide the identity of their location and hence making them even trickier. We are also looking forward to seeing more transactions being done via the mobile phones. It will even be possible to acquire important documents on line such as marriage certificates.

Internet technology has given rise to online learning where by people are acquiring degrees by studying via the internet. There is a lot of advertisement on how one can acquire a higher degree from a university that is overseas. It is hence predicted that in future, all learning will be done online. There will be an increase in learning institutions that are based online for both senior and junior students. There are some characters that students acquire while in schools which is causing a threat to their morals. Parents who care much about the moral standing of their children will hence opt for online schools where they can study under the supervision of their parents (Macionis 490).

As much as they will be doing it for the sake of protecting their children, it will be done at the expense of their social life which is necessary for their growth. It will also mean that outdoor games will be replaced by indoor and computer games. This will be a serious social issue which will be transferred to the future generation. It will basically mean that people will be so close yet know little about each other. There will be no personal relationship between the teachers and their students. They can only communicate online and acquire the knowledge that they need but will not be able to meet and talk face to face.

The issue of science making life easier or more complicated has been a debate whose clear answer has not been identified. Everything is based on a fifty percent analysis which has made people to live with it. Despite the desirable and undesirable consequences that scientific inventions are having on individuals, change is inevitable. People have had to admit that life is becoming more sophisticated with the improvements that are being made in the field. It is however impossible to do without some of the inventions that are being made as they form part and parcel of our lifestyles. Even the most cultured individuals have found it difficult to resist the changes as they are swept by them. The only thing that has remained for us is to accept the changes and bear the consequences.

Macionis, John. Society: The Basics . New York: Prentice Hall, 2008.

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• Chicago (A-D)
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IvyPanda. (2021, December 19). Crucial Scientific Discoveries in Twenty-First Century. https://ivypanda.com/essays/crucial-scientific-discoveries-in-twenty-first-century/

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1. IvyPanda . "Crucial Scientific Discoveries in Twenty-First Century." December 19, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/crucial-scientific-discoveries-in-twenty-first-century/.

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Band 9: People living in the 21st century have a better quality of life than the previous centuries. To what extent do you agree or disagree?

There are those who hold the opinion that individuals in the 21st century enjoy a superior quality of life compared to those living in earlier centuries. I am in complete agreement with this view, as I believe the unparalleled advancements in technology and social welfare have significantly elevated our way of living.

The first reason for this enhanced quality of life is the unprecedented progress in healthcare. Modern medical innovations have not only increased life expectancy but also improved the quality of life through effective treatments and preventive care. For example, advancements in medical imaging and minimally invasive surgery have made complex procedures safer and more accessible, drastically reducing recovery times and improving outcomes. These medical breakthroughs, unavailable in previous centuries, have provided us with a level of health and well-being that was previously unimaginable.

Moreover, the digital revolution has fundamentally transformed our daily lives, marking a significant improvement over past centuries. The internet and smartphones have democratized access to information, connecting people across the globe and empowering them with knowledge and resources. This has led to an informed and engaged society of people, capable of making better decisions for their personal and professional lives. The convenience and efficiency brought about by these technological tools, such as online banking, e-commerce, and telecommuting, have significantly improved our standard of living, making everyday tasks more manageable and less time-consuming.

To conclude, the 21st century offers a superior quality of life, primarily thanks to groundbreaking advancements in healthcare and the transformative impact of digital technology. These developments have not only prolonged our life spans but have also enriched our daily experiences, making modern life more convenient, connected, and comfortable than ever before.

Check Your Own Essay On This Topic?

Generate a band-9 sample with your idea, overall band score, task response, coherence & cohesion, lexical resource, grammatical range & accuracy, essays on the same topic:, people living in the 21st century have a better quality of life than the previous centuries. to what extent do you agree or disagree.

It is well-known fact that citizens in the 21st century have a more enhanced quality of life when compared to those in the past centuries.I absolutely agree with this statement as I think, the advancements in science and technology have significant impacts on our way of life. Firstly,these days,healthcare services are advanced and accessible to […]

An increasing number of people are concerned about the current life of human beings. It is believed that it is convenient for people who live in the 21st century to have a better quality of life than in the past. In my view, I completely agree with this notion. Admittedly, there are good reasons to […]

It is argued that people’s life quality in the contemporary era has significantly changed compared with the past centuries. From my perspective, I agree with this statement due to the developments of education, and medical services. Initially, in the current world, education plays an important role in strengthening our steps to approach better lives. Firstly, […]

Many argue that individuals existing in the 21st century are privileged to experience a life of superior quality than those in earlier ages. I am in complete agreement with this stance, and this essay will elaborate on my rationale, emphasizing that the unparalleled impact of technological advancements has significantly elevated our way of living. It […]

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In the recent years children are forced to study even in their leisure time. is this a good practice do you agree or disagree.

In recent times, children have been forced to study hard to achieve academic success in their lives. So, there is a belief that children should not spend their precious time studying non-academic subjects, like physical education and cookery. In this essay, I will discuss both views and will state my personal view of this statement. […]

SOME PEOPLE FEEL THAT MANUFACTURER and supermarket have the responsibility to reduce the amount of packaging of goods. Others argue that customers should avoid buying goods with alot of packaging. Discuss both views and give your opinion.

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Nowadays, more people decide to have children later in their life. This tendency can be seen frequently especially in many developed countries. New data show that the number of American women having kids after age 35 is continuing to grow. There are some reasons leading to this trend and it certainly will have great impacts on family and society. What are the reasons of this trend and its impacts on family and society?

in today’s society, the topic of delaying childbearing has emerged as prominent concern among the populace. This essay aims to delve into the underlying causes as well as the affects of this issue. Various causes play a crucial role in prompting women do not have children early in their lives. To begin with, women desire […]

Far too little has been done to prevent animals and plants from dying out, although people have been aware of this problem for a long time. Why do people do so little about it? Give your suggestions on how to solve this problem.

Due to various environmental factors, the list of endangered species of fauna and flora is continuously growing. However, no steps are taken by the people across the world to resolve the highlighted issue. If no precaution is taken, even the currently existing creatures will become extinct. This essay will discuss in detail, the reasons behind […]

These days very fewer people want to become teachers, particularly in secondary schools. What are the reasons for this and how this problem can be tackled?

In a both socially and technically globalized world, there is an important issue about decreasing amount of teachers, especially people do not teach children who is from 12 to 15 years. There are some aspects for this situation and it can be prevented by solving some issues. First reason to decrease people level for being […]

some people belive that visitors to other country should follow local customs and behavior.others disagree and think that the host country should welcome cultural differences.

With the development of overseas travel, more and more tourists behave impolitely and disrespectfully towards local cultures. However, a number of people believe that the host country should be open-minded and welcome those tourists. This essay will elaborate on why some people dislike those disrespectful behaviors and why the host country should welcome foreign tourists, […]

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Home / Essay Samples / Education / Study Skills / Thriving in the 21st Century: Essential Skills for Success

Thriving in the 21st Century: Essential Skills for Success

• Category: Sociology , Life , Education
• Topic: Communication Skills , Skills , Study Skills

Pages: 1 (628 words)

Views: 1116

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• Learners at the centre: It is important that the learners are recognized as the core participants, and are encouraged to engage actively and develop an understanding of their own activity, so as to maximize the effectiveness of the learning outcomes.
• Recognizing individual differences: We also should ensure that differences of each student are taken into account in the 21st Century skills-set so that each of them is empowered for their full potential.
• Assessment of learning: The learning environment should also operate with clarity of expectations through proper assessment strategies, and a strong emphasis on constructive feedback to facilitate smooth learning of individuals.

21st Century Skills and My Teaching

The most important skill for students’ success.

• Choi, A. (2015, December 22). What the best education systems are doing right. 
• 7 Principles of 21st-century learning and eLearning. 
• Guiding Principles for learning in the 21st Century. 
• World Bank. (2018). Ch 2: The great school expansion- and those it has left behind. In The World Development Report 2018: LEARNING to Realize Education’s Promise. 

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