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Quillette’s Most Read—2023

Our most popular essays of 2023.

Zoe Booth

28 Dec 2023 · 4 min read

Milan Kundera: The Nobel Prize for Literature Winner We Never Had

Few writers in our time were more committed to the novel or had more idealism about the heights the form could scale.

Robin Ashenden

11 Jul 2023 · 12 min read

The Universal Structure of Storytelling

Storytelling is then—in every era and every culture—a dramatization of the everlasting war between the princesses and the tigers.

Jonathan Gottschall

29 Nov 2021 · 11 min read

The Enemy of My Enemy

But let’s remain clear in our minds what they really stand for, because sometimes the enemy of your enemy turns out, in the long run, to be just another enemy.

Robert Tracinski

22 Nov 2021 · 8 min read

The Vanishing of Peng Shuai

Whatever really happened between Zhang and Peng, the truth is that they were both already victims, having been raised in a society that completely denies the importance of the individual.

Aaron Sarin

20 Nov 2021 · 6 min read

Flying Cars: What, How, When, and Why?

Even though electric and self-driving cars have yet to saturate the market, dozens of companies are at various stages of launching flying cars in a variety of models.

Randall Mayes

18 Nov 2021 · 10 min read

Equity Concerns Lead to a Mass-Firing of Museum Volunteers

The firing of the AIC docents was only possible because unpaid staffers are not covered by its provisions, and the MMA was able to circumvent equal opportunity requirements by exclusively recruiting from local black colleges.

Robert Cherry

15 Nov 2021 · 7 min read

Weekly Roundup

If there were a modern day Voltaire, or a 21st century Bertrand Russell, Steven Pinker would be it. So it is a tremendous honour for me to bring you an excerpt of Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters, by the man himself, in this week&

Claire Lehmann

2 Oct 2021 · 6 min read

My Life as a Ghostwriter

If you pick the right projects, on the other hand, ghostwriting can be highly lucrative, especially as compared to the low payouts available to mid-list authors publishing non-fiction books under their own name.

Jonathan Kay

26 Sep 2021 · 12 min read

Who Will Save Us From Racist AI?

The researchers analyzed multiple databases and the findings were striking—the ML models were able to predict self-reported race (classified as Asian, black, and white) with astonishing precision.

Zachary Robert Caverley

15 Aug 2021 · 9 min read

Vexed by the Un-Vaxxed

Civil society is based on the fundamental premise that we give up certain liberties to secure tranquility, defense, welfare, and greater liberty, such as the freedom from fatal diseases.

Michael Shermer

14 Aug 2021 · 13 min read

20 Hungarian Lessons the West Is Still Missing

Hungarian politics is usually much less ideological than you think.

Erik D'Amato

13 Aug 2021 · 12 min read

Necessity Is the Mother of Invention, and Has Been for Over 3,500 Years

And that is an ancient cultural surprise worth celebrating. Far more than imaginary Gods, Ravens, and Spirits.

Lawrence M. Krauss

13 Aug 2021 · 4 min read

Twilight of the Satyrs

I. On April 18th of this year, Blake Bailey, 58, the author of Philip Roth: The Biography, was abruptly dropped by his literary agency, the Story Company. His book had been published on April 6th, and climbed to the top of the bestseller lists. But then allegations emerged that while

Charlotte Allen

11 Aug 2021 · 28 min read

Political Correctness: A Sociocultural Black Hole—A Review

In the 1980s, when political correctness was slowly brewing in parts of academia, Isaac Asimov claimed democracy was under attack.

Göran Adamson

11 Aug 2021 · 7 min read