Best Online Essays of 2018

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The Best Online Essays of 2018

“The Counterfeit Queen of Soul” by Jeff Maysh
Smithsonian, July 1, 2018

“How Shanties and Songs of the Sea Helped Me Weather the Storm of Depression” by Blair Thornburgh
Catapult, August 6, 2018

“A Music So Beautiful Birds Fell from the Trees” by Maija Liuhto
Longreads, June 27, 2018

“The Strange Case of the Missing Joyce Scholar” by Jack Hitt
The New York Times Magazine, June 12, 2018

“All-Too-Easy Listening: The Music Industry Sells Classical as Soothing Background Music—
Robbing a Great Art of Its Power” by Jennifer Gersten
The Washington Post, November 30, 2018

“Music and My Father” by Gabrielle Bellot
Literary Hub, April 10, 2018

“I Found the Best Burger Place in America. And Then I Killed It” by Kevin Alexander
Thrillist, November 16, 2018

“Is the Next Nobel Laureate in Literature Tending Bar in a Dusty Australian Town?” by Mark Binelli
The New York Times Magazine, March 27, 2018

“Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, and the Road to West Side Story” by Laura Jacobs
Vanity Fair, January 3, 2018

“A Radical Explanation for a Conundrum About Extraterrestrial Life, and What it Means for the
Future of Humanity” by Geoffrey Miller
Seed Magazine, April 26, 2018

“Shouldn’t Studying Literature Be Fun?” by Timothy Aubry
The Chronicle of Higher Education, December 2, 2018

“This Must Be David Byrne” by Alex Pappademas
GQ, April 15, 2018

“The Art and Science of Being on Hold” by Damian Fowler
BBC, August 20, 2018

“The Story of Untranslated” by Anonymous
The Untranslated, November 16, 2018

“What Are We? On Paul Gaugin, Authenticity and the Midlife Crisis: How the Philosopher Bernard Williams
Dramatised Moral Luck” by Daniel Callcut
Aeon, June 11, 2018

“Inside The OED: Can The World’s Biggest Dictionary Survive The Internet?” by Andrew Dickson
The Guardian, February 23, 2018

“Bob in China” by Bo Seo
Los Angeles Review of Books, February 25, 2018

“The Consciousness Deniers” by Galen Strawson
New York Review of Books, March 13, 2018

“How Monet Created Motion Pictures” by Jeffrey Meyers
Standpoint, June, 2018

“A Natural History of Song” by Samuel Mehr, Manvir Singh, Dean Knox, Christopher Lucas, Daniel
Ketter, Daniel Pickens-Jones, Nori Jacoby, Timothy O'Donnell, Steven Pinker, Max Krasnow, and
Luke Glowacki
Harvard Music Lab working paper, November 21, 2018

“Writing and Alcohol: A Reckoning” by Sophie Gilbert
The Atlantic, April 6, 2018

“Deep River” by Will Bostwick
Oxford American, September 4, 2018

“Delete Your Account Now: A conversation with Jaron Lanier” by Harper Simon
Los Angeles Review of Books, October 8, 2018

“Ovid’s Game” by Donna Zuckerberg
Lapham’s Quarterly, October 8, 2018

“Letter to an Aspiring Intellectual” by Paul J. Griffiths
First Things, May 2018

“Alan Broadbent: Intimate Reflections on a Passion for Jazz” by Victor L. Schermer
All About Jazz, October 12, 2018

“The New York Times Fired My Doppelgänger” by Quinn Norton
The Atlantic, February 27, 2018

“Truth, Lies and Literature” by Salman Rushdie
The New Yorker, May 31, 2018

“Even in Old Age, Philosopher Bryan Magee Remains Wonder-Struck by the Ultimate Questions”
by Jason Cowley
New Statesman, April 8, 2018

“Exploring Buried Treasure in Plain Sight” by Jeff Sultanof
Rifftides, March 30, 2018

“How Shakespeare's 'Blood Cult’ Became Ted Hughes’s Fatal Obsession” by Robert McCrum
The Guardian, October 27, 2018

“The Secret Lives of Composers Who Work in the Trades” by Chris Sivak
New Music Box, October 24, 2018

“Inside the Booming Black Market for Spotify Playlists” by Austin Powell
The Daily Dot, March 12, 2018

“The Silence: The Legacy of Childhood Trauma” by Junot Díaz
The New Yorker, April 16, 2018

“The Death of Sacred Speech” by Jonathan Merritt
The Week, September 10, 2018

“The Tragedy of Electronic Music” by Spencer Kornhaber
The Atlantic, November 26, 2018

“Strange and Intelligent” by Christy Wampole
Aeon, October 25, 2018

“The Last Intellectual” by Claude Rawson
TLS, December 11, 2018

“What Do Our Oldest Books Say About Us” by Josephine Livingstone
The New Republic, November 7, 2018

“Is Neuroscience a Bigger Threat Than Artificial Intelligence?” by Alex Rosenberg
3:AM Magazine, November 2, 2018

Here is a list, in no particular order, of
essays and articles I enjoyed during
2018. They are mostly longform essays,
with a focus on music and culture, but
with a few articles on other subjects
included as well.
T.G.

For a list of my favorite recordings of
the year, click here.

Ted Gioia can be contacted at
tedgioia@hotmail.com

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Coming in 2019 from Basic Books:

Ted Gioia's new book
Music: A Subversive History