2022 Writing in Review
Some of my favorite essays and articles of the year
I started Handful of Earth in January of this year. While I haven’t written as much as I’d have liked to, I hope that you have enjoyed the essays and articles published here on Substack, all of which can be read for free. As 2022 draws to a close, I’d like to share some of my favorite essays and articles from the year:
- , “How the Right Became the Left and the Left Became the Right”
The “left-right reversal” described in this column is arguably the most important phenomenon in America politics today. The left’s rightward turn is something I’ve been writing about since 2018 and I believe that the failure to grasp this new reality is at the root of most pandits’ inability to understand contemporary American politics.
Edward Luce, “America’s Shipwrecked Working Class”
Speaking of American politics, this short reflection on the 2022 midterm elections points out that “working classes of all colours have been steadily drifting towards the Republicans.” While the Democrats may have averted disaster this year, a close analysis of the election results confirms that the Party is becoming increasingly bourgeois in composition and, in the process, losing African American and Latino voters election after election.
Edward Luce, “Is America Heading for Civil War?”
Another column by the formidable Financial Times commentator, this discussion of several recent books demonstrates just how dire the political situation has become in the United States, a situation that is, paradoxically, often clearer to those outside rather than inside the country.
Michael Lind, “The End of Citizenship”
This essay insightfully investigates the ways in which domestic ideological shifts have produced a “sudden outburst of vicarious Ukrainian patriotism on the part of many Americans” who, before the war, likely couldn’t even locate the country on a map.
Cornel West and Jeremy Tate, “Howard University’s Removal of Classics is a Spiritual Catastrophe”
This powerful op-ed elucidates the pivotal importance of the classics in revolutionary Black American thought and why “[a]cademia’s continual campaign to disregard or neglect the classics is a sign of spiritual decay, moral decline and a deep intellectual narrowness running amok in American culture.”
Faisal Devji, “Salman Rushdie and the Neoliberal Culture Wars”
This perspicacious essay by one of the few contemporary academics capable of such intellectual and political insight is essential reading. Devji uses the 2022 attack on Salman Rushdie and the history leading up to it as a window into the internal contradictions of liberalism in the Western world.
- , “Why We Stopped Making Einsteins”
This is one of Erik Hoel’s many excellent essays of the year focused on the history and contemporary relevance of what he calls “aristocratic tutoring.” We need much more outside-the-box thinking like this during the present educational crisis in America. Hoel himself recently left academia to write full time on Substack, and I’d highly recommend supporting his work.
- , “The Fourth Revolution”
Paul Kingsnorth is another writer who has written some incredible essays in 2022. It’s hard to choose which one to share here, but “The Fourth Revolution” is a good introduction to his thinking on environmentalism, the left, technology, and religion.
- , “On the Internalizing & Cluster B, Chthonian Crisis of the Current Moment”
While I am often suspicious of psychological explanations for politics, this article on “the miasma of performative narcissism that saturate the current culture” raises a number of pertinent issues and points to a very important passage in Christopher Lasch’s mid-90s book, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy.
- , “False Gods, False Prophets, and Their False Religion of Eugenics”
This article is an important introduction to and critique of Yuval Noah Harari’s transhumanist thought, which has enjoyed increasing popularity since the pandemic.
- , “On Dr. Ryan Marino, Covid Vaccines, and the Rage of the Tolerant Left”
While much has been said on covid, this short piece speaks for itself on the question of the vaccines and vaccine mandates, which, as I’ve written here earlier this year, is the most important issue surrounding the pandemic.
Curtis Price, “The Poisoning of a Black Southern Town”
This is one of a number of moving essays published this year on Gasoline & Grits, a website that is well worth following for its perceptive analysis of race and class grounded in the everyday lives of working people in the American South.
Matt Halfhill, “Overhyped & Under-Regulated: Zadeh Kicks, the Sneaker Pre-Order Business That Cost Customers Millions”
Though it may seem irrelevant outside the subculture of sneaker enthusiasts, this long-form piece is very significant in our understanding of the broader economy in an era of speculation and disrupted supply chains.
Michael Hudson, “The American Empire Self-Destructs”
On the topic of the economy, this essay provides a bird’s eye view of the massive global economic shifts that have accelerated in 2022, promising to radically reconstitute America’s role in the world.
Karishma Mehrotra, “In India, Desolate Solar Parks Reveal the Dark Side of Renewable Energy”
This excellent reporting on solar parks in India gives the lie to bright green environmentalist ideology, which refuses to grapple with the dark underbelly of so-called “green energy.”
I’m sure I’m missing some important writing that was published this year. What were some of your favorite essays and articles of 2022?
Excellent list, I'll take a look !