“The Case Against Children,” by Elizabeth Barber, in Harper’s
Okay, so I’ll admit that I was triggered by this headline – so very Harper’s! – and went in with a grumpy attitude, but was pleasantly surprised. Let’s say outright here that the writer is not herself making a case against children – she has them, and spoiler alert, is actually pregnant during parts of the essay.
But out of curiosity – both about her own suffering and about world views radically different than her own – she spends time with groups of “antinatalists”: people who believe that having children is morally, spiritually, ethically wrong.
Not for the reasons you might expect (climate change, etc, though that certainly doesn’t help) but because of their belief that life is suffering, and that to create life that will suffer is cruel, unnecessary, and wrong. One of these antinatalists even sued his own parents. This piece isn’t a screed so much as an exploration of what exactly being human means to different groups of people; Barber challenges our most basic assumptions about the act of creating new lives.
“The New Media Goliaths,” by , in Noema
I have become obsessed with Noema, which publishes longform, nuanced, critical essays that seem increasingly hard to find in the print landscape these days. This is one of them.
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