Golden Giraffe For Best Writing

Golden Giraffe Award For Article Of The Month

Each day, The Browser recommends five spectacular pieces of writing to surprise and delight you, and each month we celebrate the best of the best, the pieces that we’ll be thinking about for many years to come ...

Winner of the Golden Giraffe for October 2019:

A Spiritual Autobiography

Candace Vogler | Comment  | 19th October

Autobiographical essay of astonishing candour and even more astonishing content. Events narrated here, with the author as victim or witness, include child abuse, nervous breakdown, rape, attempted rape, disfigurement, miscarriage, divorce, drug addiction and fraud, through all of which the author maintains her sanity and optimism by immersing herself in religion and religious philosophy, building a career which eventually brings her to a professorial chair at the University of Chicago (9,050 words)

also brilliant:

Five Years At Capital One

Elena Botella | New Republic | 2nd October 2019

Possibly the most perceptive article about the financial industry I have ever read; and very good on the workplace more generally. It asks how good people can leave their ethics at the door each day when they work for amoral corporations. In the case of Capital One, “work” means devising strategies for tempting poor families ever deeper into credit-card debt. The key is wilful ignorance: You never meet a customer, nor ever discuss them, save in terms of financial abstractions and marketing jargon (3,140 words)

also brilliant:

People Should Be Allowed To Change Their Age

Joona Räsänen | Aeon | 9th October 2019

If you feel twenty years younger than your age, and you want to be treated as a younger person, should you be allowed to change your legal age to express the age of your inner self? It is hard to see why not, all other things being equal, although it is also possible to imagine some “unsettling” outcomes — parents who want to be younger than their children, for example. “While this result is counterintuitive, it is not impossible to countenance. Just because it’s unusual doesn’t mean it is wrong” (1,208 words)

Congratulations to Candace, Elena and Joona! We hope you’ll enjoy their writing as much as we did.

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