essays of 2022

15 Essays To Read Again in 2022

A list of our staff’s favorite essays from the past year that they did not commission themselves, or that they think cover a topic that deserves a second look.

As we prepare for 2022, we wanted to share with you a list of our staff’s favorite essays from the past year that they did NOT commission themselves or that they think cover a topic that deserves a second look.

Why I Stopped Writing About Syria, by Asser Khattab

Riada Asimovic Akyol, Contributing Editor

Among so many informative, eloquent pieces published in New Lines this year, this one I think I will actually never forget. It hit so many buttons and allowed so many people to be seen like never before. I caught myself nodding so many times while reading it, and I know a lot of people from the Balkans could understand what Asser was sharing. Others could learn with humility. The way he wrote about growing up “surrounded by people who have never experienced the joy of peaceful tranquility,” thinking that was the normal , and both the vulnerability and confidence with which he wrote about different challenges, as well as his human and professional yearnings and aspirations, were powerful and inspiring. Many conversations in open, and behind closed doors, will from now on be held, with employers, between employees, among friends, across the borders thanks to Asser’s piece. I am thankful for New Lines for publishing it.

How Arabs Have Failed Their Language, by Hossam Abouzahr

Kevin Blankinship, Contributing Editor

After the requisite boilerplate about how hard it is to choose favorites, about how every essay adds something to knowledge, etc., let me say that his is the piece I liked most from 2021. The reason is that it surprised me. It surprised me not because it was new to me: As an Arabic professor, I’ve heard who knows how many catfights about “diglossia,” namely high versus low (colloquial) varieties of Greek, Chinese, Serbian and other languages. What surprised me was how fresh the wounds are. For a quarrel looping back a thousand years, when Arab linguists tried to check “pollution” from non-native speakers, especially Persians, by setting up rules of grammar, I was stunned to see how much it agitates today. Abouzahr’s essay came out and so did the partisans. Formal Arabic is the Arabic of Islam, some said: the Arabic of the Qur’an, of classical poetry. But, said others, colloquial Arabic is the Arabic of hearth and home, of jokes and secrets, of friendship. Could it not, I thought as I watched the skirmish, be both? In the spirit of Christmas, isn’t there room for all the Arabics at the inn? A naïve thought that softens the majesty, the Whitman-like container of multitudes and, what’s more, one that misses how real language is used by real people and how it can’t be everything to everyone. Oh, well, let the fight go on, then.

The ISIS War Crime Iraqi Turkmen Won’t Talk About, by Hollie McKay

Courtney Dobson, Senior Editor

In this essay, Hollie McKay reports on women in Iraq who have been “disappeared” by the Islamic State group, the group’s use of rape as a weapon of war and how minority communities struggle to heal and come to terms with the stigma associated with sexual violence. It is a haunting piece, but McKay masterfully conveys the anguish and pain that comes with sexual violence, not just for the victim, but also for their loved ones trying to help. “Through the gap in the door flap,” McKay writes, “I noticed that scores of men and boys had lined up outside, maintaining a respectful distance from the distraught women but with curiosity etched into their sun-kissed faces. They wanted to be involved somehow, to be part of the healing process, to remind us that men were not the enemy — twisted men were the enemy. These were the fathers and brothers and sons, the nephews and neighbors.” McKay’s essay resonates for communicating the universal need for support, connection and justice, while also laying bare why these don’t come easily. Published a few months after New Lines launched, this essay left a deep impression on me.

How I Escaped China’s War on Uyghurs, by Tahir Hamut Izgil

Rasha Elass, Editorial Director

When we launched New Lines we wanted to cover themes and stories from beyond the geographic Middle East. The oppression of the Uyghurs in China struck me as an underreported story in mainstream media because it hardly featured first-person voices from the Uyghur community. So I got to work and found Tahir Hamut Izgil, a Uyghur poet who tells a story with moving prose and nuance. His essay about the chilling effect of a document that the Chinese authorities require members of the Uyghur community to fill out is both simple and profound, capturing a Kafkaesque reality that is often lost in the daily coverage of foreign affairs. Months after we translated and published Izgil’s essay, other media outlets followed suit. To us this is a triumph, evidence that we are already creating new lines in international reporting.

F ull essay

A Castle in the Air: Trekking the Secret Mountain Paths of Yemen, by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

Anthony Elghossain, Contributing Editor

Mountain men tell their stories. In Yemen, some folks speak of “an ancient city” atop a mountain. “What,” asks Tim Mackintosh-Smith after hearing them, “is really at the top of Jabal Balq?” To answer this question, he quests through myth, memory and the mind for a “castle in the air.” Is it a place? Maybe. Is it a journey? Yes. Having always gotten along with and been fascinated by folks in the mountains and hills, I was interested in reading this piece as soon as it was in our pipeline. And I loved how our writer came back for some “unfinished business.” Writing is about the quest. So, too, is life. Our writer captured those truths in this piece.

After America: Inside the Taliban’s New Emirate, by Fazelminallah Qazizai

Hassan Hassan, Editor in Chief

My choice of a favorite essay is to illustrate part of why we established  New Lines  in the first place. It was a dispatch by Fazelminallah Qazizai from a Taliban-held area, published four months before the Taliban would take over the country as fast as their trucks could drive through towns and provinces. If you read that story, nothing about what happened in the summer would come as a shock to you. After the Taliban’s takeover, it was easy for journalists to go through their old notes and write compelling stories about what they had witnessed in the months and years before, to make sense of what unfolded. It is harder to do that before the event, and Qazazai did just that. He also did it really well. The piece should be a template in how dispatches should be done. Qazazai was not parachuted into the country to come back with a piece from there. He is an Afghan journalist who actually knows the terrain, the society and history, and who goes to a Taliban area and eloquently captures and reconstructs the situation there.

The Key to Understanding Iran Is Poetry, by Muhammad Ali Mojaradi

Tam Hussein, Contributing Editor

Muhammad Ali Mojaradi in his essay is right: The key to understanding Iran is poetry. In Shiraz and Isfahan you see beggars recite Hafez and children hawking for money with birds picking couplets from small envelopes trying to tell your fortune. Perhaps it’s just Frank Miller’s “300” or the politics of the region that makes its peoples appear to have a culture built on hate and cruelty. But that is far from the truth. It has ambiguity built in, abundant variations on love, mysticism and much, much more. It just gave me an appreciation as to how all-encompassing Persianate culture is, including Iran, central Asia, Afghanistan and the subcontinent.

The Wandering Alawite, by Adnan Younes

Faysal Itani, Associate Editor

This was, as far as I’m aware, the best if not the only piece by a constituent of Syria’s mass murderer about his and his coreligionists’ implication in Bashar al-Assad’s crimes. I think it took tremendous intellectual courage to reflect on what drew Syria’s Alawites to support this regime, but it also posed an uncomfortable challenge to readers who understandably deplore any and all support for the war criminal Assad. It was difficult to write and difficult to read, because of its ability to humanize and contextualize horrible choices by Assad’s supporters and detractors alike. It was a tragic story in the most literal and compelling way.

A Multigenerational American Story of Immigration and Return, by Rasha Elass

Ola Salem, Managing Editor

A topic we often visit at New Lines is identity. Over the past year, we’ve run a number of first-person pieces looking at how environment and ancestry have shaped writers’ identity and how the answer is usually far more complex than a quick answer to the question, “Where are you from?” One story I found to be particularly fascinating was Rasha Elass’s piece in which she wrote about her Syrian great-grandfather who moved to America, carved a life for himself and later created a family of his own, only later to uproot his children and move back to Syria and face an attack from the French.

Gone to Waste: the ‘CVE’ Industry After 9/11, by Lydia Wilson

Chris Sands, South Asia Editor

The legacy of 9/11 has dominated my life and career. As a journalist for local newspapers in the U.K. in the weeks and months after the attacks, I saw and heard the racist backlash against British Muslims. Later, as a young reporter in the Middle East, I witnessed the daily indignities Palestinians suffer under Israeli occupation. But it was while living in Afghanistan for almost a decade that I came to understand the true folly of the countering violent extremism industry — a money-making enterprise perpetuated by governments, international NGOs and private companies in the guise of curbing Islamic militancy. Lydia Wilson’s article brilliantly details how this house of cards was built to ignore the social ills and legitimate political grievances that lie at the root of what was once called the “war on terror.”

The Bandit Warlords of Nigeria, by James Barnett

Kareem Shaheen, Middle East and Newsletters Editor

One of the things I was looking forward to the most when we started New Lines was giving the space to writers to explore stories that haven’t been told in the mainstream media. Too often, the rich tapestry of our lives and societies are obscured rather than illuminated. This piece is a fascinating investigation into an untold story that has long been neglected in favor of the “sexier” stories of Boko Haram extremists in Nigeria. It is about the farmer-herder conflict that has cost tens of thousands of lives, has been exacerbated by climate change and is destabilizing important parts of Africa’s most populous country. The color and fascinating exchanges in the piece, chronicled through Barnett’s exclusive access to the bandit warlords, make this unique investigation shine.

Where the Russian Gulag Once Thrived, Life Remains Isolated, by Owen Matthews

Michael Weiss, News Director

Believe it or not, one of our best essays this year grew out of the field research journal for a forthcoming spy novel. Owen Mathews spent 10 days touring the remains of the Gulag Archipelago — the slave-labor camps Stalin built to punish to send his enemies (and quite a lot of his friends) in the Russian Arctic. Whole communities and cities sprung up around these grim “colonies” of the 20th century, which helped industrialize the Soviet Union at the price of around 6 million souls. As one might expect, this architecture of atrocity has been left to rot or freeze or be swallowed up by the taiga. Matthews, an accomplished historian and biographer, travels to parts unknown and unremembered with an eye for detail and — no small trick given the circumstances — a sense of humor.

How an Email Sting Operation Unearthed a Pro-Assad Conspiracy—and Russia’s Role in It, by Michael Weiss and Jett Goldsmith

Brian Whitaker, Contributing Editor

A moment of light relief in the weird world of conspiracy theorists. Paul McKeigue is a university professor who denies the Assad regime’s chemical attacks in Syria and claims that those who died in them were executed by rebel fighters in a gas chamber. He got the gas chamber idea from an American who had a dream about it after eating anchovy pizza shortly before going to bed. McKeigue considers himself a smart guy, so when a mysterious emailer contacted him using the name “Ivan,” he assumed “Ivan” was working for Russian intelligence and began passing him information – mainly about people who disagreed with his conspiracy theories. But “Ivan” was neither Russian nor an intelligence agent – the professor had been caught in a sting.

An Elegy for Afghanistan, by Habib Zahori

Lydia Wilson, Contributing Editor

The piece is everything I want an essay to be: personal, informative and visceral, communicating a raw experience while simultaneously expressing far bigger themes about humanity and war. We published it at a time when all eyes were on Afghanistan, after the Taliban took control once coalition forces had withdrawn. For me it’s pieces like this that really cut through the immense amount that was being published at that time on this subject; it was so well written and based on so much personal and intimate knowledge. And his love for Afghanistan – and the heartbreak of that love — came through powerfully.

In Search of African Arabic, by Vaughn Rasberry

Faisal Al Yafai, Executive Editor

It was always going to be difficult to choose one essay over the others, and many of the choices of the team could easily have been my first picks. But Vaughn Rasberry’s essay on the influence of the Arabic language in Africa stands out for me because it explores such a rarely considered subject.

Rasberry believes, as I do, that African histories cannot be told without understanding the role of Arabic in shaping the political, social and literary environments of many of the countries and civilisations of the continent. The flip side is also true: that the Arab world cannot understand itself without reference to the African continent.

As Rasberry points out, there is a vast corpus of literature in African countries written in Arabic, much of it under-explored – some, no doubt, still undiscovered. Hidden histories of the African continent and the Arab world are in those texts, waiting to be sought out. Without it, both regions will only know half of their own stories.

The Failures of an American Muslim and Jewish Dialogue

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The Sidney Awards

By David Brooks

Opinion Columnist

’Tis the season to detach yourself from the news cycle and look for the bigger trends and the deeper human stories. And so every year the Sidney Awards, which I created in honor of the late, great philosopher Sidney Hook, are here to help you take that step back. The Sidneys not only celebrate a sample of each year’s beautifully written long-form journalism; they publicize essays that illuminate some broad issue or say something profound about the human condition. This year we focus on essays from smaller publications.

Stanford is one of the greatest universities on earth. It also apparently used to be more fun. There was an anarchist house, a lake where students hosted bonfires and lascivious costume parties. In “ Stanford’s War on Social Life ,” in Palladium magazine, Ginevra Davis argues that an army of administrators has systematically shut that down.

She writes: “Since 2013, Stanford’s administration has executed a top-to-bottom destruction of student social life. Driven by a fear of uncontrollable student spontaneity and a desire to enforce equity on campus, a growing administrative bureaucracy has destroyed almost all of Stanford’s distinctive student culture.”

Theme houses and fraternities have been shut down, weird rituals banned. Outdoor House, for students who enjoy hiking and the like, was removed from campus, though it was given permission to reopen this year after shifting its mission to “racial and environmental justice in the outdoors.”

The old culture gave students agency to be creative and have fun. But, Davis observes, “In less than a decade, Stanford’s administration eviscerated 100 years of undergraduate culture and social groups. They ended decades-old traditions. They drove student groups out of their houses. They scraped names off buildings. They went after long-established hubs of student life, like fraternities and cultural theme houses. In place of it all, Stanford erected a homogeneous housing system that sorts new students into perfectly equitable groups named with letters and numbers. All social distinction is gone.”

“ I Ain’t Got Nothing but Time ,” by David Ramsey in The Oxford American, is nominally an essay about Hank Williams, the country music pioneer. Williams had 35 songs make the Top 10 on the country charts in just six years. When he was asked why his songs are so sad, he said that it’s because he’s a “saddist.” He died of drink and drugs at age 29.

But the essay is about more than one man. It conjures up an entire atmosphere of loss, loneliness and mystery that was the essence of the Williams mystique. It’s best to simply bathe in this essay, not study it. Ramsey observes: “Here is what Hank knew, somehow: The human experience of loneliness is cosmic. It is not narcissistic; it is where the Holy Spirit dwells. The universe, like the West, is mostly empty space.”

Rupa Subramanya opens her essay “ Scheduled to Die: The Rise of Canada’s Assisted Suicide Program ,” in The Free Press, with a gripping sentence: “On Sept. 7, Margaret Marsilla called Joshua Tepper, the doctor who planned to kill her son.”

Subramanya’s essay is about a mother’s quest to prevent her son from going ahead with a state-assisted suicide. It’s also a tour inside Canada’s rapidly growing euthanasia infrastructure. In 2023, Subramanya reports, Canada is scheduled to expand the pool of eligible suicide seekers to include the mentally ill, and is considering including “mature minors.”

I was struck by how banal and bureaucratic the whole system is. At one point Tepper, the doctor in Marsilla’s case, emailed her son. “Hii,” the doctor wrote, casually. “I am confirming the following timing: Please arrive at 8:30 a.m. I will ask for the nurse at 8:45 a.m. and I will start the procedure at around 9:00 a.m. Procedure will be completed a few minutes after it starts.” The young man asked if he could bring his dog. As long as there is someone there who will be responsible for it afterward, the doctor replied.

Late last year, the director Peter Jackson released an eight-hour series called “Get Back,” based on footage of the hours the Beatles spent in the studio making the album “Let It Be.” In January, Ian Leslie wrote a powerful appreciation of that series in an essay called “ The Banality of Genius ,” which helps us see the series, and the creative process, with greater depth and insight.

For long stretches of the series, nothing extraordinary is happening — the action is so pedestrian it should be boring, but Leslie finds it strangely entrancing: “As we get into the rhythm of the Beatles’ daily lives, we start to inhabit their world. Since we live through their aimless wandering, we share in the moments of laughter, tenderness and joy that emerge from it with a special intensity.”

The series captures the moment in the Beatles’ career, Leslie notes, when the magic was beginning to wear off. The Beatles were beginning to wonder if they were still any good. He writes: “What makes ‘Get Back’ so dramatic, in its undramatic way, is seeing the Beatles struggle to adjust to waking life. The struggle unfolds in the music they’re making and in how they negotiate their changing relationships to each other. This was a group comprised of talented, willful individuals who shared a powerful resistance to being told what to do. The question should not be why they split up so much as how they stayed together. The answer is that they loved each other, they shared an appetite for work, and they knew they were special as a group. But it was nonetheless hard and getting harder. In ‘Get Back,’ the mythical, world-conquering, four-headed beast is revealed to be four young men, beset by uncertainty, wondering if they really want to be tied together like this forever.”

Ryan Grim’s essay “ Elephant in the Zoom ,” for The Intercept, was one of the more discussed essays of 2022 (well, at least among the sort of people who dominate my Twitter feed). In it, he describes the vicious infighting that is afflicting many progressive advocacy organizations. He captures a now familiar generational divide: Angry young employees demand that their organization practice internally the values it espouses externally. Dismayed older leaders want the staff to focus on the mission, not perceived slights to themselves. These executive directors see a lot of virtue signaling and normal workplace grievances dressed in the cloak of social justice language.

Grim’s essay is so compelling because he speaks to so many organizational leaders, most of whom, of course, insist on anonymity. One former organizational leader confesses: “My last nine months, I was spending 90 to 95 percent of my time on internal strife. Whereas [before] that would have been 25-30 percent tops.” Another executive director summarizes the situation, “To be honest with you, this is the biggest problem on the left over the last six years.” Then he adds: “This is so big. And it’s like abuse in the family — it’s the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about.”

In “ The Art of Bidding, or How I Survived Federal Prison ,” published by The Marshall Project, Eric Borsuk captures what life is like in prison, but also the redemptive power of finding some purpose to get you through a hard time.

Borsuk was part of a trio of friends who became criminals together. “Over the years, we encouraged each other to reject our Southern conservative upbringings for a more subversive approach to life, which may have had something to do with why we all ended up in federal prison together. One day you’re reading ‘Fight Club’ and debating the finer points of German idealism, and the next you’re robbing a rare books collection for millions of dollars’ worth of artwork and rare manuscripts — a seamless transition.”

Borsuk got seven years. Early on, his cellmate told him he needed a “bid.” A bid is how you spend your time. It’s your controlling project so you do the time, and you don’t sit back and let the time do you. Some men lift weights, some cook, some gamble, some educate themselves.

For a time, Borsuk’s bid was his ever-deepening friendships with his two co-conspirators, who were in the same prison. Then, arbitrarily, the friends were separated. Borsuk writes: “For weeks, I walked around in a daze, unsure of what to do with myself. In essence, my entire prison identity had been based on my relationship with my co-defendants. Now that they were gone, everything felt off. It would be nearly a decade before we’d be able to see or speak to each other again, not until we were all out of prison and off probation. Guys noticed that I was acting strange and kept asking me if I was all right. It was unusual to see one of us alone for very long. Whenever guys would spot one of us without the others, they would always shout out, ‘Where are the other amigos?’ Now, everything felt foreign. I felt vulnerable and exposed, like fresh meat all over again.”

Borsuk’s essay is a haunting journey into the hidden continent of incarceration.

Humans are predators. Horses are animals of prey. And yet these two creatures are capable of moving together with incredible power, subtlety and grace. In “ Becoming a Centaur, ” in Aeon, Janet Jones walks us through the neuroscience of horse-human cooperation. Horses, it turns out, are astoundingly sensitive to touch. They are used to responding to subtle touches and gestures because in nature they communicate with one another through movements as subtle as a flick of an ear.

At full flow, horse and rider form a deeply interconnected neural network, Jones explains. For example, a horse has a 340-degree range of vision when holding its head still, while humans only have a 90-degree range. On the other hand, humans have superior depth perception and greater ability to focus. By pooling their perceptions, Jones writes, the rider and animal create a “horse-and-human team that can sense far more together than either party can detect alone. In effect, they share effort by assigning labor to the party whose skills are superior at a given task.”

Many people nominate essays for each year’s Sidney Awards, but I’m always beholden to two in particular: Robert Cottrell, who is the founder of The Browser, a phenomenal aggregator site, which links to some of the best writing in the world; and Conor Friedersdorf, whose newsletter “The Best of Journalism” arrives in my inbox every Sunday morning and catches me up on a week’s worth of provocations, columns, essays and posts that I would have otherwise missed.

People are down on the media, often for good reason, but in many ways we’re living in a golden age of nonfiction.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram .

David Brooks has been a columnist with The Times since 2003. He is the author of “The Road to Character” and, most recently, “The Second Mountain.” @ nytdavidbrooks

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Essays are all about reflection, and we thought we’d kick off 2023 with a look at the most-read pieces of last year. It can sometimes feel like hours (years) of hard work disappear into the maw of our short attention spans, and these lists serve as important reminders of the  work. 

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Scott H Young

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Preorder my new book and get $400 of bonuses, my best essays of 2022.

I wrote 40 essays in 2022 . While far from my most prolific year, I am pleased with how most of them turned out. Thus, to give myself a little writing break over the holidays, I thought I’d share some of my favorites from this year.

• Why Don’t We Use the Math We Learn in School? Years after drilling the algorithm for long division, when was the last time you used it? I explore evidence that people are surprisingly bad at the math they ought to know well. I also explain some reasons why math doesn’t seem to play as prominent a role in real life as it probably should.
• Cognitive Load Theory and Its Applications for Learning . Why do we find some subjects confusing? Why do we struggle to keep up in math or physics classes? I review the major findings of cognitive load theory, which seeks to explain our learning successes (and failures) in terms of how our brains process information.
• How Do We Learn Complex Skills? Understanding ACT-R Theory. ACT-R is John Anderson’s career-long quest to integrate many diverse findings in cognitive psychology into a single model of the process of thinking and reasoning.
• How Does Understanding Work? What goes on in our heads when we understand text we’re reading? Construction-Integration suggests we comprehend text by generating multiple interpretations, which then “stabilize” into a coherent picture.
• Variability, Not Repetition, is the Key to Mastery . Varied examples, contexts, problems and methods all lead to more robust learning than narrow repetition.
• Cultural Literacy: Does Knowledge Need to Be Deep to Be Useful? I review E.D. Hirsch’s controversial bestseller. Hirsch argues that the shallow, fact-based knowledge we largely forget from our classroom days is far more important than people realize. Schools shouldn’t shy away from teaching these facts, and our society would be better off if we made this aim of education more explicit.
• Failure is a Lousy Teacher . I refute the commonly-held belief that failure is the key to learning. We gain less information from failures than successes (in most domains). Even “useful” failure it is usually closely followed by success. Failure is also demotivating and can encourage us to overlearn lessons that we would do better to forget.
• Brain Training Doesn’t Work . We don’t get smarter by strengthening mental muscles. Chess doesn’t help you think strategically, and Sudoku doesn’t make you better at quantitative reasoning. The evidence here is frankly overwhelming, but it’s so at odds with folk psychology that many have a hard time accepting it.

I hope everyone has a safe and happy New Year. See you in 2023!

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The best video essays of 2022

10 videos that will entertain you and make you feel smarter. What’s not to like?

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Share All sharing options for: The best video essays of 2022

An educational and argumentative style has exploded in popularity across video platforms over the past few years, part of the broader wave of explainer-based content in social media. It’s gotten to the point where the form now constitutes an extremely wide tent covering an incredibly deep well of works — or, in the parlance of one subgenre, a gargantuan iceberg . We now see everything from wordless editing experiments to vlogs with occasional image wallpapering called “video essays.” (It’s gotten to the point where one of my favorite videos released last year waded into these definitional weeds, to thought-provoking results.)

This growth makes rounding up a mere 10 exemplary videos a bigger challenge each year. My guiding principles when formulating this list were not just depth of insight, originality, and diversity of subject matter and creators, but also trying to find video essays that truly make the most of both parts of that name — which demand visual attention and engagement. The essays are listed in order of release date.

Climate Fictions, Dystopias and Human Futures by Julia Leyda and Kathleen Loock

As the prognosis around global warming gets more urgent, pop culture has been taking notice, and “cli-fi” has emerged as its own storytelling genre. Leyd and Loock use the recent Don’t Look Up as a starting point, questioning what role — if any — films like these can hope to have in affecting actual activism and reform on climate change. How strong is the connection between art’s power to move us and tangible action?

Captain Ahab: The Story of Dave Stieb by Secret Base

No one is making documentary content quite like Jon Bois, Alex Rubenstein, and the rest of the crew at Dorktown. Bois is an artist who paints with data points and historical detritus, editing all this material together in a way that feels more forward-thinking than almost anyone else making films today — whether for the internet, television, or theaters. An epic four-part series on Dave Stieb, an also-also-also-ran of baseball history, sounds ridiculous. And yet Dorktown turns him into one of the most compelling characters of the year.

[ Ed. note: Secret Base is part of SB Nation, which along with Polygon is part of Vox Media. This played no part in including the video.]

Deconstructing the Bridge by Total Refusal

This is perhaps the least “essay-like” video on this list. It’s more of a university-level lecture, but set in the least academic forum imaginable: a session of Battlefield 5. Such unusual ventures are the modus operandi of Total Refusal , a “pseudo-Marxist media guerrilla” which has used The Division to explain urban design , Red Dead Redemption 2 to explain class , and much more. Within the Battlefield 5 map is a re-creation of Dutch city of Nijmegen, the site of a decisive battle during World War II. Total Refusal takes viewers on a survey of the area in a virtual form, and in the process they delve not just into the history involved but also the entire concept of war tourism and re-creations, questioning how culture remembers these events.

Why Panzer Dragoon Saga Is the Greatest RPG Nobody Played by Michael Saba

If this doesn’t send the 1998 Sega Saturn game Panzer Dragoon Saga to the top of your must-play list, then I don’t know what to tell you. More than an intriguing look at a game that was incredibly ahead of its time and took years to find its audience, this video is a treatise on a pressing issue within gaming. See, if you want to play Panzer Dragoon Saga , you will almost certainly have to pirate it, which might stir ethical qualms in some. Saba mounts an impassioned defense of piracy as a form of archival practice and game preservation. Even if you disagree with such a conclusion, the problems he highlights within the industry cannot be denied.

Nice White Teachers, Bad Brown Schools: Hollywood’s Pedagogy on Urban Education by Yhara Zayd

Yhara Zayd makes her third consecutive appearance on our annual video essay list, and for good reason. Not content to retread ground covered by other pop culture video creators, she finds both novel subjects and interesting lenses on them. Here she scrutinizes the “inspirational” story trope of well-intentioned white teachers making a difference in urban environments, seen in the likes of Dangerous Minds and The Ron Clark Story . Most incisively, she contrasts the conventions of this genre with the stark realities and lived history of actual outsider intervention in nonwhite education.

Intimate Thresholds by Desiree Garcia

Less than four minutes long, this essay is nonetheless entrancing, thanks to Garcia’s continually inventive editing. Instead of a drawn-out exploration of the theme of female artistic competition in film, she contrasts two examples through visceral juxtaposition: 1940’s Dance, Girl, Dance and 2010’s Black Swan. With split screens, hazy picture-in-picture, precise cuts, and some remarkable use of captions, the essay makes its ideas intuitively felt rather than explaining itself through lecture.

Instagram Hates Its Users by Jarvis Johnson

The long story made short is that Instagram has continually sabotaged any actual enjoyment of using its app through trying to imitate whatever new trend has come down the cultural pipeline. But the long story, as relayed by Johnson, is so much more entertaining. We often forget the direct relationship between interface design and user experience, but this is a terrific deep dive into how that process works, pinned to an easy-to-grasp timeline of Instagram’s calamitous history.

Fixing My Brain With Automated Therapy by Jacob Geller

Jacob Geller is exceptionally good at drawing in a web of disparate sources to discuss ideas you might not have even thought about before. Here, the story of “ the first chat bot ,” the 2019 visual novel Eliza, and the app-based 2021 game UnearthU are used to explore the use of artificial intelligence in modern therapy. But as the title suggests, Geller goes one step further, testing out several different therapy apps that purport to help you improve your mental health without the need of any human therapists. His results, and what they suggest about the true intention behind these apps and the way therapy is incorporated into contemporary society, are… well, disquieting.

Parking lots are everywhere and nowhere by What’s So Great About That?

The concept of “liminal space” is currently popular in online culture discourse. But Grace Lee seldom tackles a topic from the same angle as everyone else. With reference points as wide-ranging as Seinfeld, Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi,” and the work of artist Guillaume Lachapelle, she discusses how parking lots appear in media, and in a wider view how they and similar urban-industrial spaces figure into our everyday lives. Lee’s essays demand your attention like few others; look away and you’re liable to miss a great little visual gag. Because of this, despite her videos seldom going longer than 15-20 minutes, they often pack in much, much more information than you’ll expect.

How Degrowth Can Save the World by Andrewism

Andrew Sage describes himself not just as an anarchist but as “solarpunk” — focused on solutions for a sustainable future for humanity. In this video he elucidates one of the key features of the destructive capitalist status quo: the idea of unlimited economic and industrial growth. Insistence of “degrowth” practices can often elicit fears of some vague loss in one’s standard of living. But Sage debunks this and many other arguments against degrowth, while building a more inspiring and hopeful vision for an environmentally sound, egalitarian existence.

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The Best Reviewed Essay Collections of 2021

Featuring joan didion, rachel kushner, hanif abdurraqib, ann patchett, jenny diski, and more.

Well, friends, another grim and grueling plague year is drawing to a close, and that can mean only one thing: it’s time to put on our Book Marks stats hats and tabulate the best reviewed books of the past twelve months.

Yes, using reviews drawn from more than 150 publications, over the next two weeks we’ll be revealing the most critically-acclaimed books of 2021, in the categories of (deep breath): Memoir and Biography ; Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror ; Short Story Collections ; Essay Collections; Poetry; Mystery and Crime; Graphic Literature; Literature in Translation; General Fiction; and General Nonfiction.

Today’s installment: Essay Collections .

Brought to you by Book Marks , Lit Hub’s “Rotten Tomatoes for books.”

1. These Precious Days by Ann Patchett (Harper)

21 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed Read Ann Patchett on creating the work space you need, here

“… excellent … Patchett has a talent for friendship and celebrates many of those friends here. She writes with pure love for her mother, and with humor and some good-natured exasperation at Karl, who is such a great character he warrants a book of his own. Patchett’s account of his feigned offer to buy a woman’s newly adopted baby when she expresses unwarranted doubts is priceless … The days that Patchett refers to are precious indeed, but her writing is anything but. She describes deftly, with a line or a look, and I considered the absence of paragraphs freighted with adjectives to be a mercy. I don’t care about the hue of the sky or the shade of the couch. That’s not writing; it’s decorating. Or hiding. Patchett’s heart, smarts and 40 years of craft create an economy that delivers her perfectly understated stories emotionally whole. Her writing style is most gloriously her own.”

–Alex Witchel ( The New York Times Book Review )

2. Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion (Knopf)

14 Rave • 12 Positive • 6 Mixed Read an excerpt from Let Me Tell You What I Mean here

“In five decades’ worth of essays, reportage and criticism, Didion has documented the charade implicit in how things are, in a first-person, observational style that is not sacrosanct but common-sensical. Seeing as a way of extrapolating hypocrisy, disingenuousness and doubt, she’ll notice the hydrangeas are plastic and mention it once, in passing, sorting the scene. Her gaze, like a sentry on the page, permanently trained on what is being disguised … The essays in Let Me Tell You What I Mean are at once funny and touching, roving and no-nonsense. They are about humiliation and about notions of rightness … Didion’s pen is like a periscope onto the creative mind—and, as this collection demonstrates, it always has been. These essays offer a direct line to what’s in the offing.”

–Durga Chew-Bose ( The New York Times Book Review )

3. Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit (Viking)

12 Rave • 13 Positive • 1 Mixed Read an excerpt from Orwell’s Roses here

“… on its simplest level, a tribute by one fine essayist of the political left to another of an earlier generation. But as with any of Solnit’s books, such a description would be reductive: the great pleasure of reading her is spending time with her mind, its digressions and juxtapositions, its unexpected connections. Only a few contemporary writers have the ability to start almost anywhere and lead the reader on paths that, while apparently meandering, compel unfailingly and feel, by the end, cosmically connected … Somehow, Solnit’s references to Ross Gay, Michael Pollan, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Peter Coyote (to name but a few) feel perfectly at home in the narrative; just as later chapters about an eighteenth-century portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds and a visit to the heart of the Colombian rose-growing industry seem inevitable and indispensable … The book provides a captivating account of Orwell as gardener, lover, parent, and endlessly curious thinker … And, movingly, she takes the time to find the traces of Orwell the gardener and lover of beauty in his political novels, and in his insistence on the value and pleasure of things .”

–Claire Messud ( Harper’s )

4. Girlhood by Melissa Febos (Bloomsbury)

16 Rave • 5 Positive • 1 Mixed Read an excerpt from Girlhood here

“Every once in a while, a book comes along that feels so definitive, so necessary, that not only do you want to tell everyone to read it now, but you also find yourself wanting to go back in time and tell your younger self that you will one day get to read something that will make your life make sense. Melissa Febos’s fierce nonfiction collection, Girlhood , might just be that book. Febos is one of our most passionate and profound essayists … Girlhood …offers us exquisite, ferocious language for embracing self-pleasure and self-love. It’s a book that women will wish they had when they were younger, and that they’ll rejoice in having now … Febos is a balletic memoirist whose capacious gaze can take in so many seemingly disparate things and unfurl them in a graceful, cohesive way … Intellectual and erotic, engaging and empowering[.]”

–Michelle Hart ( Oprah Daily )

5. Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told by Jenny Diski (Bloomsbury)

14 Rave • 7 Positive

“[Diski’s] reputation as an original, witty and cant-free thinker on the way we live now should be given a significant boost. Her prose is elegant and amused, as if to counter her native melancholia and includes frequent dips into memorable images … Like the ideal artist Henry James conjured up, on whom nothing is lost, Diski notices everything that comes her way … She is discerning about serious topics (madness and death) as well as less fraught material, such as fashion … in truth Diski’s first-person voice is like no other, selectively intimate but not overbearingly egotistic, like, say, Norman Mailer’s. It bears some resemblance to Joan Didion’s, if Didion were less skittish and insistently stylish and generated more warmth. What they have in common is their innate skepticism and the way they ask questions that wouldn’t occur to anyone else … Suffice it to say that our culture, enmeshed as it is in carefully arranged snapshots of real life, needs Jenny Diski, who, by her own admission, ‘never owned a camera, never taken one on holiday.’” It is all but impossible not to warm up to a writer who observes herself so keenly … I, in turn, wish there were more people around who thought like Diski. The world would be a more generous, less shallow and infinitely more intriguing place.”

–Daphne Merkin ( The New York Times Book Review )

6. The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020 by Rachel Kushner (Scribner)

12 Rave • 7 Positive Listen to an interview with Rachel Kushner here

“Whether she’s writing about Jeff Koons, prison abolition or a Palestinian refugee camp in Jerusalem, [Kushner’s] interested in appearances, and in the deeper currents a surface detail might betray … Her writing is magnetised by outlaw sensibility, hard lives lived at a slant, art made in conditions of ferment and unrest, though she rarely serves a platter that isn’t style-mag ready … She makes a pretty convincing case for a political dimension to Jeff Koons’s vacuities and mirrored surfaces, engages repeatedly with the Italian avant garde and writes best of all about an artist friend whose death undoes a spell of nihilism … It’s not just that Kushner is looking back on the distant city of youth; more that she’s the sole survivor of a wild crowd done down by prison, drugs, untimely death … What she remembers is a whole world, but does the act of immortalising it in language also drain it of its power,’neon, in pink, red, and warm white, bleeding into the fog’? She’s mining a rich seam of specificity, her writing charged by the dangers she ran up against. And then there’s the frank pleasure of her sentences, often shorn of definite articles or odd words, so they rev and bucket along … That New Journalism style, live hard and keep your eyes open, has long since given way to the millennial cult of the personal essay, with its performance of pain, its earnest display of wounds received and lessons learned. But Kushner brings it all flooding back. Even if I’m skeptical of its dazzle, I’m glad to taste something this sharp, this smart.”

–Olivia Laing ( The Guardian )

7. The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century by Amia Srinivasan (FSG)

12 Rave • 7 Positive • 5 Mixed • 1 Pan

“[A] quietly dazzling new essay collection … This is, needless to say, fraught terrain, and Srinivasan treads it with determination and skill … These essays are works of both criticism and imagination. Srinivasan refuses to resort to straw men; she will lay out even the most specious argument clearly and carefully, demonstrating its emotional power, even if her ultimate intention is to dismantle it … This, then, is a book that explicitly addresses intersectionality, even if Srinivasan is dissatisfied with the common—and reductive—understanding of the term … Srinivasan has written a compassionate book. She has also written a challenging one … Srinivasan proposes the kind of education enacted in this brilliant, rigorous book. She coaxes our imaginations out of the well-worn grooves of the existing order.”

–Jennifer Szalai ( The New York Times )

8. A Little Devil in America by Hanif Abdurraqib (Random House)

13 Rave • 4 Positive Listen to an interview with Hanif Abdurraqib here

“[A] wide, deep, and discerning inquest into the Beauty of Blackness as enacted on stages and screens, in unanimity and discord, on public airwaves and in intimate spaces … has brought to pop criticism and cultural history not just a poet’s lyricism and imagery but also a scholar’s rigor, a novelist’s sense of character and place, and a punk-rocker’s impulse to dislodge conventional wisdom from its moorings until something shakes loose and is exposed to audiences too lethargic to think or even react differently … Abdurraqib cherishes this power to enlarge oneself within or beyond real or imagined restrictions … Abdurraqib reminds readers of the massive viewing audience’s shock and awe over seeing one of the world’s biggest pop icons appearing midfield at this least radical of American rituals … Something about the seemingly insatiable hunger Abdurraqib shows for cultural transaction, paradoxical mischief, and Beauty in Blackness tells me he’ll get to such matters soon enough.”

–Gene Seymour ( Bookforum )

9. On Animals by Susan Orlean (Avid Reader Press)

11 Rave • 6 Positive • 1 Mixed Listen to an interview with Susan Orlean here

“I very much enjoyed Orlean’s perspective in these original, perceptive, and clever essays showcasing the sometimes strange, sometimes sick, sometimes tender relationships between people and animals … whether Orlean is writing about one couple’s quest to find their lost dog, the lives of working donkeys of the Fez medina in Morocco, or a man who rescues lions (and happily allows even full grown males to gently chew his head), her pages are crammed with quirky characters, telling details, and flabbergasting facts … Readers will find these pages full of astonishments … Orlean excels as a reporter…Such thorough reporting made me long for updates on some of these stories … But even this criticism only testifies to the delight of each of the urbane and vivid stories in this collection. Even though Orlean claims the animals she writes about remain enigmas, she makes us care about their fates. Readers will continue to think about these dogs and donkeys, tigers and lions, chickens and pigeons long after we close the book’s covers. I hope most of them are still well.”

–Sy Montgomery ( The Boston Globe )

10. Graceland, at Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache from the American South  by Margaret Renkl (Milkweed Editions)

9 Rave • 5 Positive Read Margaret Renkl on finding ideas everywhere, here

“Renkl’s sense of joyful belonging to the South, a region too often dismissed on both coasts in crude stereotypes and bad jokes, co-exists with her intense desire for Southerners who face prejudice or poverty finally to be embraced and supported … Renkl at her most tender and most fierce … Renkl’s gift, just as it was in her first book Late Migrations , is to make fascinating for others what is closest to her heart … Any initial sense of emotional whiplash faded as as I proceeded across the six sections and realized that the book is largely organized around one concept, that of fair and loving treatment for all—regardless of race, class, sex, gender or species … What rises in me after reading her essays is Lewis’ famous urging to get in good trouble to make the world fairer and better. Many people in the South are doing just that—and through her beautiful writing, Renkl is among them.”

–Barbara J. King ( NPR )

Our System:

RAVE = 5 points • POSITIVE = 3 points • MIXED = 1 point • PAN = -5 points

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READER SURVEY

The best essays of 2022.

From the life of Lincoln to the late David McCullough, here are the top 10 stories that fascinated our readers in 2022.

November/December 2022

Every year, we look back on our published issues to see how we did with our readers. We like to look at which subjects were most popular, which essays elicited the strongest responses, and which were most read. The results are always different, and always fascinating.

This year, we asked our readers directly which articles were their favorites. Below you can find the top 10 titles based on the results of  that survey . Again, the results are enlightening — while stories about Lincoln and the Civil War landing the top spots may be expected, we were happily surprised to find lesser-known topics like privateers during the Revolution and Olympic icon Jim Thorpe getting lots of play. 

Take a look at the full list below, and feel free to email us with your own nominations or suggestions at [email protected].

—  The Editors

1. Lincoln Walks a Tightrope , by David S. Reynolds, Spring Issue

The unique political genius of Abraham Lincoln was to navigate carefully and at times conservatively between abolition and the Southern cause until he knew the time was right for radical justice.

2. Antietam, America's Bloodiest Day , by Justin Martin, September Issue

In September 1862, the South hoped to end the war by invading Maryland just before the mid-term elections. But its hopes were dashed after the bloodiest day in American history.

3. Bob Dole and the Nazis’ Brutal Last Stand in Italy , by Edwin S. Grosvenor, Summer Issue

Allied soldiers struggled for months to clear veteran German troops dug into the mountains of northern Italy in late 1944 and early 1945.

4. American Rebels at Sea , by Eric Jay Dolin, Summer Issue

An estimated fifteen hundred privateering ships played a crucial role in winning the American Revolution, but their contributions are often forgotten.

5. Andrew Jackson: Our First Populist , by David S. Brown, November/December Issue

Was he the era’s greatest Democrat or its elected autocrat? A hero or a scoundrel Balancing Andrew Jackson’s legacy is a problematic exercise, complicated by his many contradictions.

6. Johnstown: “Run For Your Lives!”  by David McCullough, September Issue

In the hills above Johnstown, the old South Fork dam had failed. Down the Little Conemaugh came the torrent, sweeping away everything in its path.

7. Jim Thorpe Finally Wins , by David Maraniss, October Issue

Considered by many to have been the world’s greatest athlete, Thorpe persevered through triumphs and tragedy.

8. FDR Unites America for War , by Peter Shinkle, November/December Issue

Adding Republicans to key positions in his administration, Franklin Roosevelt created a unified effort to fight World War II.

9. Remembering David McCullough , by Edwin S. Grosvenor, September Issue

He became the dean of American historians after learning his craft working five years on the staff of American Heritage.

10. Henry Ford's Bungle in the Jungle , by Mark Callaghan, Winter Issue

He was one of America's greatest innovators, but his plan to build a production city in the Amazon ultimately ended in disaster

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this magazine of trusted historical writing, now in its 75th year, and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage .

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Mosquitoes, mules, and men.

© Copyright 1949-2023 American Heritage Publishing Co . All Rights Reserved. To license content, please contact licenses [at] americanheritage.com.

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The Best Reviewed Books of 2022: Essay Collections

Featuring bob dylan, elena ferrante, zora neale hurston, jhumpa lahiri, melissa febos, and more.

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We’ve come to the end of another bountiful literary year, and for all of us review rabbits here at Book Marks, that can mean only one thing: basic math, and lots of it.

Yes, using reviews drawn from more than 150 publications, over the next two weeks we’ll be calculating and revealing the most critically-acclaimed books of 2022, in the categories of (deep breath): Fiction ; Nonfiction ; Memoir and Biography ; Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror ; Short Story Collections ; Essay Collections; Poetry; Mystery and Crime ; Graphic Literature ; and Literature in Translation .

Today’s installment: Essay Collections .

1. In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing  by Elena Ferrante (Europa)

12 Rave • 12 Positive • 4 Mixed

“The lucid, well-formed essays that make up In the Margins  are written in an equally captivating voice … Although a slim collection, there is more than enough meat here to nourish both the common reader and the Ferrante aficionado … Every essay here is a blend of deep thought, rigorous analysis and graceful prose. We occasionally get the odd glimpse of the author…but mainly the focus is on the nuts and bolts of writing and Ferrante’s practice of her craft. The essays are at their most rewarding when Ferrante discusses the origins of her books, in particular the celebrated Neapolitan Novels, and the multifaceted heroines that power them … These essays might not bring us any closer to finding out who Ferrante really is. Instead, though, they provide valuable insight into how she developed as a writer and how she works her magic.”

–Malcolm Forbes ( The Star Tribune )

2. Translating Myself and Others by Jhumpa Lahiri (Princeton University Press)

8 Rave • 14 Positive • 1 Mixed

“Lahiri mixes detailed explorations of craft with broader reflections on her own artistic life, as well as the ‘essential aesthetic and political mission’ of translation. She is excellent in all three modes—so excellent, in fact, that I, a translator myself, could barely read this book. I kept putting it aside, compelled by Lahiri’s writing to go sit at my desk and translate … One of Lahiri’s great gifts as an essayist is her ability to braid multiple ways of thinking together, often in startling ways … a reminder, no matter your relationship to translation, of how alive language itself can be. In her essays as in her fiction, Lahiri is a writer of great, quiet elegance; her sentences seem simple even when they’re complex. Their beauty and clarity alone would be enough to wake readers up. ‘Look,’ her essays seem to say: Look how much there is for us to wake up to.”

–Lily Meyer ( NPR )

3. The Philosophy of Modern Song by Bob Dylan (Simon & Schuster)

10 Rave • 15 Positive • 7 Mixed • 4 Pan

“It is filled with songs and hyperbole and views on love and lust even darker than Blood on the Tracks … There are 66 songs discussed here … Only four are by women, which is ridiculous, but he never asked us … Nothing is proved, but everything is experienced—one really weird and brilliant person’s experience, someone who changed the world many times … Part of the pleasure of the book, even exceeding the delectable Chronicles: Volume One , is that you feel liberated from Being Bob Dylan. He’s not telling you what you got wrong about him. The prose is so vivid and fecund, it was useless to underline, because I just would have underlined the whole book. Dylan’s pulpy, noir imagination is not always for the squeamish. If your idea of art is affirmation of acceptable values, Bob Dylan doesn’t need you … The writing here is at turns vivid, hilarious, and will awaken you to songs you thought you knew … The prose brims everywhere you turn. It is almost disturbing. Bob Dylan got his Nobel and all the other accolades, and now he’s doing my job, and he’s so damn good at it.”

–David Yaffe ( AirMail )

4.  Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative by Melissa Febos (Catapult)

13 Rave • 2 Positive • 2 Mixed Read an excerpt from Body Work here

“In her new book, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative , memoirist Melissa Febos handily recuperates the art of writing the self from some of the most common biases against it: that the memoir is a lesser form than the novel. That trauma narratives should somehow be over—we’ve had our fill … Febos rejects these belittlements with eloquence … In its hybridity, this book formalizes one of Febos’s central tenets within it: that there is no disentangling craft from the personal, just as there is no disentangling the personal from the political. It’s a memoir of a life indelibly changed by literary practice and the rigorous integrity demanded of it … Febos is an essayist of grace and terrific precision, her sentences meticulously sculpted, her paragraphs shapely and compressed … what’s fresh, of course, is Febos herself, remapping this terrain through her context, her life and writing, her unusual combinations of sources (William H. Gass meets Elissa Washuta, for example), her painstaking exactitude and unflappable sureness—and the new readers she will reach with all of this.”

–Megan Milks ( 4Columns )

5. You Don’t Know Us Negroes by Zora Neale Hurston (Amistad)

12 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed

“… a dazzling collection of her work … You Don’t Know Us Negroes reveals Hurston at the top of her game as an essayist, cultural critic, anthropologist and beat reporter … Hurston is, by turn, provocative, funny, bawdy, informative and outrageous … Hurston will make you laugh but also make you remember the bitter divide in Black America around performance, language, education and class … But the surprising page turner is at the back of the book, a compilation of Hurston’s coverage of the Ruby McCollom murder trial … Some of Hurston’s writing is sensationalistic, to be sure, but it’s also a riveting take of gender and race relations at the time … Gates and West have put together a comprehensive collection that lets Hurston shine as a writer, a storyteller and an American iconoclast.”

–Lisa Page ( The Washington Post )

6. Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us by Rachel Aviv (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

11 Rave • 4 Positive • 2 Mixed Listen to an interview with Rachel Aviv here

“… written with an astonishing amount of attention and care … Aviv’s triumphs in relating these journeys are many: her unerring narrative instinct, the breadth of context brought to each story, her meticulous reporting. Chief among these is her empathy, which never gives way to pity or sentimentality. She respects her subjects, and so centers their dignity without indulging in the geeky, condescending tone of fascination that can characterize psychologists’ accounts of their patients’ troubles. Though deeply curious about each subject, Aviv doesn’t treat them as anomalous or strange … Aviv’s daunted respect for uncertainty is what makes Strangers to Ourselves distinctive. She is hyperaware of just how sensitive the scale of the self can be.”

–Charlotte Shane ( Bookforum )

7. A Line in the World: A Year on the North Sea Coast by Dorthe Nors (Graywolf)

11 Rave • 1 Positive Read an excerpt from A Line in the World here

“Nors, known primarily as a fiction writer, here embarks on a languorous and evocative tour of her native Denmark … The dramas of the past are evoked not so much through individual characters as through their traces—buildings, ruins, shipwrecks—and this westerly Denmark is less the land of Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales and sleek Georg Jensen designs than a place of ancient landscapes steeped in myth … People aren’t wholly incidental to the narrative. Nors introduces us to a variety of colorful characters, and shares vivid memories of her family’s time in a cabin on the coast south of Thyborøn. But in a way that recalls the work of Barry Lopez, nature is at the heart of this beautiful book, framed in essay-like chapters, superbly translated by Caroline Waight.”

–Claire Messud ( Harper’s )

8. Raising Raffi: The First Five Years by Keith Gessen (Viking)

4 Rave • 10 Positive • 1 Mixed Read an excerpt from Raising Raffi here

“A wise, mild and enviably lucid book about a chaotic scene … Is it OK to out your kid like this? … Still, this memoir will seem like a better idea if, a few decades from now, Raffi is happy and healthy and can read it aloud to his own kids while chuckling at what a little miscreant he was … Gessen is a wily parser of children’s literature … He is just as good on parenting manuals … Raising Raffi offers glimpses of what it’s like to eke out literary lives at the intersection of the Trump and Biden administrations … Needing money for one’s children, throughout history, has made parents do desperate things — even write revealing parenthood memoirs … Gessen’s short book is absorbing not because it delivers answers … It’s absorbing because Gessen is a calm and observant writer…who raises, and struggles with, the right questions about himself and the world.”

–Dwight Garner ( The New York Times )

9. The Crane Wife by CJ Hauser (Doubleday)

8 Rave • 4 Positive • 2 Mixed • 1 Pan Watch an interview with CJ Hauser here

“17 brilliant pieces … This tumbling, in and out of love, structures the collection … Calling Hauser ‘honest’ and ‘vulnerable’ feels inadequate. She embraces and even celebrates her flaws, and she revels in being a provocateur … It is an irony that Hauser, a strong, smart, capable woman, relates to the crane wife’s contortions. She felt helpless in her own romantic relationship. I don’t have one female friend who has not felt some version of this, but putting it into words is risky … this collection is not about neat, happy endings. It’s a constant search for self-discovery … Much has been written on the themes Hauser excavates here, yet her perspective is singular, startlingly so. Many narratives still position finding the perfect match as a measure of whether we’ve led successful lives. The Crane Wife dispenses with that. For that reason, Hauser’s worldview feels fresh and even radical.”

–Hope Reese ( Oprah Daily )

10. How to Read Now by Elaine Castillo (Viking)

8 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed Read an excerpt from How to Read Now here

“Elaine Castillo’s How to Read Now begins with a section called ‘Author’s Note, or a Virgo Clarifies Things.’ The title is a neat encapsulation of the book’s style: rigorous but still chatty, intellectual but not precious or academic about it … How to Read Now proceeds at a breakneck pace. Each of the book’s eight essays burns bright and hot from start to finish … How to Read Now is not for everybody, but if it is for you, it is clarifying and bracing. Castillo offers a full-throated critique of some of the literary world’s most insipid and self-serving ideas … So how should we read now? Castillo offers suggestions but no resolution. She is less interested in capital-A Answers…and more excited by the opportunity to restore a multitude of voices and perspectives to the conversation … A book is nothing without a reader; this one is co-created by its recipients, re-created every time the page is turned anew. How to Read Now offers its audience the opportunity to look past the simplicity we’re all too often spoon-fed into order to restore ourselves to chaos and complexity—a way of seeing and reading that demands so much more of us but offers even more in return.”

–Zan Romanoff ( The Los Angeles Times )

Our System:

RAVE = 5 points • POSITIVE = 3 points • MIXED = 1 point • PAN = -5 points

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10 Successful Harvard Application Essays | 2022

With the top applicants from every high school applying to the best schools in the country, it's important to have an edge in your college application. Check out our updated list of 10 Harvard application essays below from students who made it in, and hear from expert college consultants about what made these work.

Sophia's Essay

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Successful Harvard Essay - “Black Eyeliner Does Not Make You a Nonconformist”

Several years ago, my mother told me I listen to “white people music.” And I suppose that’s true—rock 'n' roll tends to spring from the middle-class basements of young, white men. Though I did point out that its origins trace back to jazz musicians of the Harlem Renaissance. Also that one of the greatest guitarists of all time—dear Mr.Hendrix; may he rest in peace—was black.

My devotion to punk rock began in seventh grade, when Green Day’s “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” came up on my iTunes shuffle. I started to look into their other releases, eventually immersing myself into the complete punk discography. My mother, having grown up in a racially segregated New York, was more likely to listen to Stevie Wonder than Stevie Nicks.

But, she must have figured, to each her own. So while my compatriots indulged in the music of Taylor Swift, One Direction, and Lady Gaga, my tacky Hot Topic headphones blasted Green Day, Ramones, and The Clash. My young adolescent ears drank in the raw, chaotic beauty, an echo of the pain of the past. The thrashing, pulsating vitality of the instruments painted a picture, connecting me to the disillusioned kids who launched an epic movement of liberation some 40 years ago.

Punkers question authority. Aggressively contrarian, they advocate for the other side—the side that seemed smothered silent during the post-Vietnam era. They rejected the established norms. They spoke out and weren’t afraid.

I had always felt different from my peers. In my girls’s prep school, the goal was to be blond and good at soccer. I was neither, which automatically deemed me “uncool”. I had a few close friends but never felt like I was part of a whole.

Then came the punk philosophy, for the outliers, for those who were different. That was something I could be part of.

Instead of trying to conform to my peers, I adopted an anti-conformist attitude. Much like the prematurely gray anti-hero of my favorite book, I sneered at all the “phonies” around me. I resented anything popular. Uggs? Wouldn’t buy them. Yoga pants? Never. Starbucks?Well, I could make a few concessions.

But I felt more cynical than liberated. I wasted so much energy on being different than I lost track of what actually made me happy. I insisted I didn’t care what people thought of me, which was true. Yet if I based my actions almost solely on their behavior, how could I deny their influence?

Luckily, as I transitioned from a private school to a brand new public high school, I got to clean the slate. I bought yoga pants and found they were comfortable. I listened to a wide variety of music, even the eh kind that wasn’t 100% hardcore punk. And I was happier.

I revised my punk philosophy: Do as you like—whether it fits into the “system” or not.

The Beatles’s “Revolution” lyrics sum it up well:

You tell me it’s the institution

Well, you know

You’d better free your mind instead

What I think Lennon was getting at is questioning everything does not entail opposing everything.

What I think Lennon was getting at is questioning everything does not entail opposing everything. Defiance for the sake of defiance is unproductive at best, destructive at worst. I believe in life’s greater Truths, like Love and Justice. These Truths are what should govern my actions—not what’s popular and what isn’t. Striving to act on these ideals has helped me stay true to myself, regardless of what’s considered “conformist."

Perhaps I’ve failed the punk movement. We’ll have to wait and see. In the meantime, I’ll do what makes me happy and change what doesn’t. I’ll wear Doc Martens instead of Uggs; I’ll partake in a grande pumpkin spice latte; I’ll watch Gossip Girl; I’ll blare my favorite guitar solo over the speakers in my room.

And that’s as punk as it gets.

Professional Review by The Art of Applying

From the snarky title and fiery opening, I was immediately drawn in. I and many people on our team at The Art of Applying® grew up as one of the few students of color in our honors classes, being told we liked “white people things.”

When you write about very specific personal experiences you’ve had, you can strike an emotional chord and connection with people who have similar experiences, and you can simultaneously intrigue people who have had vastly different experiences.

The student’s response to her mother’s assertion and the level of knowledge the student demonstrates about punk rock’s origins and political context show that she doesn’t just enjoy punk music passively as a fan; she was curious enough to research and learn about its historical roots, and confident enough to offer a contradictory viewpoint about what punk music is and who it is and isn’t for.

I enjoyed reading the journey of how the student’s interest in punk rock blossomed from an interest into a passion and eventually an identity. Don’t just tell us the beginning and the end of a personal growth journey; show us the messy middle too.

The student concisely depicts a vivid image of her outsider status in her private school without villainizing the other students. She also uses humor and wordplay well when she makes a concession for enjoying Starbucks.

A turning point in the essay comes when the student starts questioning whether her staunchly nonconformist identity is serving her. This shows an even deeper level of self reflection and personal growth.

While including quotes and lyrics in your essay can divert attention from your own words to a famous person’s, the student effectively uses the lyrics as a launching point for further reflection.

It ends in the same confident, energetic voice I grew to love throughout the piece, and the final sentences read like a glorious mic drop.

The conclusion is strong in that we see a person who has embraced all sides of herself rather than stubbornly clinging to a rigid image of nonconformity.

This essay is an excellent example to learn from if you want to write about how one of your passions spurred personal growth, struggles with fitting in, changing your mind about who you are, and/or getting clear on your values.

Taras' Essay

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Successful Harvard Essay: More Boluses to Dissect

Finally, I had found a volunteer opportunity at the Long Marine Lab, a marine biology research facility at UC Santa Cruz! I envisioned swimming with dolphins, or perhaps studying behavioral patterns of decorator crabs. But when I discovered the nature of my work on the first day of volunteering, my excitement turned to disappointment: I’d be picking through albatross boluses, the indigestible materials they cough up before going to sea. Sure enough, after three hours of separating fishing line from brown muck, I began to dread what I was in for. At that point, I had no clue of just how interesting the opportunity would turn out to be, and it would remind me of how easily I become engrossed and fascinated by all sorts of random stuff.

It didn't take long for my boredom with the boluses to shift toward curiosity.

It didn’t take long for my boredom with the boluses to shift toward curiosity. In the first place, the project itself was fascinating. The idea was to research the behavior and diet of albatrosses at sea. These birds can fly for months without touching land! When the birds have chicks, they cough up whatever they’ve eaten at sea to feed their young. When the chicks become old enough to fly, they cough up the hard, indigestible materials left in their stomachs. These boluses contain squid beaks that can reveal the types of squid eaten and the area where the squid were caught. We volunteers would pick through the boluses, separating out anything that looked interesting.

As I got better at dissecting these blobs, I started finding crazy stuff, and my colleagues and I would often discuss important findings. There was, of course, the search for the biggest squid beak, and the fish eyes were always interesting. But most shocking was the plastic. Beyond the normal Styrofoam and fishing line were plastic bottle caps, lighters, even toothbrushes. Occasionally, Asian writing revealed distant origins. Once, I picked through a bolus permeated with orange goo, eventually to discover the round mouthpiece of a balloon. The origins of these artifacts were sad, but also fascinating. I learned of the Texas-sized trash heap in the middle of the Pacific, the effects of which I was witnessing firsthand. I gained a heightened awareness of the damage inflicted on the oceans by humans, and their far-reaching impacts. Perhaps most importantly, I realized that even the most tedious things can blow my mind.

If dissecting boluses can be so interesting, imagine the things I’ve yet to discover! I play piano and can see myself dedicating my life to the instrument, but I can’t bear to think of everything else I’d have to miss. I’d love to study albatrosses, but also particle physics or history, and preferably all three. At this point in my life, I can’t imagine picking just one area. At the same time, though, I love studying subjects in depth. I tend to get overwhelmed by my options, since I can’t possibly choose them all. But at least I know I’ll never be bored in life: there are just too many subjects to learn about, books to read, pieces to play, albatrosses to save, and boluses to dissect.

Professional Review by Prep Expert (Akbar Rahel)

While many applicants write essays full of detail and superlatives, emotional honesty is a critical component of a great essay.

What immediately distinguishes the first paragraph of the essay is the emotional honesty: Taras admits how “excitement turned to disappointment” and how he “had no clue” about how the opportunity would turn out. Too often, applicants fail to recognize that admissions officers are just normal people reading essays—people who also experience a range of emotions such as disappointment and confusion. While many applicants write essays full of detail and superlatives, emotional honesty is a critical component of a great essay.

Moreover, on a simple, albeit important level, he situates readers in the very first sentence by mentioning that his research was a volunteer opportunity at Long Marine Lab. Too many applicants attempt to keep a reader in suspense when, in fact, it is always better to provide context for an experience. Admissions officers don’t want to feel like they are deciphering the seemingly mundane who, what, when, and where. Nobody has time to untangle an essay.

Moving on, Taras succeeds in clearly demonstrating a sincere passion for his research by sharing interesting details of his work, such as understanding boluses. Whether writing about birds, Model UN, or any other possible topic, details are what help applicants show the admissions committees a level of intellectual vitality.

While an overall vibrant essay that captures a reader’s attention because of the unique topic, some aspects could have been improved. For example, exclamation points may come across as contrived enthusiasm to many readers—and strip away some of the decorum of an essay. Moreover, in the last paragraph, Taras mentions particle physics and history as possible interests, which did not align with the essay (and could have hurt chances for admissions in the final “shaping” of an incoming class).

Yukta's Essay

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Successful Harvard Essay: Yukta

Garishly lined with a pearlescent lavender, my eyes idly scanned the haphazard desk in front of me, settling on a small kohl. I packed the ebony powder into my waterline with a shaky hand, wincing at the fine specks making their way into my eyes.

The palette's colors bore in, the breadth of my imagination interwoven into now-brittle brushes.

The girl in the mirror seemed sharper, older, somehow. At only 12, I was relatively new to the powders and blushes that lined my birthday makeup kit, but I was determined to decipher the deep splashes of color that had for so long been an enigma to me.

After school involved self-inflicted solitary confinement, as I shut myself in my bedroom to hone my skills. The palette’s colors bore in, the breadth of my imagination interwoven into now-brittle brushes. Much to my chagrin, my mom walked in one day, amused at my smudged lipstick, which congealed on the wispy hairs that lined my upper lip.

“Halloween already?” she asked playfully.

I flushed in embarrassment as she got to work, smoothing my skin with a brush and filling the gaps in my squiggly liner. Becoming a makeup aficionado was going to take some help.

“What’s this even made of?” I asked, transfixed by the bright powder she was smattering on my cheeks.

“You know, I’m not sure,” she murmured. “Maybe you should find out.”

Hours down the internet rabbit hole, I learned that the shimmery powder was made of mica, a mineral commonly used in cosmetics. While the substance was dazzling, its production process was steeped in humanitarian violations and environmental damage. Determined to reconcile my burgeoning love for makeup with my core values, I flung the kit into the corner of my drawer, vowing to find a more sustainable alternative. Yes, I was every bit as dramatic as you imagine it.

Now 17, I approach ethical makeup with assured deliberation. As I glance at my dusty kit, which still sits where I left it, I harken back on the journey it has taken me on. Without the reckoning that it spurred, makeup would still simply be a tool of physical transformation, rather than a catalyst of personal growth.

Now, each swipe of eyeliner is a stroke of my pen across paper as I write a children’s book about conscious consumerism. My flitting fingers programmatically place sparkles, mattes, and tints across my face in the same way that they feverishly move across a keyboard, watching algorithms and graphs integrate into models of supply chain transparency. Makeup has taught me to be unflinching, both in self expression and my expectations for the future. I coat my lips with a bold sheen, preparing them to form words of unequivocal urgency at global conferences and casual discussions. I see my passion take flight, emboldening others to approach their own reckonings, uncomfortable as they may be. I embark on a two-year journey of not buying new clothes in a statement against mass consumption and rally youth into a unified organization. We stand together, picking at the gritty knots of makeup, corporate accountability, and sustainability as they slowly unravel.

Deep rooted journeys of triumph and tribulation are plastered across the surface of my skin — this paradox excites me.

I’m not sure why makeup transfixes me. Perhaps it’s because I enjoy seeing my reveries take shape. Yukta, the wannabe Wicked Witch of the West, has lids coated with emerald luster and lips of coal. Yukta, the Indian classical dancer, wields thick eyeliner and bright crimson lipstick that allow her expressions to be amplified across a stage. Deep rooted journeys of triumph and tribulation are plastered across the surface of my skin — this paradox excites me.

Perhaps I am also drawn to makeup because as I peel back the layers, I am still wholly me. I am still the young girl staring wide-eyed at her reflection, earnestly questioning in an attempt to learn more about the world. Most importantly, I still carry an unflagging vigor to coalesce creativity and activism into palpable change, one brushstroke at a time.

Professional Review by Prepory

This student takes a household item as common as makeup to build a narrative that is as universally accessible as it is unique. This object is inflected with facets of both her personal and cultural identity that give the reader immediate contact with the student’s personality. She takes us on a sweeping journey through her investigation of the world around her, and embarks on a coming-of-age story without losing sight of the essay’s main topic. This student strikes a balance between the narrative and creative writing elements that are integral to successful personal statements. The writer gives us glimpses of insight into her personal development across multiple years, using makeup as a medium for self-reflection and discovery. She masterfully leverages the colors and elements of her makeup collection to craft vivid descriptions, situating imagery as the cornerstone of this essay’s approach and success. She takes up an object so easily tied to consumerism and superficiality and uses it to champion the societal and ethical battles for which she advocates.

We also see that the writer of this essay has a clearly defined voice. While many students struggle with the temptation to elevate their writing through ornamentation, this writer is able to maneuver a vibrant writing style that remains engaging, rhythmic and measured. Through each moment of this essay, we learn what the author cares about: conscious consumerism, creativity, and activism; we also learn how she thinks: curiosily, selflessly, and with feminist undertones. The opening sentences of this essay employ a successful strategy for personal statement writing, rich with adjectives detailing a small scene, that is expanded upon to make a larger commentary about the author and where she stands in society. Last, the student’s essay compliments her larger admissions profile in which the reader learns about years of advocacy, sustainable practices, and intentions to positively impact her community.

Eda's Essay

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Successful Harvard Essay: Homeless for Thirteen Years

I sat on my parents’ bed weeping with my head resting on my knees. “Why did you have to do that to me? Why did you have to show me the house and then take it away from me?” Hopelessly, I found myself praying to God realizing it was my last resort.

For years, my family and I found ourselves moving from country to country in hopes of a better future. Factors, such as war and lack of academic opportunities, led my parents to pack their bags and embark on a new journey for our family around the world. Our arduous journey first began in Kuçovë, Albania, then Athens, Greece, and then eventually, Boston, Massachusetts. Throughout those years, although my family always had a roof over our heads, I never had a place I could call “home.”

Instantly, I knew that it was fate that was bringing this house to me.

That night that I prayed to God, my mind raced back to the night I was clicking the delete button on my e-mails, but suddenly stopped when I came upon a listing of the house. It was September 22, 2007 —eight years exactly to the day that my family and I had moved to the United States. Instantly, I knew that it was fate that was bringing this house to me. I remembered visiting that yellow house the next day with my parents and falling in love with it. However, I also remembered the heartbreaking phone call I received later on that week saying that the owners had chosen another family’s offer.

A week after I had prayed to God, I had given up any hopes of my family buying the house. One day after school, I unlocked the door to our one-bedroom apartment and walked over to the telephone only to see it flashing a red light. I clicked PLAY and unexpectedly heard the voice of our real estate agent. “Eda!” she said joyfully. “The deal fell through with the other family—the house is yours! Call me back immediately to get started on the papers.” For a moment, I stood agape and kept replaying the words in my head. Was this really happening to me? Was my dream of owning a home finally coming true?

Over the month of November, I spent my days going to school and immediately rushing home to make phone calls. Although my parents were not fluent enough in English to communicate with the bank and real estate agent, I knew that I was not going to allow this obstacle to hinder my dream of helping to purchase a home for my family. Thus, unlike a typical thirteen-year-old girl’s conversations, my phone calls did not involve the mention of makeup, shoes, or boys. Instead, my conversations were composed of terms, such as “fixed-rate mortgages,” “preapprovals,” and “down payments.” Nevertheless, I was determined to help purchase this home after thirteen years of feeling embarrassed from living in a one-bedroom apartment. No longer was I going to experience feelings of humiliation from not being able to host sleepovers with my friends or from not being able to gossip with girls in school about who had the prettiest room color.

I had been homeless for the first thirteen years of my life. Although I will never be able to fully repay my parents for all of their sacrifices, the least I could do was to help find them a home that they could call their own—and that year, I did. To me, a home means more than the general conception of “four walls and a roof.” A home is a place filled with memories and laughter from my family. No matter where my future may lead me, I know that if at times I feel alone, I will always have a yellow home with my family inside waiting for me.

Professional Review by Potomac Admissions

Honest. Heartbreaking. Powerful.

Those were the first three words that came to mind after reading Eda’s essay.

By being so honest, Eda showcases her genuine growth and maturity over time.

What we love about Eda’s essay is its refreshing vulnerability. Too many college essays are “too” picture-perfect. Eda doesn’t censor the truth, even if admitting her inner thoughts may potentially paint her in a negative light. For example, she starts the entire essay with a scene of her weeping on her parents’ bed, blaming them for her misfortune. By being so honest, Eda showcases her genuine growth and maturity over time.

Her personal voice is also strong throughout the essay. When she talks about falling in love with “that yellow house,” an image of said house is automatically conjured up in our minds. When she speaks of the heartbreak she experienced upon learning “that yellow house” was sold to another family, we felt pain in our hearts too. Her deliberate choice to “PLAY” the voicemail she received for us and include her subsequent internal thoughts further pulls us into reliving her journey with her.

Yet, she goes beyond merely telling us of her journey. She highlights just how atypical her journey has been. Instead of enjoying phone conversations about makeup or shoes, she is talking to agents about fix-rate mortgages and down payments… all at the age of 13. Though she does not explicitly state this (she doesn’t need to): it is clear that Eda has had to grow up fast, becoming a stronger individual as a result.

Her understanding of the word “home” evolves from a physical roof over her head to a more abstract one. Home is wherever her “memories and laughter” exist. In the end, she comes to terms with the sacrifices her parents have made. Learning to be proud of her upbringing showcases Eda’s evolution.

Eda is someone who will overcome whatever challenges thrown her way, making her a strong college applicant.

Lisa's Essay

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Successful Harvard Essay: Playing it Dangerous

In hazy stillness, a sudden flurry of colored skirts, whispers of “Merde!” Sternly, my fingers smooth back my hair, although they know no loose strands will be found. My skin absorbs heat from stage lights above—if only that heat would seep into my brain, denature some proteins, and deactivate the neurons stressing me out. A warm hand, accompanied by an even warmer smile, interrupts my frenzied solitude. I glance up. My lovely teacher nods, coaxing my frozen lips into a thawed smile. A complex figure, filled in with doubt, yet finished with shades of confidence: My body takes its place and waits.

One, two, three, four; two, two, three, four. On stage, the lights and music wash over me. Never having had a true ballet solo before, my lungs are one breath away from hyperventilating. Trying to achieve a Zen-like state, I imagine a field of daisies, yet my palms continue sweating disobediently. It’s not that I’ve never been on stage alone before; I’ve had plenty of piano recitals and competitions. Yet, while both performances consume my mind and soul, ballet demands complete commitment of my body.

I've had plenty of piano recitals and competitions. Yet, while both performances consume my mind and soul, ballet demands complete commitment of my body.

Gently slide into arabesque and lean downward; try not to fall flat on face—Mom’s videotaping. In terms of mentality, I would hardly be described as an introvert; yet, a fear of failure has still kept me from taking risks. Maybe I was scared of leaping too high, falling too far, and hitting the hard floor. As I moved up in the cutthroat world of dance, this fear only increased; the pressure of greater expectations and the specter of greater embarrassment had held me contained. Now, every single eyeball is on me.

Lean extra in this pirouette; it’s more aesthetic. But is it always better to be safe than sorry? Glancing toward the wings, I see my teacher’s wild gesticulations: Stretch your arms out, she seems to mime, More! A genuine smile replaces one of forced enthusiasm; alone on the stage, this is my chance to shine. I breathe in the movements, forget each individual step. More than just imagining, but finally experiencing the jubilation of the music, I allow my splits to stretch across the stage and my steps to extend longer and longer, until I’m no longer safe and my heart is racing. Exhilarated and scared in the best way, I throw myself into my jumps. I no longer need to imagine scenes to get in the mood; the emotions are twirling and leaping within me.

Reaching, stretching, grabbing, flinging ... My fear no longer shields me. I find my old passion for ballet, and remember the grace and poise that can nevertheless convey every color of emotion. Playing it safe will leave me part of the backdrop; only by taking risks can I step into the limelight. Maybe I’ll fall, but the rush is worth it. I’ll captain an all-male science bowl team, run a marathon, audition for a musical, and embrace the physical and intellectual elation of taking risks.

Professional Review by MR. MBA®, Val Misra

Lisa creates a winning essay by successfully invoking real emotions in the reader through her creative, descriptive prose that conveys vivid imagery, heartfelt feelings, and wholesome introspection. I instantly likened Lisa’s allegory to a bird trapped in a closed cage; the cage serves as a metaphor for what we all face in our lives, our fears. Lisa’s first ballet solo is brilliantly illustrated as her ‘Aha! moment’ where she sheds her fears (opens her cage) and, with careful self-reflection, chooses to embrace future risks (flies only forward).

In paragraphs 1-3, Lisa captivates us instantly through her beautiful, rich language and imagery, as she portrays herself immobilized by stress and a fear of failure and family/public opinion. I empathize and want to learn more! Her warm humor shines perfectly: wanting to deactivate her brain neurons and reminding herself not to fall face-first lest she gets scolded by her mother/family - wonderfully done! Lisa uses her “lovely teacher” as her grounding, comfort zone and supporter, a theme many can share. Her anxiety is relatable, and she uses this to explicate her general risk averse nature.

In paragraphs 4-5, Lisa’s solo is radiantly depicted as her defining moment where she dances and realizes her transformation- fears turn to passion and excitement. She is poetry in motion in the moment, smiling, shedding her fears, and embracing risk like a warm glass of milk. A poignant question is posed, “But is it always better to be safe than sorry?” Through introspection, Lisa expresses her desire to pursue risks that will advance her personally. Acknowledging she may not always succeed, “the rush is worth it”. Lisa ends with concrete examples of leadership roles and activities that she will pursue at college- admissions officers favorably view students eager to step outside their comfort zones and embark on new adventures/challenges at college. To make this essay stronger, Lisa could have highlighted precisely how she will tackle any fears that may crop up during new obstacles at college, tying to lessons learned through her ballet.

Superbly written in a distinct narrative form, this essay crafts an experience that is vibrant, funny, deep, and relatable.

Superbly written in a distinct narrative form, this essay crafts an experience that is vibrant, funny, deep, and relatable. Lisa’s brand values seamlessly flow throughout the essay: creativity, determination, overcoming obstacles, self-reflection, growth through risk and, of course, passion! We are left with a glowing lesson in motivation in the hope of ridding oneself of such negative feelings to go on and achieve greater things - ‘playing it dangerous’.

Michelle C.'s Essay

At KEY we take a long-term, strategic approach centered on each individual student’s best interests. Working with our college-bound students beginning in Grade 8, we guide them in establishing a strong foundation of academics to build their unique profiles of co-curricular and extracurricular activities, academic direction, and professional skills. We aspire to give each of our students the best opportunity to thrive within their current education environmentand beyond. For a free consultation about our services and more, please visit: https://www.keyeducation.com/university .

Successful Harvard Essay

“You should scrub off the top layer of your skin whenever you lose a round,” my debate teammate once advised me.

“That’s not practical,” I replied.

“Neither is your refusal to wear clothes you’ve lost important debate rounds in. Your wardrobe has very little to do with your success.”

Half of me disagrees with him. I still bring three BIC Round Stic pencils with 0.7 lead to every test because my gut tells me this fastidious procedure raises my scores. I’m still convinced that labs receive better grades if written in Calibri. And I still won’t rewear clothes in which I’ve lost crucial rounds.

Yet the other half of me is equally dismissive of my own superstitions. I love logic, never failing to check that steps in a proof lead to a precise conclusion without gaps in reasoning.

Fortunately, I often abandon my penchant for pragmatism to accommodate for my unwarranted superstitions. And since I only feel the need to act logicalcally in selective situations, I am perfectly content with the illogical nature of my other habits:

Raised with my great-grandmother, grandparents, and parents all under one roof, I never lacked a consultant to help me transcribe Korean holiday dates from the lunar calendar onto my schedule. Yet whenever all four generations of my family celebrates with a traditional meal of bulgogi, my untraceable and admittedly nonexistent Italian blood flares in protest; I rebelliously cook myself linguine con le vongole that clashes terribly with my mom’s pungent kimchi.

If I plot a graph of “hours I spend in physical activity” versus “week of the year,” the result looks like an irregular cardiac cycle. The upsurges symbolize my battles with colossal walls of water in hopes of catching a smooth surf back to Mission Bay shore. The ensuing period of rest mirrors the hours I spend researching in that one spot in my debate team’s war room that isn’t covered in papers (yet), or at the piano sight-reading the newest Adele song. Then the diastolic tranquility is interrupted by the weekends when I’m sprinting through trenches to avoid paintballs swarming above my favorite arena at Paintball USA.

I find comfort in the familiar. I treasure the regular midnight chats with my brother as we indulge in batter while baking cupcakes for a friend's birthday, keeping our voices hushed

I find comfort in the familiar. I treasure the regular midnight chats with my brother as we indulge in batter while baking cupcakes for a friend’s birthday, keeping our voices hushed to avoid waking our mom and facing her “salmonella is in your near future” lecture. Yet, some of my fondest memories involve talking to people with whom I share nothing in common. Whether my conversations are about the Qatari coach’s research on Kuwait’s female voting patterns, or about the infinite differences between the “common app” and the Oxford interviewing process, or even about my friend’s Swedish school’s peculiar policy of mandating uniforms only on Wednesdays, I love comparing cultures with debaters from different countries.

My behavior is unpredictable. Yet it’s predictably unpredictable. Sure, I’ll never eat a Korean dinner like one might expect. But I’ll always be cooking linguine the moment I catch a whiff of kimchi.

Professional Review by Key Education (Bryan)

Most often, it is the down-to-earth topics that make for the most successful Common App essays. My students have written on subjects as mundane as cleaning, loading the dishwasher, eraser shavings, finding a piece of driftwood, or looking after not one, but two Shiba Inus. And so, it was a delight to read Michelle Choi’s essay. Choi took an idea that the rest of us probably give very little thought to – superstitions – and effectively used it as a focusing lens to explore different parts of her life.

By drawing these connections between seemingly unrelated and different aspects of her life, Choi demonstrated her ability to introspect while giving the reader a richer picture of who she is. Choi is not just another high achiever. Her superstitions – and that ever-present struggle between being logical and superstitious – is what makes her appealing. One can’t help but to like her. As I often remind my students, quirky is cool.

These various connections give the reader insight into what drives Choi as someone who is profoundly curious and quirky, someone who takes a different approach to things.

With Choi’s hook, the reader’s attention is immediately captured. One could be forgiven for probably cringing a little at the thought of scrubbing off a layer of one’s own skin. And besides that, what was Choi even going on about? Her opening compels the reader to want to keep on reading. Very early on in her essay, we know that debating is a core part of her identity. As she guides the reader through the rest of her essay, she skillfully connects her superstitions to other important aspects of her life, including her cultural heritage, family, surfing, music, paintball, baking, conversations with random strangers, and examinations of different cultures around the world. These various connections give the reader insight into what drives Choi as someone who is profoundly curious and quirky, someone who takes a different approach to things, whether it be intentionally combining Korean and Italian cuisine (I picture the likes of Gordon Ramsay already shuddering at the clash of flavors) to playing pop on the piano (perhaps a refreshingly different take than Mozart or Beethoven).

If I could offer one suggestion, it would be that after reading Choi’s essay, I was craving a little more. Perhaps she could have expanded slightly: what did she learn from this process of being unconventional? How did it influence the way she saw the world and influenced her actions? And in what ways did she apply this learning? That said, even with her essay, Choi does what many other students don’t with their Common App essay; she takes that a unique approach using a down-to-earth topic as a focusing lens to draw connections to various parts of her life.

Tony's Essay

As an admission essay specialist , Dan Lichterman has been empowering students to find their voice since 2004. He helps students stand out on paper, eliminating the unnecessary so the necessary may speak. Drawing upon his storytelling background, Dan guides applicants to craft authentic essays that leap off the page. He is available for online writing support within the US and internationally. To learn more and schedule a brief complimentary consultation visit danlichterman.com.

Successful Harvard Essay: Beauty in Complexity

Gazing up at the starry sky, I see Cygnus, Hercules, and Pisces, remnants of past cultures. I listen to waves crash on the beach, the forces of nature at work. Isn’t it odd how stars are flaming spheres and electrical impulses make beings sentient? The very existence of our world is a wonder; what are the odds that this particular planet developed all the necessary components, parts that all work in unison, to support life? How do they interact? How did they come to be? I thought back to how my previously simplistic mind-set evolved this past year.

The very existence of our world is a wonder; what are the odds that this particular planet developed all the necessary components, parts that all work in unison, to support life?

At Balboa, juniors and seniors join one of five small learning communities, which are integrated into the curriculum. Near the end of sophomore year, I ranked my choices: Law Academy first—it seemed the most prestigious—and WALC, the Wilderness Arts and Literacy Collaborative, fourth. So when I was sorted into WALC, I felt disappointed at the inflexibility of my schedule and bitter toward my classes. However, since students are required to wait at least a semester before switching pathways, I stayed in WALC. My experiences that semester began shifting my ambition-oriented paradigm to an interest-oriented one. I didn’t switch out.

Beyond its integrated classes, WALC takes its students on trips to natural areas not only to build community among its students, but also to explore complex natural processes and humanity’s role in them. Piecing these lessons together, I create an image of our universe. I can visualize the carving of glacial valleys, the creation and gradation of mountains by uplift and weathering, and the transportation of nutrients to and from ecosystems by rivers and salmon. I see these forces on the surface of a tiny planet rotating on its axis and orbiting the sun, a gem in this vast universe. Through WALC, I have gained an intimate understanding of natural systems and an addiction to understanding the deep interconnections embedded in our cosmos.

Understanding a system’s complex mechanics not only satisfies my curiosity, but also adds beauty to my world; my understanding of tectonic and gradational forces allows me to appreciate mountains and coastlines beyond aesthetics. By physically going to the place described in WALC’s lessons, I have not only gained the tools to admire these systems, but have also learned to actually appreciate them. This creates a thirst to see more beauty in a world that’s filled with poverty and violence, and a hunger for knowledge to satisfy that thirst. There are so many different systems to examine and dissect—science alone has universal, planetary, molecular, atomic, and subatomic scales to investigate. I hope to be able to find my interests by taking a variety of courses in college, and further humanity’s understanding through research, so that all can derive a deeper appreciation for the complex systems that govern this universe.

Professional Review by Dan Lichterman

Tony’s essay opens with stargazing at the ocean’s edge where we experience his boundless curiosity towards the natural world, sentience, and life itself. This wide-eyed wonderment is rendered artfully, yet what actually enables this essay to succeed is its ability to ponder deep concepts without getting lost in the clouds.

The story itself revolves around an event that seems far removed from the incomprehensibility of the universe: a randomized selection has assigned Tony to study wilderness arts when he preferred the path of law. He is bitter that a decision impacting his studies has been determined by chance. We see vulnerability in his admission that he was beholden to an “ambition oriented paradigm,” rather than studying what interested him most. However, what we discover through the rest of the essay is that Tony’s decision to remain in wilderness arts is one that has transformed him completely, changing his perspective from a “simplistic mindset” to one that is addicted to “understanding the deep interconnections embedded in our cosmos.”

The strength of Tony's language helps us appreciate the breadth and excitement of his unforseen awakening.

The strength of Tony’s language helps us appreciate the breadth and excitement of his unforseen awakening. From visualizing the “carving of glacial valleys” to reveling in the complex mechanics of natural systems, the essay showcases how much more Tony appreciates our world thanks to an event that had once seemed unfairly arbitrary. Observing Tony’s thirst for life’s interconnectedness, we grow confident that his evolving perspective will guide his studies into exciting unexpected realms.

Yueming's Essay

Crimson Education is the world’s leading university admissions consultancy. We take application counseling to the next level of personalization and success, increasing your chance of admission to Ivy League, Oxbridge, and other top universities by 700%. At Crimson, each student is matched with a team of top university strategists, tutors, and mentors who work together to provide customized support in every aspect of the student’s journey. Learn more at www.crimsoneducation.com and schedule your complimentary consultation with a Crimson advisor today.

My Ye-Ye always wears a red baseball cap. I think he likes the vivid color—bright and sanguine, like himself. When Ye-Ye came from China to visit us seven years ago, he brought his red cap with him and every night for six months, it sat on the stairway railing post of my house, waiting to be loyally placed back on Ye-Ye’s head the next morning. He wore the cap everywhere: around the house, where he performed magic tricks with it to make my little brother laugh; to the corner store, where he bought me popsicles before using his hat to wipe the beads of summer sweat off my neck. Today whenever I see a red hat, I think of my Ye-Ye and his baseball cap, and I smile.

Ye-Ye is the Mandarin word for “grandfather.” My Ye-Ye is a simple, ordinary person—not rich, not “successful”—but he is my greatest source of inspiration and I idolize him. Of all the people I know, Ye-Ye has encountered the most hardship and of all the people I know, Ye-Ye is the most joyful. That these two aspects can coexist in one individual is, in my mind, truly remarkable.

Ye-Ye was an orphan. Both his parents died before he was six years old, leaving him and his older brother with no home and no family. When other children gathered to read around stoves at school, Ye-Ye and his brother walked in the bitter cold along railroad tracks, looking for used coal to sell. When other children ran home to loving parents, Ye-Ye and his brother walked along the streets looking for somewhere to sleep. Eight years later, Ye-Ye walked alone—his brother was dead.

Ye-Ye managed to survive, and in the meanwhile taught himself to read, write, and do arithmetic. Life was a blessing, he told those around him with a smile.

Years later, Ye-Ye’s job sent him to the Gobi Desert, where he and his fellow workers labored for twelve hours a day. The desert wind was merciless; it would snatch their tent in the middle of the night and leave them without supply the next morning. Every year, harsh weather took the lives of some fellow workers.

After eight years, Ye-Ye was transferred back to the city where his wife lay sick in bed. At the end of a twelve-hour workday, Ye-Ye took care of his sick wife and three young children. He sat with the children and told them about the wide, starry desert sky and mysterious desert lives. Life was a blessing, he told them with a smile.

But life was not easy; there was barely enough money to keep the family from starving. Yet, my dad and his sisters loved going with Ye-Ye to the market. He would buy them little luxuries that their mother would never indulge them in: a small bag of sunflower seeds for two cents, a candy each for three cents. Luxuries as they were, Ye-Ye bought them without hesitation. Anything that could put a smile on the children’s faces and a skip in their steps was priceless.

He would buy them little luxuries that their mother would never indulge them in: a small bag of sunflower seeds for two cents, a candy each for three cents.

Ye-Ye still goes to the market today. At the age of seventy-eight, he bikes several kilometers each week to buy bags of fresh fruits and vegetables, and then bikes home to share them with his neighbors. He keeps a small patch of strawberries and an apricot tree. When the fruit is ripe, he opens his gate and invites all the children in to pick and eat. He is Ye-Ye to every child in the neighborhood.

I had always thought that I was sensible and self-aware. But nothing has made me stare as hard in the mirror as I did after learning about the cruel past that Ye-Ye had suffered and the cheerful attitude he had kept throughout those years. I thought back to all the times when I had gotten upset. My mom forgot to pick me up from the bus station. My computer crashed the day before an assignment was due. They seemed so trivial and childish, and I felt deeply ashamed of myself.

Now, whenever I encounter an obstacle that seems overwhelming, I think of Ye-Ye; I see him in his red baseball cap, smiling at me. Like a splash of cool water, his smile rouses me from grief, and reminds me how trivial my worries are and how generous life has been. Today I keep a red baseball cap at the railing post at home where Ye-Ye used to put his every night. Whenever I see the cap, I think of my Ye-Ye, smiling in his red baseball cap, and I smile. Yes, Ye-Ye. Life is a blessing.

Professional Review by Crimson Education

Yueming’s essay is the perfect example of an application essay that does exactly what it’s supposed to do: it fills out the picture of who Yueming is and allows the admissions committee to learn things about him that are not contained in the rest of his application. Yueming uses the story of his Ye-Ye’s baseball cap to show the reader what is important to him and to demonstrate key personality traits that he’d contribute to life on campus.

Yueming uses the story of his Ye-Ye's baseball cap to show the reader what is important to him and to demonstrate key personality traits

Even though most of the text is devoted to Ye-Ye’s biography, the essay is not just about him. Ye-Ye’s whole story is a prelude to the final paragraphs, which reveal the most important aspects of Yueming’s personality. Just like in life, our ancestors’ past is a prelude to a future generation’s history, which is still emerging. This subtle parallel, unnoticeable at first glance, allows the reader to understand the profound development of Yueming’s personality and his talent for looking deeper into the essence of things.

Yueming shows his ability to learn from the experience of others, and he highlights his own resilience and the positive mindset he gained from Ye-Ye. These qualities are undoubtedly essential for a future Harvard student and demonstrate his ability to embody “life is a blessing” on campus and beyond.

Charles' Essay

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James was not fitting in with everyone else. During lunch, he sat alone, playing with his own toys. During group activities, the other campers always complained when paired with him. What was wrong? As camp counselor, I quietly observed his behavior—nothing out of the ordinary. I just couldn’t fathom why the other campers treated him like a pariah.

After three days of ostracism, James broke down during a game of soccer. Tears streaming down his cheeks, he slumped off the field, head in his hands. I jogged toward him, my forehead creased with concern. Some campers loudly remarked, “Why is that creep crying?” Furious indignation leaped into my heart. They were the ones who “accidentally” bumped into him and called him “James the Freak.” It was their cruelty that caused his meltdown, and now they were mocking him for it. I sharply told them to keep their thoughts to themselves. I squatted beside James and asked him what was wrong. Grunting, he turned his back to me. I had to stop his tears, and I had to make him feel comfortable. So for the next hour, I talked about everything a seven-year-old boy might find interesting, from sports to Transformers.

I had to stop his tears, and I had to make him feel comfortable. So for the next hour, I talked about everything a seven-year-old boy might find interesting, from sports to Transformers.

“I have a question,” I asked as James began to warm to me. I took a deep breath and dove right into the problem. “Why do the other campers exclude you?” Hesitantly, he took off his shoes and socks, and pointed at his left foot. One, two, three … four. He had four toes. We had gone swimming two days before: All the campers must have noticed. I remembered my childhood, when even the smallest abnormality—a bad haircut, a missing tooth—could cause others, including myself, to shrink away. I finally understood.

But what could I do to help? I scoured my mind for the words to settle his demons. But nothing came to me. Impulsively, I hugged him—a gesture of intimacy we camp leaders were encouraged not to initiate, and an act I later discovered no friend had ever offered James before. Then, I put my hand on his shoulder and looked him straight in the eyes. I assured him that external features didn’t matter, and that as long as he was friendly, people would eventually come around. I listed successful individuals who had not been hindered by their abnormalities. And finally, I told him he would always be my favorite camper, regardless of whether he had two, five, or a hundred toes.

On the last day of camp, I was jubilant—James was starting to fit in. Although the teasing had not completely disappeared, James was speaking up and making friends. And when, as we were saying our good-byes, James gave me one last hug and proclaimed that I was his “bestest friend in the whole wide world,” my heart swelled up. From my campers, I learned that working with children is simply awesome. And from James, I learned that a little love truly goes a long way.

Professional Review by College Confidential

Charles Wong takes the all too common experience of watching someone be excluded and explains how he combats it. In his personal account of being a camp counselor, Charles not only communicates that he cares deeply for others, but also displays his thought process for how he solves problems in general. Instead of just declaring these personal characteristics, he shows them through a personal account. The pointed decision to “show” not “tell” is an excellent essay tactic.

Charles not only communicates that he cares deeply for others, but also displays his thought process for how he solves problems in general.

First, Charles begins with his description of the situation. His tone is casual and straightforward. He incorporates crucial details, but his writing is not superfluous. His essay is concise and easy to follow. While this approach may seem to lack sophistication, it reflects Charle’s raw, real thoughts. The reader can feel his concern; Charles walks us through his genuine dilemma. Additionally, the acts of kindness he describes—the pep talks, the hugs—offer insight into his character. The decision to include these details paint Charles as a kind and bright personality, something of value on any college campus.

Moreover, Charles does more than just describe how he solved this particular problem, but expands it to life in general. He grasps meaning from a seemingly mundane experience and explains how it changed his entire mindset. This ability to consciously grow suggests Charles’s drive to to learn from all life has to offer; he is a student in more than just the classroom.

Sean's Essay

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I have always envied the butterfly.

Its graceful poise as it glides through the air; the blissful flutter of its wings as it courageously embarks upon life’s journeys. Its ambitious and adaptive nature — a change-maker and discoverer, a trendsetter in the animal world, a leader amongst other species. Charles Darwin said, “it is not the strongest of species that survives, nor the most intelligent. It is the one most adaptable to change.” I envy the butterfly’s adaptive approach to change, making them the silent leaders of the animal kingdom.

It was at age nine, on a family trip to the Boston Museum of Science, that I was first drawn to the breathtaking butterfly. As I stepped into the butterfly’s endless capsule of nature, the flamboyant and audacious nature of the butterfly was captivating — their vibrant colors flaunted proud and shame-free, central to their persona but not defining of their personality. Their extraordinary courage in self-expression brought a little boy great inspiration. As someone who has questioned and struggled with my identity and accepting my queerness throughout life, the butterfly exemplified what it meant to be bold, courageous, and proud to a young boy who was lacking in all of those.

The butterfly exemplified what it meant to be bold, courageous, and proud to a young boy who was lacking in all of those.

I vividly recall one butterfly standing out among its comrades. Being an uncreative third-grader, I named my new friend Bloo due to his radiant cerulean shades descending from darkness to light as they progressed from the wing’s base. I watched Bloo soar, using his wings to glide far above the dainty and fragile stereotypes placed on him by society. I admire the profound growth Bloo must have achieved to get here, at one point a timid and powerless inchworm evolved into a carefully-crafted canvas of power. Bloo exemplified the strength and pride that I needed to begin accepting my identity. Looking back on this brief encounter with Bloo, I recall how he taught an insecure child self-acceptance. From here, I began to internalize the butterfly’s power. I began to molt into a new skin with fledgling wings.

As I progressed through life with these newly-discovered wings, I became increasingly drawn to observing butterflies in nature. They have proven much more than just precious gems found amongst clouds or prize trophies for kindergarteners to catch in their nets. The butterfly has shown itself as the hidden alpha of the animal kingdom — a leader and trendsetter amongst organisms both small and large, a fearless change-maker enabling them to outsurvive the rest for the past fifty-six million years.

With the wings and strength of the butterfly latched to my shoulders, I proudly embraced the challenge posed by this delicate yet powerful creature — to be a leader and a change-maker. Recognizing many social injustices in my community, I was inspired by the butterfly to become a voice of change. Driven by the butterfly’s creativity, I developed a social justice discussion program to take place at my high school, and became a local leader and fighter against corrupt politics in the 2020 election cycle. Bloo reminds me that time moves quickly and I must never settle nor lose focus in the crusade for justice. I hope to use this fragile time to advocate for equality in medicine, combining my passion for science with advocacy to leave a lasting legacy.

Today, the lessons taught by the butterfly are never far from my mind, whether I'm sitting in my English classroom discussing Beowulf, dreading the prospect of my upcoming integral exam, or even studying Darwin in Biology.

All these years later, as I ponder my defining characteristics and core values, I recognize that it is my time to become the butterfly — to embody Darwin’s words and face life with the courage to create change as I break free from my cocoon and enter the long-awaited adult world.

Professional Review by HS2 Academy

This piece is quite touching, as it deftly crafts a delicate and nuanced picture of Sean’s lifelong connection with the butterfly. It is playful (“my new friend Bloo”) while also profoundly introspective. It starts out effectively with a thought-provoking hook. After all, how many people would think to envy a butterfly? But the essay quickly picks up pace and shows how the butterfly truly is a perfect symbol for Sean’s own metamorphosis into a true leader and agent of change.

The essay works on so many levels because it utilizes an extended metaphor that aptly describes many parallels with Sean's life.

The essay works on so many levels because it utilizes an extended metaphor that aptly describes many parallels with Sean’s life. Oftentimes, many college essays utilize figurative language, but the connection with the narrative of that student’s life tends to be rather superficial. The idea of a butterfly emerging from a cocoon may seem a bit cliche as an image of a student’s transformation, but Sean’s essay goes deeper, in part because of a parallel with Sean’s own struggles with their queer identity. Phrases like using his wings to “glide far above the dainty and fragile stereotypes placed on him by society” powerfully capture Sean’s own journey from an insecure child to an advocate for social justice and equality in medicine.

We learn that Sean has truly found inspiration in the butterfly, rising above struggles with self-identity to become a principled leader with a genuine desire to fight injustice. The qualities Sean demonstrates—determination over adversity, passion for equality and justice—would be a welcome addition to any college community.

The Best Video Essays of 2022

This article is part of our 2022 Rewind .  Follow along as we explore the best and most interesting movies, shows, performances, and more from this very strange year.   In this entry, we explore the best video essays of 2022.

2022 has, inconceivably, come to an end. And in the spirit of reflection and gratitude, it’s time to appreciate the thing that had our back when times were tough; the thing that helped us wind down after a long day at work; the thing that made that first cup of coffee in the morning go down just a little easier: video essays.

This year, I had the pleasure of once again curating The Queue , a thrice-weekly column dedicated to highlighting short-form video content about films, television, and the craft of visual storytelling. As a result, the focus of the video essays below is movies and TV shows — if you’re wondering why there are no video essays on speed running mechanics or broadway musical drama, that’s why!

There were, it must be said, a heck of a lot of top-shelf video essays this year that fell outside the scope of this list (including, but not limited to, Jacob Geller’s poetic eulogy to sea monsters ; People Make Games’ anthropological exploration of VRChat , and Jenny Nicholson’s sarcastically long portrait of Evermore , the theme park that tried to sue Taylor Swift).

Once again, I had a doozy of a time narrowing down a short list of this year’s selections. So if you could all stop making such good #content, that would be great (just kidding, never stop). I want to sincerely thank all the essayists I’ve covered this year for their hard work. I hope I get to continue seeing you in my feed in 2023 and beyond.

Bergman Island: Art, Love, and the Unbearable Process of Making

French director Mia Hansen-Løve embraces the notion of autobiographical filmmaking. And the video essay above does a beautiful job illustrating how her first English-language film,  Bergman Island , draws attention to the process of its own making without sacrificing its own story. I love how this essayist unravels the tapestry of the film’s twisty relationship with metatext with tangible examples and accessible language.

This video essay on the metatextuality of Mia Hansen-Løve’s  Bergman Island   is by  Broey Deschanel  a self-described “snob (and YouTuber) whose video essays cover everything from new releases like Licorice Pizza  and  Euphoria  to camp classics like  Showgirls . You can subscribe to their YouTube account  here  and you can follow them on Twitter  here .

Realism and Fantastic Cinema

We’re living during an interesting time in visual effects, where more often than not, realism is the goal. The following video essay offers a convincing gospel that preaches a different approach, which proposes that “fantastic cinema” that actively doesn’t chase photorealism or expose its own trickery is different, special, and worth fighting for. If you’ve found other arguments against  modern CGI unconvincing — or if your love of practical effects starts and stops with fetishism — I urge you to give this a look.

This video essay on why the pursuit of realism in special effects is hurting the fantasy genre is by APLattanzi , a freelance filmmaker and illustrator who hails from the Philadelphia area. You can subscribe to them on YouTube  here . Their essays cover a large swath of topics, from film scores to short films. You can also find them on Letterboxd  here .

Gen Z needs more slacker movies

In all fairness, this video essay is preaching to the choir: I’m a huge sucker for slacker movies. And if for  whatever reason you’re not, this essayist articulates something that feels True about what the sub-genre offers to the 2020s, an age where we’re increasingly bumping up against the political spirit of fucking off and the price of who can afford to do nothing.

This video essay on why the younger generation (I’m dating myself, whoops!) need some new slacker movies   is by  Niche Nonsense , a video essay channel that provides, well, just that: niche nonsense. The channel was only created in mid-December of 2021. And you can get in on the ground floor and subscribe here .

Leslie Cheung & Hong Kong LGBT Cinema

Love letters are contagious, and if you’re unfamiliar with Hong Kong star Leslie Cheung , this is a great introduction to one of the greatest LGBTQ+ icons in film history and how he left his impact on the Queer Hong Kong films that came in the wake of his trailblazing.

These videos on the impact of Leslie Cheung on Hong Kong queer cinema is by  Accented Cinema , a Canadian-based YouTube video essay series with a focus on Asian cinema. You can subscribe to Accented Cinema for bi-weekly uploads here . You can follow them on Twitter  here .

The Secret Ingredient That Makes Raimi’s ‘Spider-Man’ So Great

When people say that modern superhero movies feel soulless, you don’t always get a lot of concrete examples or arguments as to why this is the case aside from a general feeling . Luckily, the above video essay takes the time to nail something specific about why Sam Raimi ‘s Spider-Man   trilogy feels so much more sincere and front-the-heart than modern, irony-poisoned Marvel fare.

This video essay on why everyday people make Sam Raimi’s  Spider-Man  films feel so special is co-written by  Patrick (H) Willems  and  Siddhant Adlakha .  You can find their own directorial efforts and their video essays on their channel  here . You can also find Willems on Twitter  here . And you can find Adlakha on Twitter  here .

The Lion King and Disney’s Sequel Curse

Frankly, I didn’t know that I  needed  an hour-long defence of The Lion King 1 ½ until it was sitting in my YouTube subscriptions. The Disney animated feature-length sequel landscape is, by and large, pretty mid. And while  The Lion King 2  is one of the better ones out there,  The Lion King 1 ½  is in a class all of its own. If you’re not familiar, the sequel takes place during the events of the first film, but it’s told from the perspective of Timon and Pumba. The following video essay does a stellar job describing why it rules, how it ties into Shakespeare, and why it’s a great example of self-aware filmmaking.

This video on the incredible Disney sequel  The Lion King 1 ½  is by Jace, a.k.a   BREADSWORD,  an LA-based video essayist who specializes in long-form nostalgia-heavy love letters. Impeccably edited and smoother than butter, BREADSWORD essays boast an unparalleled relaxed fit and an expressive narrative tone. Long essays like this take a lot of time to put together, and somehow BREADSWORD makes it all look effortless. You can subscribe to them on YouTube  here . And you can follow them on Twitter  here .

Twin Peaks Actually, ACTUALLY EXPLAINED (No, But For Real)

This is, quite frankly, one of the most lucid explanations of “why  Twin Peaks is the way it is” that I’ve ever seen. Maybe its my small screen ignorance showing, but the idea that TV reflexivity is the key that unlocks Twin Peaks really feels capital-t True. The above is the first of a two-parter, and will hit harder if you’ve seen all three seasons and  Fire Walk With Me . I’m also a massive fan of how this essayist choses to frame their work; the Socratic dialogue is alive and well.

This video essay on what Twin Peaks is about, actually, is by Maggie Mae Fish , a Los Angeles-based comedian, actress, and culture critic who releases short films and video essays on her  YouTube account . Fish has been featured on College Humor, Screen Junkies, and JASH. She was also a former lead actor and writer at Cracked.com. You can follow Fish on Twitter  here .

Nothing But Trouble is a Very Weird Movie

Even if you haven’t had the pleasure of watching Nothing But Trouble  with your own two, God-given eyes, you may still have heard rumblings of its notorious status. I appreciate that this video essayist takes the time to give complicated stories — like the making of this movie and why it came to be thought of as a massive bomb — the time they deserve to breathe and speak for themselves.

This video essay on why  Nothing But Trouble  is good, actually comes to us from  In Praise of Shadows , a video essay channel run by Zane Whitener  and based in Asheville, North Carolina. The channel focuses on horror, history, and retrospectives. Under their “Anatomy of a Franchise” banner, they break down horror properties including  Tremors ,  The Stepfather , and  Re-Animator,  in addition to  The Hills Have Eyes . You can check out the series’ playlist  here . And you can subscribe to the In Praise of Shadows YouTube channel  here . And you can follow them on Twitter  here .

Why The Bear Hits So Hard

There’s a special bond between cooking and the moving image and Hulu’s The Bear  is the latest piece of pop culture to bring the two art forms together. I love how this video essay balances its analysis of the technical and scripted aspects of the show to explain the controlled chaos that defines the feel of the show. Breakdowns like this, that do as much showing as they do telling, are really what the video essay format is all about.

This video essay on the appeal of  The Bear  is by Virginia-based filmmaker and video editor  Thomas Flight . He runs a YouTube channel under the same name. You can follow Thomas Flight and check out his back catalog of video essays on YouTube  here . You can follow him on Twitter  here .

Under The Skin | Audiovisual Alienation

While I do think that  all  movies partake in non-verbal storytelling (they are moving  pictures, after all), I do think some films are more non-verbal than others. This isn’t to say that these films aren’t about  anything or that, more disparagingly, they are “just vibes” (yeesh). Case in point: this thoughtful analysis of Under the Skin , a film that uses non-verbal storytelling to put us in the shoes of an alien visitor trying to make sense of the confusing, predatory, and often beautiful human world.

This video essay on how  Under the Skin  uses non-verbal storytelling to explore the question of what it means to be human   is by  Spikima Movies , a Korean-Canadian who’s been dropping gems on YouTube since 2019. You can subscribe to Spikima’s channel for more incredible essays  here . And you can follow them on Letterboxd  here .

How a 10-year-old girl wrote Japan’s most insane horror film

Just when I thought that House   was starting to slip into that special category of movies that have been “talked to death,” someone goes ahead and makes a video essay like this. I adore the messy human stories behind canonized films. And the way that this video essayist describes the father-daughter relationship behind the deeply personal making of House  is impeccable, even if you’re already familiar with the general beats.

This video essay on the uncanny origins of the 1977 horror film  House   is by  k aptainkristian, a YouTube-based video essay channel that peddles visual love letters to filmmakers, musicians, and syndicated cartoons. The account is run by  Kristian T.   Williams , whom you can follow on Twitter  here . You can subscribe to kaptainkristian, and check out their back catalog on YouTube  here .

Studio LAIKA and the Ghosts of Invisible Labor

Given that conversations on labor and animation are becoming more and more prescient and pointed, this video essay feels like a must-watch. This essayist’s analysis is deeply insightful, compelling, and well-argued. The idea that animators on Laika films are in-universe Lovecraftian gods tickles my brain something fierce.

This video essay on the self-reflexive industrial allegory of Laika studios is written and directed by  Mihaela Mihailova . It is produced by Alla Gadassik and edited by Gil Goletski, with Jacqueline Turner providing the narration. The end of the video credits the Vancouver-based Emily Carr University of Art and Design for support. Mihailova is an Assistant Professor in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University. She is the editor of the essay collection Coraline: A Closer Look at Studio LAIKA’s Stop-Motion Witchcraft  (Bloomsbury, 2021)

Why This 1950s Studio Made Movies Backwards

We love a gimmick. And we especially love a gimmick that produces some wildly kick-ass movie posters. This video essay offers a lucid explanation of how AIP cracked the code for making B-Movies: poster first, movie later. Has this principle of making a film from a marketing perspective mutated into something more insidious over time? Yep. Will that make me any less charmed by exploitation cinema? Nope. Look, someone  had to make the movies that play at the drive-in while teens suck face in the back of their parents’ Cadillac.

This video on how American International Pictures marketed their films backward is by  Andrew Saladino , who runs the Texas-based  Royal Ocean Film Society . You can browse their back catalog of videos on their Vimeo account  here . If Vimeo isn’t your speed, you can give them a follow on YouTube  here .

Why Did Spaghetti Westerns Look Like That?

On the one hand, this is something of a biased pick because I eat Spaghetti Westerns for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. On the other hand, this video essay does a really solid job honing in on one specific aspect of the sub-genre and asking: why? I love laser-focused topics like this, and the fact that it’s about one of the most iconic shot types in genre cinema is just icing on the cake.

This video essay on Sergio Leone’s filmography and how he perfected the use of the close-up shot is by  Adam Tinius , who runs the YouTube channel  Entertain the Elk . They are based in Pasadena, California. You can follow them on YouTube  here . And you can follow them on Twitter  here .

The Catharsis of Body Horror

Frankly, the fact that this video essay managed to stay online for as long as it has (thus far) without getting sent back to the shadow realm by YouTube’s AI censor bots is a straight-up miracle. Luckily, as of writing this, the essay is still live and absolutely worth your time, especially  if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t vibe with body horror. There’s no shame in having likes and dislikes. But this essay very clearly articulates why body horror is a lot more than the sum of its goo-covered, fleshy parts.

This video essay on the catharsis themes of body horror is by  Yhara Zayd . They provide insightful deep dives on young adult content from  Skins  to  My Best Friend’s Wedding . You can check out more of their content and subscribe to their channel on YouTube  here . If you like their stuff and you want to support them, you can check out their Patreon  here .

Related Topics: 2022 Rewind , The Queue

Recommended Reading

Anatomy of a suspense scene: alfred hitchcock’s 4-part formula, how a24 revived studio loyalty, can we have more solarpunk movies, please, why “day for night” is so hard to pull off.

The best video essays of 2022

Our annual celebration of audiovisual essays polled 44 international voters and includes recommendations of more than 180 videos.

13 January 2023

By  Grace Lee , Irina Trocan , Cydnii Wilde Harris

For the sixth edition , the Sight and Sound poll for the best video essays of the year has one consistent trait: diversity. The more frequent formats of YouTube explainer videos and Vimeo-published cinephile formal play/educational endeavours remain predominant, but are not singularly representative. The nominated titles range from exceptional TikTok content (which doesn’t even take the title for brevity – competing against a 30-second montage) to short or feature-length essay films, documentaries, as well as art museum/gallery installations and live performances in academic contexts.

The 2022 video essay retrospective was compiled with the help of 44 voters (from 21 countries) for the ‘Best of’ or ‘ Emerging voices ’ sections. The contributors bring in their expertise as video essayists (several of whom earned nominations in the poll from their peers), film/art critics, film-studies academics (professors, researchers) and festival curators, collectively building a list of 250 nominations, or 181 distinct titles.

Considering how the definition of ‘video essay’ varies depending on the voter, it’s no surprise that the length of one such work produces even less consensus. The average runtime is 23.2 minutes, although 70% of nominated videos are 20-minutes or shorter, with some nominations reaching 3 to 6 hours in length. 

While it has never been the case in the audiovisual realm that ‘best’ and ‘most popular’ are overlapping concepts, our video round-up reveals an almost shocking disparity in this respect. Platform-produced view counts range from single-digit numbers to above 10 million, in the case of Dan Olson’s acclaimed take on NFT s, and several million views for works by Andew Saladino/Royal Ocean Film Society and Jacob Geller. 

Streaming is, however, just one possible venue for the dissemination of digital audiovisual essays, and perhaps not the most transparent one (let’s remember that intentionally watching 30 seconds on YouTube counts as a ‘view’). About a dozen titles nominated by our voters have screened in cinemas. Others were made for film/media studies classrooms and conferences. It’s worth noting that academic events either large ( NECS , Visible Evidence, SCMS ) or specialised (‘Interrogating the Modes of Videographic Criticism’ and ‘Videoessays and Academic Filmmaking: Practices, Pedagogies and Potentials’ at Aarhus University, the Theory and Practice of the Video Essay Conference at UM ass Amherst) have helped part of the videographic community stay in touch throughout the year. 

Further, many titles below were published in academic journals. The well-known [in]Transition (represented in the poll by 11 titles), NECSUS (8 nominations) and Tecmerin (6 titles) are joined by fellow scholarly publications in welcoming audiovisual work (Open Screens published Liz Greene’s multi-nominated Spencer Bell, Nobody Knows My Name; MSMI commissioned Evelyn Kreutzer’s Footsteps, and 16:9, Movie and Journal of Embodied Research also get mentioned).

In the overwhelming volume of possible videos to watch and share, making a choice involves either bookmarking or acknowledging published work. Among the handful of tenacious video essayists and publications whose fine work periodically inspires rhapsodic descriptions, several titles get nominated repeatedly – to name only three makers, Johannes Binotto, Liz Greene and Barbara Zecchi get 14, 9, and 8 mentions, respectively, in the poll. Most titles or authors, however, are mentioned – ‘bookmarked’ – only once, which to us increases the archival value of every contributor’s discoveries. Interestingly, some voters have decided on self-imposed limitations, either by topic (eg. video games), length (keeping all nominated titles short), the cinematic power of nominated videos or defining ‘noteworthy’ as videos one can learn from, etc. Many have expressed their difficulty in choosing just one video by a certain maker.

In thematic terms, cinema is still the prevalent topic, and several of the oft-voted titles tackle familiar subjects in peculiar or innovative ways: intertextual comparison (Hoffman’s Maria’s Marias), deformative criticism (O’Leary’s Men Shouting), archival reconstruction or even fantasising (Zecchi’s video essay on Flor de España), memory and audiovisual language (the Once upon a Screen series, the Art & Trash works on noir, and several of the films made for/prone to festival screenings.)

The corollary of cultural memory, oppressive erasure, also haunts works like Spencer Bell or Eva Hageman’s Shiplap. Johannes Binotto’s continued series Practices of Viewing invites viewers to take distance from contemporary/historical viewer habits. Technology makes its appearance thematically, whether in a discussion of state-of-the art visual effects (whose artisans go unacknowledged and poorly paid), a debunking of NFT myths or a survey of wellness apps employing cognitive-behavioural therapy.

One recurring motif had to do with sound and the moving image, whether in the second NECSUS issue on ‘Sound and the audiovisual essay’ or in less theoretically bent edits. Score and soundtrack were as instructive as sound design and silence. Matthew Tomkinson’s [wings flapping] remixes clips throughout an economic 30-second work. Even when sound is not the topic, multiple nominees were noted for their own inventive sound design techniques. kaptainkristian (Kristian T. Williams) explores two works from seemingly dissimilar mediums in Cowboy Bebop x Blade Runner – Cycle of Influence, revealing how they are in concert together, creating an illuminating experience specifically through sound design.

The deliberate use or absence of sound was another theme found throughout this year’s nominees. Breaking the Silence and Singing by Barbara Zecchi is but one notable, multiple nominee that plays with the filmic modes alongside its source material. Ian Garwood’s careful analysis of pop songs’ place in scholarly video essays curiously intersects with Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin’s lyrical demonstration of Marianne Faithful’s nouvelle vague aura in Thinking Machine #58: As Tears Go By.

Labelling nominated works by country (a very approximate move, in the realm of independent digital production), the list includes 26 different nations, though with clearly uneven presence – the US still dominates the chart, many countries appear through one nomination, and often the frequency of one country is determined by individuals (Stephen Broomer, Colleen Laird and Dayna McLeod represent Canada almost by themselves). However, the fact that long-standing venues of global cinephilia like MUBI , Little White Lies and Desistfilm support video essays is encouraging. The partnership between MUBI and FILMMADRID produced six nominees by different creators in a range of languages about films from all around the world. While the poll continues to be awash with English language videos, this year featured contributions in Farsi, French, German, Czech, Icelandic and Spanish, just to name a few. Maryam Tafakory’s brilliant Nazarbazi was nominated by six different contributors, and unfolds in both Farsi and English.

Throughout the year, as this community has gathered both online and in person at various film festivals and conferences, those in attendance as both presenters and spectators have been able to similarly work in concert. As the association of video essayists grows, the boundaries of the videographic form expand, and the multi-authored Hands of the Future is further evidence. The desktop documentary has become one of the most popular emerging modes of criticism, with more than 10 nominees inviting their audiences into their personal screens. It also provides the starting point for Cormac Donnelly’s Can I Remember It Differently?, which takes as its subject matter revisiting Minority Report (2002) but uses a whole array of videographic techniques to peel back the layers.

Donnelly’s piece is just one of the multiple videos nominated from [in]Transition’s series, Once upon a Screen: vol. 2. Edited by Ariel Avissar and Evelyn Kreutzer, the volume features videos from numerous creators – working with each other’s materials to different ends – challenged to create around the theme of memory, a prompt that led to an array of analyses as varied as their methodologies. With four mentions in the 2022 poll, the TV Dictionary was yet another collection curated by Ariel Avissar for the second year in a row that proved to be a well of inspiration. The structure of the exercise invites creators to play within the set parameters to their hearts’ desire, to colour both inside and outside of the lines.

Further, what is made clear throughout the poll’s nominations is how much this is in fact a welcoming and interconnected community, beyond social media affordances that we’ve learned throughout the years to distrust. We hope this poll is a due celebration and self-examination of the videographic community’s great potential and a catalyst for future inspiration. Thank you to everyone who participated.

Most nominated videos

Liz Greene’s Spencer Bell, Nobody Knows My Name earned 7 mentions, whereas Maryam Tafakory’s Nazarbazi , Eva Hageman’s Shiplap and Maria Hoffman’s Maria’s Marias all got 6 mentions. Cormac Donnelly’s Can I Remember It Differently? was mentioned 5 times, among other nods to videos from the Once upon a Screen series. Kreutzer’s Footsteps , the collaborative Hands of the Future and Binotto’s Synced also got 5 mentions. The Filmkrant Thinking Machine series by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin is represented in the poll by 7 different videos.

Ariel Avissar

Johannes binotto, philip józef brubaker, nelson carvajal, tracy cox-stanton, will digravio, chloé galibert-laîné, ian garwood, jacob geller, tomas genevičius, libertad gills, catherine grant, chiara grizzaffi, delphine jeanneret, miklós kiss, jaap kooijman, evelyn kreutzer, kevin b. lee, adrian martin, daniel mcilwraith, queline meadows, jason mittell, carlos natálio, nuria cubas, javier h. estrada and gabriel doménech, alan o’l eary, inney prakash, julian ross, josé sarmiento, jemma saunders, dan schindel, meg shields, shannon strucci, scout tafoya, max tohline, irina trocan, david verdeure, ricardo vieira lisboa, barbara zecchi, all the votes.

Film theorist, curator and occasional video essayist, Charles University in Prague and Národní filmový archiv

Punctured Sky by Jon Rafman

Rafman again embarks on a journey through the most bizarre places, memories, and artefacts of our online culture, a hauntological quest for a computer game from his youth that is riddled with detours, stutters, and clues that go nowhere. This time, Rafman’s trip involves passages familiar from desktop documentaries, disclosing software interfaces and search engines as fundamentally unable to find what we truly want and trapping us in endless loops of desire. Punctured Sky highlights the difficulties of rescuing our formative experiences with old video games and early internet aesthetics within the bounds of ubiquitous nostalgia and its vicious circles.

Safari(Browser)_The_Nature_of my_Computer.mov by Megan Dieudonné and Andrea Rüthel

This precious discovery from the 2022 Marienbad Film Festival also adopts the form of a desktop documentary. It focuses on images that almost every computer user from the 2000s took for granted – the default Windows and Mac wallpapers. Pictures of idyllic, unobtrusive landscapes that served as a pleasant background for our everyday encounters with software landscapes of a much more complicated kind. The authors treat these visual equivalents of Kenny G songs seriously, searching for the provenance of the original photos and the ‘real-life’ places they depicted and speculating on the wallpapers’ ideological functions and their possible alternatives.

Skin Pleasure by Marius Packbier and Aïlien Reyns

Skin Pleasure showcases the strengths of audiovisual research by examining not only specific objects but also the conditions under which researchers engage with them. The video essay confronts us with a counter-image of watching online pornography, showing us the interface (or ‘skin’) between the perceiving subject and the Brobdingnagian mass of titillating videos. The essay transcends the subject-object boundaries by inventing new ways of clouding, obscuring, and blurring our vision of recognisable figures (yet without ever withdrawing from figuration altogether). If there ever was a case study of haptic criticism, it is this film.

Can I Remember It Differently? by Cormac Donnelly, inspired by a memory text by Ariel Avissar

In my favourite piece from the Once upon a Screen project, Cormac Donnelly attempts to remember his feelings about Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002). Here the author reaches beyond the desktop and employs physical archival sources such as film magazine reviews, marketing material, a CD - ROM press kit, or a Nokia mobile phone to refresh his recollections. The interplay of online and physical materials, guided by a personal voice-over and clever split-screen structure, captures the transitional period of the early 2000s quite effectively. Overall, the video essay’s playful yet historically authentic approach is something that makes it stand out.

Filling (Feeling) the Archival Void: The Case of Helena Cortesina’s Flor de España by Barbara Zecchi

Another videographic essay with archival ambition and whimsical undertones concentrates on the first female-directed Spanish film that did not survive in any material form. The essay is a speculative exercise in reconstructing a missing film through alternative historical sources (the preserved film synopsis, photographs, posters, newspapers, scenes from contemporary silent films, etc). Again, a strong authorial presence makes these archival snippets meaningful and enables Zecchi to reconcile subjective imagination with historical validity. In doing so, the archival void of Flor de España becomes filled with possible histories as well as possible futures.

Home When You Return by Carl Elsaesser

This homage to Joan Thurber Baldwin’s amateur melodramas from the 1950s proposes yet another answer to how a certain archival void – this time of a film genre – could be filled with speculative yet historically relevant content. The melodrama that Elsaesser aims to recover is not precisely that of glossy visuals and exaggerated emotions but that of unfulfilled longing. Empty interiors of a classic 1950s home infiltrated by blurred faces, fleeting voices, and letter excerpts render melodrama through the viewpoint of reflective nostalgia, a history that cannot be restored and survives only in the form of indistinct spectres.

Murky Waters: Submerging in an Aesthetics of Non-transparency by Jaap Kooijman and Patricia Pisters At first glance, Kooijman’s and Pisters’ work could resemble another supercut – a compilation of swimming pool scenes from mainstream cinema. However, the crystal-clear water surfaces soon start to descend into opaque, unknowable depths. Thanks to the meticulous editing, sound design, and, above all, superimpositions, the video essay portrays this journey to the other side of life with frightening easiness.

[Back to top]

Video essayist and media scholar at Tel Aviv University

The Writing Process by Colleen Laird

Colleen Laird is one to watch out for. A newcomer to the field, her work is impeccably impressive (impressively impeccable?) right off the bat, and always fun to watch. It was difficult to pick which of her videos to spotlight here, so it might as well be this one.

Tennis | House by Kevin L. Ferguson

Not gonna say anything about this one – just give it a watch. Be prepared to be confused in the beginning (or possibly all the way through?).

What the Internet Did to Garfield by Super Eyepatch Wolf

The best feature-length video essay presented by a guy wearing a Garfield costume you’ll see all year. Not for the faint of heart.

Empowering the Accent: An (Accented) Video-essay   by Barbara Zecchi

A riff on/response to Ian Garwood’s The Place of Voiceover in Academic Audiovisual Film and Television Criticism , this reflection on the accented voice is as playful as it is timely.

TV Dictionary – I May Destroy You by Joy Hunter

I told myself I’d never pick a video made for a project I organised myself for one of these polls, but Joy Hunter’s take on I May Destroy You is just that good.

The Great Wedding Day Supercut by Yaron Baruch

140 weddings from 10 decades of cinema, skilfully edited into 18 minutes of pure, unadulterated matrimonial bliss.

And be on the lookout for these fantastic unpublished works, which may or may not become publicly available in the coming months:

• Knit One, Stab Two  by Alison Peirse
• Young (Woman) Filmmaker(s)  by Katie Bird
• GeoMarkr  by Chloé Galibert-Laîné
• Music Video Space by Mathias Korsgaard

Lecturer in media and cultural studies, video bricolageur, leading videoessayresearch.org

Breaking the Silence and Singing by Barbara Zecchi

“The voice of protest is the voice of another which seems to have bred in us the instinct to enjoy and fight rather than to suffer and understand.” Virginia Woolf

When I hear a voice it means that I become its vessel, literally and physically. In order to be audible your voice must resonate in me. Again.

Once upon a Screen: Can I Remember It Differently? by Cormac Donnelly

Films change when our life changes. In this beautifully delicate, tender and thoughtful video, analytical re-watching becomes an almost therapeutic endeavour. I know the feeling when certain films by including just the slightest hint at a child’s harm have become unwatchable. But there is something so soothing and so wise in Cormac’s piece that through video essay means we can counter not only films but also our own anxieties. Wasn’t it Godard who insisted that film history should be not just about what was, but what could have been, what still could be?

her eyes, in other words, her mouth by Maíra Mendes Galvão

This essay reminds me of a whole series of videos I was so lucky to see when teaching two workshops at UM ass Amherst. But I am particularly struck by this one by Maíra for its combination of a deceivingly reduced form and radical closeness which turns the video into an experience both visceral and explosive. I will never ever be able to watch Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962) with the same eyes again. And if you watch Maíra’s video you will know that I mean this literally.

L’unique. Maria Casarès. 1922-2022 by Carmen Ciller and Irene Azuag

I am ashamed to admit that I wasn’t aware of the actress Maria Casarès. I had never seen the full film by Cocteau, and the clips I knew only showcased Jean Marais. All the more this video essay has put a spell on me, convincing me that at the centre of Orphée (1950), probably unbeknown to its director and critics, there was always someone else. Even if I don’t speak the video’s language, I think I fully understand – hypnosis does not depend on linguistics. It’s this video that I have running endlessly on my screen.

Spencer Bell, Nobody Knows My Name by Liz Greene

Showing is not repeating. The late bell hooks’ call for an oppositional gaze which allows to find “spaces of resistance” even within the most toxic material, is taken literally by Liz Greene. This reversal of a racist film does not erase the violence and abuse the film is both proof of and instrument for. How could it? But Liz’s reading against the grain of the film’s narrative allows that something else can be seen than what was intended. It makes me aware of my responsibilities in what and how I watch, and of its emancipatory potentialities.

Simultaneous Tensions: The Duo-Vision of Wicked, Wicked by Stephen Broomer, Art &  Trash

My list had to include a piece by Stephen Broomer whose experimental films fascinate me but whom I got to know as a video essayist only this year through his brilliant series Art & Trash. There are too many titles I could pick, but I am drawn to this one in particular, because, when I first watched it, I had the video accidentally played a second time in the background. This resulted in a very confusing soundtrack of double takes – so fitting to the video and to Stephen’s videos in general: They always ring twice. And more.

Maschinenmensch by Wickham Flannagan, Batuhan Buldu, Ruya Nese

We are quick to say that sitting in a cinema is not only a visual but a body-altering experience. We have read all the theoretical texts about it. But rarely have I seen it made felt so harshly, so disturbingly, and so uncannily like in this video. But please be warned and don’t watch this unprepared. I fear a trigger warning is in place here.

TV Dictionary — The Leftovers by Ariel Avissar

I need to include this not because I consider it Ariel’s best but because it is testament not only to the brilliance and addictiveness of the still going strong TV Dictionary series but also to the playfulness, cleverness, and sheer generosity of its inventor. I can’t think of another initiative that made so many finally try their first video essay, while also reinvigorating all the pros.

Bold Decade Films

Spencer Bell, Nobody Knows My Name   by Liz Greene

Greene plays the video clips that feature forgotten actor Spencer Bell in reverse while she narrates the injustices the black thespian faced in Hollywood in the early golden age of cinema. The otherworldly body movements are interesting, but come to a brilliant apotheosis when Bell appears to be pulled backwards by a lightning bolt that captures him like a rope. The poetic entrapment for a black character actor is a potent visual in a video essay that otherwise features many academic touchstones and Greene’s consistent narration that seeks to right a wrong in Hollywood history.

Solaris-2001-McKenna-2022 by Brian D. McKenna - Offscreen

McKenna posits that Tarkovsky’s Solaris is a direct reaction to Kubrick’s 2001, and he juxtaposes many synced movie clips to demonstrate his thesis. I may not agree with him, but I could look at these juxtapositions all day, from sheer admiration for technical interplay between the two films. He wisely ends his narration midway through and allows the films to talk to one another; films which are allowed to play simultaneously, much like a Pink Floyd/Wizard of Oz experiment.

Synced by Johannes Binotto

Binotto excels at interacting with his video subjects, in this case a dreamy scene of French teenagers dancing under coloured lights. By stepping through the scene frame by frame, Binotto transforms the media object by nearly (and then literally) touching it. He also has a talent for not letting his narration slip into academic-speak and he repeatedly shows how what matters most in a video is what movie fans love: the feel of the film.

Bicentennial Yang by Nelson Carvajal

Carvajal has a great talent for mashing up two tangentially related movies and creating trailers for a new, imaginary film. His command of narrative is why I chose this new work of his. I haven’t seen Bicentennial Man or After Yang, and yet because of his editing, their merger is seamless and crystal clear.

Bid Up by Will DiGravio

Personal Shopper as Vlog by Alessia Duarte, Laura Fritschi und Naomi Jackson

The Unloved, Part 104: Ambulance by Scout Tafoya

Why THE BATMAN Is So Beautiful by Patrick Tomasso

Are TV Shows Now Being Shot for TikTok? by Kevin B. Lee

Captain Marvel as Military Propaganda by Tony Ninov

Professor at Savannah College of Art and Design, founder and editor of The Cine-Files

I have selected the five videos that make up the collection Sound and the Audiovisual Essay Part 2, edited by Liz Greene in NECSUS . Each of these videos is wonderful in its own right, but together they represent a brilliant intervention in audiovisual approaches to the study of sound – so diverse, lively and rich!

Synced by Johannes Binnotto

The Place of the Pop Song in Academic Audiovisual Film and Television Criticism by Ian Garwood

Le Plaisir: Voices and Viewpoints   by John Gibbs and Douglas Pye

Irresistible Instrumentalism: Materially Thinking Through Music-making in the Story Worlds of Silent Films   by Catherine Grant

The Gravity of the Acousmêtre: Listening via the Radio and Through Paratext in Film by Liz Greene

Host,  The Video Essay Podcast ; creator, Notes on Videographic Criticism

These seven videos/projects/films, for me, epitomise the greatness of this form: they provide a new way of seeing and engaging with familiar images, sounds, and mediums. Each taught me how to be a better watcher, listener, and reader. They inspired me, and I look forward to returning to them time and time again in the years to come.

Shiplap by Eva Hageman

Beginning with clips from HGTV programming, Hageman analyses the history of ‘shiplap’ through the lens of Waco, Texas, unpacking its racist roots and revealing its hidden, violent history. Construction, reconstruction, deconstruction, all take on new meanings in this video, both as it relates to the process of videographic criticism and the content of the work itself. What sticks with me though is Hageman’s remarkable voiceover, guiding us through this “American nightmare.”

Speaking Nearby by Amaya Bañuelos Marco

Video essays offer a unique way to shape one’s own viewing choices. Not until watching this fantastic piece did I finally watch Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Reassemblage (1982) and Margot Benacerraf’s Araya (1959). I not only found a way into these films because of this work, but my experience was enriched – and my understanding deepened – as a result of watching all three together.

Accidentally Sexist – How to Rewrite an Icky Scene by Afterthoughts

An analysis of a single, sexist scene becomes a wide-ranging video about sexist writing, sexism in professional athletics and e-sports, bad writing, talking about sexism online, the nature of analysis and persuasion, and so much more. Through a mix of virtuosic pacing and editing, coupled with a voiceover that guides us through each step of the way, this video by Afterthoughts is a new gold standard for me in how video essays can engage in close analysis to not only better understand a scene, but make its audience better viewers.

Makeover Movie by Sue Ding

A superb deconstruction of the makeover movie trope featuring the thoughts and conversation of the director’s friends as they watch a cut of the video. What sits with me is the ways in which this video blends together the experiences of individuals with the remixed films to understand the degree of universality that can often be found in the deeply personal.

A deeply moving, personal, political, and revelatory work that showcases the potentials of videographic criticism as it relates to the archive. Video essays can not only animate the archive, but attempt to fill, as this video essay does, voids in the archive. A work that charts the way forward for what video essays can do and be.

Las Marías de María / Maria’s Marias by Maria Hoffman

Multiscreen juxtaposition sits at the foundation of videographic criticism. In this video, Hofmann places The Sound of Music (Wise, 1965) beside “its almost unknown German original,” Die Trapp-Familie (Liebeneier, 1956) to challenge the cultural and critical histories of the film. With a mix of archival audio pulled from various sources, the video will leave anyone who watches it with a new and greater understanding of Wise’s film (and a desire to watch Liebeneier’s), showcasing the power of this form to alter our engagement with otherwise familiar images and sounds.

Footsteps by Evelyn Kreutzer

A personal anecdote comes to inform a reading of a key motif in Hitchcock’s films: sounds of feet. Though the films of Hitchcock are the corpus from which this video draws, it becomes about the sounds of feet in film in general, and thus how we interpret them in our own lives, through the screen or otherwise.

Video essayist, senior researcher at the Lucerne School of Art and Design (Switzerland)

My selection profiles practitioners whose videographic work I discovered this year – being either newcomers to the field, or makers who weren’t yet on my personal radar.

Meeting Meat Joy by Chloé Lavalette and Rémi Dauvergne

Based on a deep, clumsy and humorous Skype encounter between French researcher Chloé Lavalette and legendary artist Carolee Schneemann, this evocative experimental essay explores whether – and at what costs – spectators should help artworks escape the intentionality of their authors and the zeitgeist in which they were made, and questions the contemporary affordances of a certain feminist legacy.

So I Didn’t Sleep Very Well Last Night by Dayna McLeod

Produced in the context of the amazing Sociability of Sleep collective research project, this hilarious video performs as a dream confessional as much as a playful exploration of the aesthetics of social media filtering, while gently poking at female (self-)representation in visual media and mainstream culture.

Ob Scena by Paloma Orlandini Castro

A thoughtful exploration of the aesthetics and politics of online pornography, this video essay features one of my favourite videographic dispositif of 2022: a projection box with hand drawings on transparent layers, used here to demonstrate the genitalia-centredness of most pornographic visual compositions.

Crushed by Ella Rocca

A playful, moving and brave desktop exploration of what it means to have a ‘crush’ on somebody. I was especially drawn to the way this video essay incorporates interview footage in the flow of screen recordings – the intimate conversation between the two protagonists reintroducing reciprocality and otherness into what might have otherwise remained a distanced foray into the arguably creepy mechanisms of online stalking.

Echos of Dreams by Emily Su Bin Ko

Having only seen it once, my memory of this video essay is as free-floating as I remember its narration to be. I was most struck by its intermingling of found footage and performative re-enactment, as well as its evocative exploration of what ties together spectatorial (female) identification and embodiment.

Navigators by Noah Teichner

As challenging as it is gratifying to watch, Noah Teichner’s years-in-the-making, feature-length Navigators revisits an episode of anarchist history through a careful re-editing of Buster Keaton’s filmography. Shot and edited entirely on 16 and 35mm film, the essay unfolds as a both rigorous and poetic work of visual and literary historiography.

Senior lecturer in film and television studies, University of Glasgow

My list contains video essays that fall under five minutes. There are a couple of motivations for establishing this arbitrary temporal parameter. Maybe it’s just me, but aren’t video essays getting longer these days, in the world of the YouTube monologue, but also that of the academic journal? Yet, the time available to view them hasn’t been extended, so it might be useful to highlight some short, sharp examples of the form. Also, in my teaching, I routinely ask students to produce work within miserly time constraints, so this list provides an illustration of what can be achieved within those limits.

[wings flapping] by Matthew Tomkinson

TV Dictionary — Line of Duty by Lucy Fife Donaldson

Improbable Dialogism or the Art of Flying by Barbara Zecchi

True Enough by Chloé Galibert-Laîné

Lost Wave by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin

Philosophical Frameworks and Feminist Praxes in Lady Bird (Gerwig, 2017) by Rob Stone

I know this exceeds my arbitrary time limit, but this is actually comprised of three videos, two of which are under five minutes. Even if the third comes in at a mighty 11 minutes (and one second), it still retains the other two’s trailer-like properties, each serving as an accompaniment to ideas also explored in the longer form of a monograph.

Video essayist, writer about games/art/phenomena

in this one i die and go to hell. by Leo Vader

After slipping on a toy car and knocking himself out, Leo has an extended argument about going to hell with a divine version of himself. It’s funny in the way only a Leo Vader video can be (“Oh, the Youtuber who jacked off all the time? I’m sorry, we actually had you in the Mother Theresa section”), while simultaneously reckoning with the cognitive dissonance of knowing our actions are largely meaningless while still attempting to live well.

Gears Through the Years: A Gears of War Campaign Retrospective by Noah Caldwell-Gervais

Noah applies his razor-sharp thematic analysis to the gore-soaked shooters in the “Gears of War” game series and emerges with a surprisingly nuanced portrait of how military valorisation influences a society and the individuals within it. An exhaustive but eminently watchable video that ultimately reclaims Gears of War as far more than a bro-y cover shooter.

Cowboy Bebop x Blade Runner — Cycle of Influence (feat. Spike) by kaptainkristian

Within the worlds of Blade Runner and Cowboy Bebop, style is inextricable from substance. Kaptainkristian delivers on this legacy with a stunningly edited meditation on the influence each property had on the other. The script is lovely and it ends with Steve Blum reciting the tears in rain speech (!), but the visuals are where the essay truly shines, blending together Blade Runner and Bebop so effectively they meld into one unbroken dystopic flow.

The Thinking Machine #62: The Cinematographer’s Signature by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin

A good video essay is probably something that shows not only what can’t be described in words, but also what can’t be seen at first glance. Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin’s essay on cinematographer Michael Ballhaus’ virtuoso shot in The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979) once again demonstrates the duo’s virtuosity.

Closing Distance: The Cosmic View, the Terrestrial Horizon, and Jean-Claude Labrecque’s Essai à la mille by Stephen Broomer

Borrowed Dreams: Joseph Cornell and the Archive as Psychic Imprint by Stephen Broomer

These are two excellent video essays (among many others) by Stephen Broomer about experimental filmmakers Jean-Claude Labrecque and Joseph Cornell who are often undeservedly forgotten in the global context of film history. An intriguing analysis of film language and techniques.

Hands of the Future by Sabrina D. Marques, Mehdi Jahan, Dan Shoval, Adrian Martin (Voiceover)

Trapped in the eternal moment of the present, the characters in this wonderful essay confirm their creator’s statement that “each hand is like a screen yet to be filled by a movie”.

Le Plaisir: Voices and Viewpoints by John Gibbs and Douglas Pye

“Good criticism should imply a conversation”, claim John Gibbs and Douglas Pye. Their dialogic video essay form was inspired by Max Ophuls’ wonderful Le Plaisir (1952), and the end result is a great example of metacriticism.

Once upon a Screen: Radical Elsewhere by Philip Józef Brubaker

Gilles Deleuze’s ideas, and especially his warning about the danger of being caught in other people’s dreams, continue to inspire great films and video essays. And that familiar feeling that the movie knew me better than I knew myself.

I’m always interested in video essays’ attempts to analyse the relationship between video and sound. Johannes Binotto shows that the coupling of optics and acoustics in cinema has never been taken for granted and that it is still an area open to experimentation.

Audiovisual essayist and professor of film at the University of Reading

Tracing the Threads of Influence: George Hoyningen-Huene and Les Girls (1957) by Lucy Fife Donaldson

Dance, Camera, Dance: Directorial Choreography in the Live Anthology Drama by Peter Labuza

Temporal Ghosts | David Lowery’s A Ghost Story  by Enrique Saunders

Filmmaker, video essayist , researcher and film professor at Universidad de las Artes.

GeoMarkr by Chloé Galibert-Laîné

Smart, fun and exciting video essay, full of surprises.

The Hands of the Future by Sabrina D. Marques, Mehdi Jahan, Dan Shoval, Adrian Martin (Voiceover)

One of my favourite subjects in film. Beautifully done and covering a wide range of films.

Letter Across Oceans: To Tiziana Panizza / Carta a través de los océanos: A Tiziana Panizza by Catherine Grant and Paul Merchant

An epistolary video essay on one of the most brilliant filmmakers working today.

Four Ways to Be a Woman Artist… According to the Movies by Susan Felleman

The first video essay by Felleman, on a very interesting subject. Hard to forget this video essay because the tendencies it describes continue to be reproduced in contemporary film and TV .

Zohra, The Second Woman by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin

Video essay on the haunting presence of actress Zohra Lampert in two films, Opening Night (John Cassavetes, 1977) and Splendor in the Grass (Elia Kazan, 1961).

Paisaje — Movimiento by Mariana Daniela Torres Valencia

Beautiful meditation on the work of Artavazd Peleshyán; full of texture, colour and movement.

Screen media-maker and publisher of scholarly video essays, and a former professor of screen studies.

I thought I might retire from voting after last year’s S&S poll. I was convinced otherwise by the amazing scope and quality of this year’s videographic criticism in my own academic field of film, television and screen studies. All the videos below have scholarly value, but all are also powerful and beautiful films that work amazingly well on big and small screens in the wider public domain, and in film festivals, too.

Nazarbazi   by Maryam Tafakory

My absolute favourite was Maryam Tafakory’s latest exquisite work Nazarbazi. This film will last the test of time, but also speaks so potently to our present moment.

We published Shiplap at [in]Transition , where it was brilliantly evaluated by two wonderful peer reviewers Terri Francis and Brandy Monk-Payton. Everyone should read their thoughts on it. For me, the work showed how one can make politically and intellectually important work about the most banal vernacular forms of throwaway television in poetic and haunting ways.

Liz’s work gets more and more powerful and pertinent with each passing year. She is a truly outstanding practice-researcher working with videographic criticism, and deserves all the awards and accolades she receives. Spencer Bell… is the first published part of a new research project she has begun on The Wizard of Oz universe. She made another of my favourite video essays this year as part of her academic research The Gravity of the Acousmêtre , published at NECSUS .

Mirror, Mirror by Ariel Avissar and Evelyn Kreutzer

My favourite video in the Once upon a Screen vol. 2 collection on formative movie experiences, led by Avissar and Kreutzer, which we’re publishing at [in]Transition . The entire collection is brilliant. But Mirror, Mirror epitomises the project as a whole and is the most amazingly collaborative videographic work, incorporating the texts, editing, voices, and filmic and televisual references of five participants: Avissar, Kreutzer, Barbara Zecchi, Alan O’L eary, Maria Hofmann, who contributed other videos and texts to the project, with Johannes Binotto, Philip Brubaker, Cormac Donnelly, Jiří Anger Veronika Hanakova, Clair Richards, Julia Schoenheit, Chloé Galibert-Laîné, Gregory Brophy and Will Webb.

Mad Men’s Babylon by Ariane Hudelet

Intertextuality – “the shaping of a text’s meaning by another text, either through deliberate compositional strategies such as quotation, allusion, calque, plagiarism, translation, pastiche or parody, or by interconnections between similar or related works perceived by an audience or reader of the text” [Wikipedia] – is always my favourite scholarly subject, and this video is always going to be my favourite video on that subject. Hudelet weaves a virtuosic videographic argument of magisterial proportions and beauty. Love it!

Practices of Viewing: Screenshot by Johannes Binotto

Johannes has had another astonishingly inspiring year of videographic production, of which the Practices of Viewing series is probably the peak. It’s hard just to choose one PoV work from him, but Screenshot is the one that returns to my mind most often, so it definitely gets my vote. I can’t wait to see what Johannes makes next. He is an artist and a scholar of the most important kind – someone who works with his most personal vulnerabilities and his practical inventiveness, as well as with his incredible breadth of knowledge and learning.

The Thinking Machine #61: Rose // Eros by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin

My favourite video essayist duo continues to produce the highest quality work week in week out, including for their amazing Filmkrant column The Thinking Machine . It’s hard to choose just one work by these makers (I also love no. 55 The Unbreakable Frame ), but no. 61 Rose // Eros is just the most beautiful video one can imagine on my second favourite subject: intratextuality – the study of internal aesthetic and textual connections. It teaches us about the motifs, figures and transformations in Werner Schroeter’s 1986 masterpiece The Rose King and is a masterpiece itself in so doing.

Associate professor in film and sonic arts, Northumbria University

I have not had the opportunity to watch widely this year. Instead, my list (in alphabetical order) includes works that chime closely with my area of research into sound, music, David Lynch, and archival studies. Some of these works are by established video essayists and some are by researchers/artists new to publishing in this form. I find all of these works to be an inspiration. 

Johannes Binotto offers a compelling example of sync and the early use of Walkman sound in film, unpicking theories of film sound, the split subject, and disruption on screen. Like much of Binotto’s work, the elegance of the piece is frame perfect.

Lucy Fife Donaldson’s account of George Hoyningen-Huene’s contribution and collaborations with George Cukor, Gene Allen and Orry-Kelly is a thorough investigation drawing from archival research. This audiovisual essay was published in December 2022 in Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism, issue 10 .

Ian Garwood riffs on his Indy Vinyl project by producing an audiovisual essay that considers how pop music is and can most effectively be used in this format. Garwood details the influence of other practitioners on his approaches to the audiovisual essay and points to how to best do this work audiovisually.

John Gibbs and Douglas Pye allow us to listen in the dark to their binaural recording of a conversation about Max Ophuls’ Le Plaisir (1952). This requires time and a sustained listening session but the rewards are as pleasurable as they are illuminating.

Irresistible Instrumentalism: Materially Thinking Through Music-making in the Story Worlds of Silent Films by Catherine Grant

Catherine Grant investigates musical accompaniment in early film through remix practice and textual engagement with film music theory and history. Grant draws together key performances of early music representation to allow us to listen differently.

Footsteps by Evenlyn Kreutzer 

With her focus on the musicalised rhythmic approach to film sound studies, Kreutzer invites us to pay attention to the interplay of sound effects and an absence of sound in Hitchcock’s films. This will be the inaugural audiovisual essay published by the journal, Music, Sound, and the Moving Image in December 2022.

Wild at Heterosexuality by Dayna McLeod

McLeod’s performative style and editing prowess underpin her sharply humorous queering of David Lynch’s Wild at Heart (1990). This work leaves me gasping for breath!”

Postdoctoral fellow at IULM  University

Climate Fictions, Dystopias and Human Futures by Julia Leyda, Kathleen Loock

Sleep by Johannes Binotto

The Cinematographer’s Signature by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin

Irresistible Instrumentalism by Catherine Grant

Angstlust by Alan O’L eary

A History of the World According to Getty Images by Richard Misek

Lecturer at University of Art and Design HEAD – Genève, co-director Festival Cinéma Jeune Public, curator at Locarno Film Festival, Int. Short Film Festival Winterthur and La Fête du Slip

F1 ghting Looks Different 2 Me Now  by Fox Maxy

Fox MAXY is a California-based artist and filmmaker of Kumeyaay and Payómkawichum ancestry. The experience of being Native American is a central theme in her work, which deals with Native American identity and culture, and the power of decolonisation. Her films are made of digital collage portraying political and formally playful expression of modern Indigenous life. Her work has screened at MoMA, LACMA , Rotterdam, and BlackStar Film Festival among other places. In 2022, Fox was named as Sundance Institute’s Merata Mita Fellow. She represents one of the most interesting and daring voices of contemporary filmmaking.

Il faut regarder le feu ou bruler dedans (Watch the Fire or Burn Inside It)  by Caroline Poggi, Jonathan Vinel

Il faut regarder le feu ou bruler dedans (Watch the Fire or Burn Inside It) is a cry to save the land from mass construction and mass tourism through the voice of a young woman healing it by burning the land. For years the island of Corsica has been stricken by devastating wildfires. Here, a woman chooses to care for the earth by burning it. She documents the process, allowing a few musical detours along the way. Their filmography includes: Tant qu’il nous reste des fusils à pompe (2014), Notre heritage (2015), After School Knife Fight (2017), Jessica Forever.

Lake of Fire   by Neozoon

The fear of death can only be conquered if people believe in a powerful saviour – otherwise eternal damnation in hell is waiting. The documentary film collage Lake of Fire shows how the dualistic view and way of life of certain believers additionally fuels the climate change-related hell on earth in a dangerous way. NEOZOON , founded 2009, is a female art collective based in Germany and France. The collective is interested in the role of the animal, whether living or dead, and its relationship with humans in an urban environment.

A Winter’s Elegy   by Aakash Chhabra

Aakash Chhabra subtly explains the weight of the caste system. The history of the cast-off town of Panipat is the one of its migrant workers, found in the folds of fabric sold in its marketplaces. The film essay combines everyday images in this cloth-recycling wasteland with the testimony of a young woman who grew up under the industrial tin sheets.

O mar também é seu (The Sea Is Also Yours)   by Michelle Coelho

Michelle Coelho’s work focuses on agrarian conflicts, violation of rights, and social mobilisation. In this film, the power of the dream and storytelling takes another dimension. A woman dreams that she is transformed into an animal. Between sleep and wakefulness, she remembers her abortion and the ghosts that have accompanied her since. Other women of the island reveal mysteries that help her heal the wounds caused by the violence that nightmarishly condemns women in her country.

Bigger on the Inside   by Angelo Madsen Minax

From an isolated wooded cabin a trans man star gazes, scruff chats with guys, watches youtube tutorials, takes drugs, and lies about taking drugs – feeling his way through a cosmology of embodiment. Bigger on the Inside probes the boundaries between interior and exterior, the micro and macro, to consider bodily insides as passage way and portal, relative to the immensity of longing. Nudes and landscapes are equally erotic. Eros as an issue of boundaries: When I desire you, a part of me is gone. Land is surreal. Memory is porous.

The Spiral   by María Silvia Esteve

A WhatsApp audio begins, and with it, a downward spiral unfolds. The voice of a woman sinking into a health anxiety attack, quickly entangles a complex labyrinth of fears and emotions. The Spiral is a dive into a lonely ride, an hypnotic escalation towards childhood, family, and the loneliness of “home”. Does home really feel like home?

Associate professor in audiovisual arts and cognition at University of Groningen, NL / co-author of Film Studies in Motion: From Audiovisual Essay to Academic Research Video

Au cinéma! by Johanna Vaude

A lovely tribute to the theatrical experience. Supercutting excerpts from films depicting a variety of film viewing acts in the cinema, it could be a scene from György Pálfi’s mashup film “ FINAL CUT – Ladies and Gentlemen”.

Letter Across Oceans – To Tiziana Panizza  by Catherine Grant and Paul Merchant

“The messages in bottles don’t often arrive safe and sound”. Beautifully thought-out, written, paced, sound designed piece of poetic audiovisual work. A subtle but passionate contribution to the growing body of environmental audiovisual works.

Harnessing Perversity: J.G. Ballard, David Cronenberg and Crash  by Jonathan Bygraves

Simple but effective little video, exploring the commonalities between the work of J.G. Ballard and David Cronenberg, made for Watershed’s screening of the 4K restoration of Cronenberg’s Crash (1996).

Scholarship from the More-Than-Human? Constraint and Cognitive Agency in Videographic Criticism by Alan O’Leary

“What happens when arts and media cross previously established boundaries?” “What happens when scholarship crosses previously established boundaries?” Although, as O’Leary puts it, it is only a ‘draft video presentation’ (originally produced for the 6th International Society for Intermedial Studies Conference), I enjoyed it more than anything I’ve read on the topic because it is not only arguing for the value of parametric and other constraint-based videographic methods, but also, through its triptych-clear visual didacticism, make the viewer experience such scholarship.

Sound of Metal: An Exploration into the Internal Focalization of Sound & Silence by Ümran Bayazit, Aleksandras Gasiunas, Meke Levenga, Nenritji Esther Suwa, Maartje Westenberg

Everyone understood the lesson (Ruben learned) at the end of Darius Marder’s Sound of Metal (2020). However, to understand how such a powerful takeaway is primed throughout the film, culminating in the final scene, you need a thorough and sensitive close analysis. I’m happy to share the work of my BA students that accomplishes exactly that.

Associate professor media studies, University of Amsterdam, organiser ASCA Videographic Criticism Seminar

Published in [in]Transition, Eva Hageman’s Shiplap takes a seemingly random and recurring item from the makeover television series Fixer Upper to expose histories of racism. The strength of the audiovisual essay is its subtlety. Rather than crudely connecting the triviality of the television genre to the seriousness of a hidden histories, the audiovisual essay shows the connection by carefully unraveling the different layers, similar to the way the layers of drywall are removed to reveal the shiplap.

Maria’s Marias by Maria Hoffman

Published in Tecmerin, Maria Hofmann’s Maria’s Marias presents a compare and contrast of Die Trapp-Familie (1956) and The Sound of Music (1965) in a continuous split screen, thereby cropping the images from both films. The soundtrack consists of a collage of voices from a variety of sources, telling different stories about the cinematic representations of the Von Trapp family’s history. The result is a fascinating comparison, which may not say much about “the essence of Austrian culture,” but does raise questions about cinematic storytelling and the possibilities to disrupt such narratives.

Published in Open Screens, Liz Greene’s Spencer Bell, Nobody Knows My Name not only brings attention to the 1925 film adaptation of The Wizard of Oz, but also highlights the forgotten role of Black American actor Spencer Bell, who plays the lion. By selecting only the scenes featuring (the silent) Bell, and playing them backwards, Greene invites us to look critically at the representation of Blackness. Greene’s voiceover presents an explanatory narrative, but also reflects the author’s archival search and emphasises her own subject position, clearly speaking with a female voice and non-American accent.

Postdoctoral researcher and video essayist, Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf

Practices of Viewing: Dubbing by Johannes Binnotto

A fascinating ‘anti-cinephilic’ take on film sound, exemplified through a cinephilic darling (Hitchcock). The role and influence of dubbing onto a specific film experience and (even more so) on the ways in which many of us first encountered and now remember cinema deserves much more attention, especially now that video essay culture seems to be more and more concerned with questions of language, multi-linguality, accented voiceovers, and related questions of (sonic) diversity and inclusivity. Binotto’s use of repetition, slow motion and multiple languages makes a powerful case for listening more closely.

The Mechanics of Fluids by Gala Hernández López

In this desktop documentary, Hernández López immerses herself and us into the darkness of incel networks on the internet, a subculture that appears both hidden and in plain sight, that hides behind online anonymity, yet produces real-life terror. Through a variety of screen-capture and animated stylistic approaches and voice-over narrations, the filmmaker manages to evoke a peculiar, troubling, affective response, lingering in-between empathy, rejection, and confusion. A great space to find oneself in after seeing a film, if you ask me.

A very recent and very personal short video made by prolific video essayist Barbara Zecchi that is simple in its structure and stylistic approach, and to a large extent lets the images and sounds speak for themselves. I was very moved by her use of close-ups on children’s faces as they are gradually literally and figuratively finding and fighting for their voices.

This video joins scenes of palm reading from various filmic sources. It evokes a very strong sense of tactility, not just in terms of its imagery but also in terms of what videographic practices FEEL like (touching a film, sticking films together, arranging them…). Its portrayal of the past and future of its various characters’ life lines suggests that it’s as much about the past and future of film itself – a longing for the touchability of analog film perhaps, produced in a form (the supercut, the video essay) that thrives digitally.

A very interesting study in adaptation and transatlantic cultural influence, framed through a playful nod to kogonada’s seminal What Is Neo-Realism?

I’ve rarely seen the split screen being used so well and so strikingly for the purposes of comparison – a comparison that goes way beyond the specific films and national genres at its forefront.

Auditorium by Johannes Binnotto

I’m considering this a ‘bonus pick’ so to speak because I got to witness its making and because it is a personal memory for me. Produced with, for, and through a strong sense of community and playfulness, it carries a lot of joyfulness and tenderness that speaks so much to this year, in which we could gather in large groups in person again.

Locarno Film Festival professor for the Future of Cinema, USI  Lugano

Sound and the Audiovisual Essay, Part 2: The Theory, History, and Practice of Film Sound and Music in Videographic Criticism  by Liz Greene, Johannes Binotto, Ian Garwood, John Gibbs and Douglas Pye, Catherine Grant

While my favourite video essay from last year was a series produced by a single author, this time I was most impressed by Liz Greene’s curation of five original video essays by six different authors, each taking a distinctively different approach to exploring cinematic sound. Maybe it is cheating to lump them together, but I was struck by how collectively they form as deep and complementary an exploration of a single subject as one could wish for. Simply a landmark achievement in videographic sound studies, as well as a model for thematic curation to create connections between authors.

Nazarbazi by Maryam Tafakory

Tafakory’s expansion of her previous video essay Irani Bag is a quantum leap in what we might call ‘videographic poetics’. A montage of nearly 100 classic Iranian films, on-screen text, rhythm and sound are all choreographed flawlessly into a meditation on cinematic and real world separation, prohibition and longing.

The Potemkinists / Potemkinistii by Radu Jude

Sergei Eisenstein’s silent masterpiece Battleship Potemkin (1925) is brought out into the open, literally, with an open-air dialogue that recounts how historical events counter Eisenstein’s telling. Unexpectedly timely, it explores the longstanding tensions between Russia, Ukraine and Romania, and in doing so casts a fresh critical light on a canonical work of cinema.

Platformer Toolkit by Mark Brown

This is a beautifully presented and addictively interactive introduction to the design considerations that go into a video game. While it might seem more like a tutorial at first, it’s self-designation as a ‘video essay’ is well-earned, as it uses its chosen medium to shed critical insight upon it. In any event, it opens wide the possibilities for interactive and programmed interfaces for video essays and videographic scholarship.

Fixing My Brain with Automated Therapy by Jacob Geller

This stretches what I would feel comfortable calling a video essay. A 53-minute on-camera monologue that starts out as a review of therapy apps, which steadily deepens into a provocative critique of how Cognitive Behavioural Therapy ( CBT ) may be the preferred psychological treatment model for the booming industry of AI -driven therapy. Left me thinking about the relationship between artificial intelligence and human wellness, computer vs. human programming.

Like There’s No Tomorrow by Joel Blackledge

Among the video essays published on [in]Transition this year, this one really got me in how it drew attention to a trope that had been hidden in plain sight: the role of retro pop culture in Hollywood sci-fi and dystopia movies. A powerful melancholy exudes from the accumulation of these tropes, while Blackledge’s narration raises several provocative interpretations for its significance. It also received some of the most rigorous peer reviews of any video essay this year (from notable post-cinema scholars Selmin Kara and Shane Denson), altogether setting an exemplary instance of generative discourse.

What Rules the Invisible by Tiffany Sia

Another selection from the circles of experimental cinema, Sia intricately edits decades worth of amateur travelogue footage of Hong Kong, interspersed with her mother’s account of life inside the colony. Words confront images to reveal what they don’t show and what their creators can’t see.

Film critic and audiovisual essayist

Sordid Scandal by Amalia Ulman

This was first presented as a video performance piece in 2020, but only made available as a stand-alone work in the wake of Ulman’s brilliant 2021 feature El Planeta. A dizzying détournement of the slideshow presentation format, it delves deep into the sordid scandal of film culture.

Hardly Working by Total Refusal

I figured that Machinima (recustomising parts of video games) was a played-out or co-opted game by now, but the collective Total Refusal have revitalised this audiovisual genre with a superb analysis of the luckless lives of extras in Red Dead Redemption 2. And how many audiovisual essays thank Karl Marx in the end credits?

An amazing montage, harsh and lyrical (not to mention timely), which guides us to read the extremely eloquent absences and silences in a period of Iranian cinema.

Johanna Vaude is a superstar of audiovisual montage; her work crosses effortlessly between avant-garde traditions and first-rate televisual entertainment. There have been many ‘spectators within the spectacle’ supercuts, but none quite like this.

Hands of the Future by Sabrina D. Marques, Mehdi Jahan and Dan Shoval

A beautiful and original choice of motif: palm reading scenes in cinema. Poised between chance and destiny, fate and possibility. These three cinephiles dive deep. Full disclosure: that’s my voice at the start delivering the opening narration.

Three Minutes: A Lengthening by Bianca Stigter

One of two feature films on my list. This extraordinary 69-minute piece is an incredible work of historical excavation, slowing down and looking closely to discover what is lost and hidden in documentary traces.

Moonage Daydream by Brett Morgen

Why did I pick it? Why the hell not?!? Watching this dazzling compilation/remix of David Bowie footage (much of it previously unseen), I thought: it’s one big audiovisual essay! Some magnificent sequences, and a compellingly restricted point-of-view.

Video essayist, filmmaker

My Place by Miguel G. Otero

Negative Space by Colleen Laird

transitional steps [Sirk | Stahl | Stairs] by Johannes Binotto

From One Shore to the Other / De una orilla a la otra by Valentín Vía Vázquez

Video essayist (as kikikrazed) and moderator of The Essay Library Discord server

Cowboy Bebop x Blade Runner — Cycle of Influence by kaptainkristian aka Kristian T. Williams

kaptainkristian is known primarily for his slick visual style, but this video’s standout is its sound design. In his exploration of the reciprocal influence between Cowboy Bebop and Blade Runner, Williams blends together the two worlds until they become one. The sequence where Steve Blum (who voices Spike in Cowboy Bebop) reads the ‘tears in the rain’ monologue from Blade Runner is my favourite video essay moment this year.

The Strange Beauty of Absurdle’s Algorithm by Max Tohline

It’s always a treat to see a gaming video essay that plays with the game itself – the script of this essay’s narration follows along with different rounds of Absurdle, a variation on the popular Wordle. The clever wordplay and rhyme scheme make this essay on the meaning(s) of ‘play’ in video games and video essays extra fun.

Platformer Toolkit by Game Maker’s Toolkit aka Mark Brown

Advertised as an “interactive video essay,” the Platformer Toolkit is an unpolished platformer game that gives you the tools to improve it. It’s a great example of using interactivity to talk about an interactive medium. To learn more about it before playing yourself, see the short video about it on his YouTube channel .

Everything Everywhere All At Once by @pbpbbpbppb aka Pavan Bivigou

This is one of the rare TikTok essays that made me completely pause my scrolling and let it wash over me. I think about the final line, “all the other yous are rooting for you,” constantly.

Rabbit, Candide, and a World Gone to Hell by The Nukes

I don’t want to say too much about this one, because I think it is better to experience it for yourself. All I’ll say is that I found it to be incredibly striking and original. Just watch it – and then watch it again.

Zoopraxography for Lovers (Cinema’s First Kiss Was Between Two Women) by Lily Alexandre

Lesbian author and activist Madeline Davis once said, “our community has a past, but no history.” In this video essay, Alexandre begins with a history lesson on early photography and deftly weaves in the story of two nameless women seen kissing in a Muybridge motion study. By situating this kiss within a larger history of film, their story is lifted out of the shadows, and it feels as if a missing piece is being restored. All of this builds to a deeply moving ending that left me speechless.

Film and media professor at Middlebury College; project manager of [in]Transition: 

Is ‘Cancel Culture’ Really a Threat to America? by Michael Hobbes

Journalist and podcaster Hobbes has made a career debunking media myths, and his first video in years is a stellar example of his work – it’s the video I share with anyone complaining about ‘cancel culture’, effectively rebutting all of the hand-wringing and victimisation discourse to anyone willing to listen. My favourite example from 2022 of the possibilities of the YouTube-style video essay, and one that should be seen by more people within the video essay community.

A masterclass in using subtle videographic techniques to create a work that is both intellectually and emotionally powerful, Greene’s choice to reverse the scenes of Bell makes the original unearthed footage uncanny and unsettling. Together with her measured and thoughtful narration, alongside wisely selected quotations, the deceptively simple video exemplifies what academic videographic criticism can offer.

Academic videographic criticism has not given television as much attention it deserves, and when it does, videos typically ignore popular “everyday television” forms like reality TV . Hageman’s video treats the home makeover genre as an archival site to explore racial and material histories, presented with an otherworldly style that makes the critical insights feel more tangible and real than the constructed norms of the genre it mines for footage.

Succession but It’s Arrested Development  by Luis Azevedo

This needs to be experienced in tandem with Azevedo’s Arrested Development but It’s Succession  - these complementary masterful intercuts of two iconic TV series demonstrate the power of sound to signify tone and genre. I prefer this sitcom-isation of Succession, largely because it masterfully uses Arrested Development’s fractured complex storytelling to convey a somewhat coherent narrative arc, and lets us see the comedic tones of these dramatic performances shine through.

Line Goes Up: The Problem with NFT s by Dan Olson

I rarely have time or patience for the 2+ hour video essays that have become quite popular (especially with my 16-year-old!), but this one is an exception. Olson presents a comprehensive case for why NFT s, and their associated crypto, Web3, and blockchain trends, are total scams. While I don’t think it ultimately needs to be a feature-length documentary, it’s an utterly captivating and convincing example of this YouTube format — and it has proven to be rather prescient since it was released in January 2022.

Once upon a Screen: Can I Remember It Differently?  by Cormac Donnelly

2022 saw a rise in interesting collaborations within the videographic world, including a group Exquisite Corpse experiment , and the recently-released Once upon a Screen vol. 2 projects. From the latter collection, this video, based on Ariel Avissar’s written memory, stuck with me the most, as Donnelly uses a wide range of videographic techniques to create something that is simultaneously embedded in his own personal history, and captures Avissar’s writing. Both authors’ written commentaries add rich layers of reflexivity and revisioning to the project, which I nominate as emblematic of the bold possibilities of videographic collaboration.

Film teacher and researcher at Escola das Artes in Católica University (O Porto); film programmer at IndieLisboa Film Festival; film critic at À pala de Walsh website

Can a visual essay be a remedy against that awkward moment where you thought you have seen something that was not on the film? Cormac Donnelly’s reverses that more common preoccupation while taping into one’s memories and fears. Profound yet comical, Can I Remember It Differently? show us how cinema touches trauma and memory and how artistic expression is a way to deal with those remembrances.

Practices of Viewing: Loop by Johannes Binotto

Cinema as memory plays out as rituals of repetition. Part of the series Practices of Viewing, Binotto’s piece reflects on how the end of looping in cinema could represent a loss. Loop implies difference, and multiplying the doors of entrance and comprehension. Psycho (1960) is a perfect place to disseminate voyeurism.

This clever and provoking work deals with how image construction in home and garden television shows – specially based on the ideals of renewal, family and hospitality – pose questions about, as Eva classifies it, “race, place, and memory”. Shiplap, then, becomes more than a type of lumber used in interior design, but a symbol of covering nightmare stories about inequality, racism, marginalisation and displacement.

Temporal Ghosts. David Lowery’s A Ghost Story  by Enrique Saunders

Touching and intelligent essay by Enrique Saunders, which addresses the features of the long take and slow cinema on a moment in A Ghost Story (David Lowery). What is appealing here is that the spectral quality of cinema, literalised by the theme of the film, achieves a dimension of temporality, of being able to live inside an image for a while, and what that duration and insistence might do in terms of dramatic discomfort. Moreover, every image and its reversal is also a way to propose spectator as the true hors champ of cinema.

Mr Bean Is a Masterpiece of Hitchcockian Suspense by Lara Callaghan

What is most surprising in this Lara Callaghan’s piece is how her analysis of a Mr. Bean moment, using Hitchcock techniques and universe, walks a thin line between engaging audiovisual analysis and comic material. Is this low culture vs serious culture? Or is it a lesson in engaging in an argument, without ever losing grip of proof, expectation and spectator’s surprise?

Ragtag by Giuseppe Boccassini

Giuseppe Boccassini’s 84-minute video essay is a great work. A compilation of suggestive moments from the noir universe that, more than editorialising strong moments from the genre, aims at conveying violence, paranoia and fear through repetition and insistence. A video essay that renders the nightmarish quality of the noir, the creative instrument metamorphosing itself to portrait form and content.

As Tears Go By by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin

For some time now, The Thinking Machine, the series by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin for Filmkrant has been an indispensable project to understand visual essays potentials. This year it was difficult to choose a favourite, but As Tears Go By touches me particularly, in how editing makes impossible dialogues take shape. Anna Karina and Marianne Faithful’s dialogue is trapped in men’s universe: the words and the images. This piece is a small key out of imaginary imprisonment.

FILMADRID International Film Festival programming team

Hands of the Future by Sabrina D. Marques, Mehdi Jahan, Dan Shoval, Adrian Martin (voiceover)

Back to Theaters by Victoria Oliver Farner

Deconstructing the Construction: The Female Images in Chinese Detective Films, 2010-2020 by Ying-Hsiu Chou (University of Washington)

Maria’s Marias by Maria Hofmann (University of Minnesota)

Chantal Akerman: The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy by Andrea Nouga Feliu

The French New Wave: A Free Woman Under the Male Gaze by Laura Romero Sánchez

Associate professor of film and media in digital contexts at Aarhus University, Denmark; visiting researcher in the Centre for World Cinemas and Digital Cultures, University of Leeds, UK ; author of Workshop of Potential Scholarship: Manifesto for a Parametric Videographic Criticism, NECSUS  2021

Affective Atmosphere: Embodiment and the Film Frame by Pavel Prokopic

The poll asks for suggestions of ‘noteworthy’ (rather than ‘best’) video essays. Writing as a maker, I have interpreted this to mean video essays I can learn from, not so much in terms of what they’re trying to tell me, but in terms of their methods, techniques and rhetoric. In this first choice, I think there’s too much onscreen text; still, I admire how it’s placed as commentary in one vertical of the triptych. The faces and voices, colours, lighting, textures and split-screen in the video essay are exquisitely beautiful. The combination of affect and alienation is unusual and impressive.

I dislike the frenetic voiceover style of the YouTube argumentative video essay, however well-intentioned or put together. Why are they so keen to tell me what to think? In Shiplap, Eva Hageman performs, for me, a more effective inquiry into race, place and memory, deploying found footage, archival materials and text to suggest an analysis that must be completed by the viewer. Voiceover is either sourced from the footage or whispered by the author herself. I hope to learn from Hageman’s political use of juxtaposition and implication, and her refusal to restrict the video’s analytical thrust to a single direction.

TV Dictionary—Blob by Barbara Zecchi

This contribution to Ariel Avissar’s ever-expanding TV Dictionary deals with a phenomenon of everyday avant-gardism that has been a staple of Italian television for decades. Blob is meta-television: a twenty-minute absurdist montage of clips drawn from the broadcasting of the previous day. Chris Keathley suggests that video essays can be most effective when they borrow the aesthetic strategies of the media object analysed, and Barbara Zecchi does this here with great wit. Notice the use of horizontal scrolling text and the fragmenting of the onscreen definition read by a variety of ‘accented’ and AI voices. The video essay ends perfectly.

The Spaces Beyond: Experimenting with the Theory of Audiovisual Concrète by Holly Rogers and Heather Britton

The voiceover is well-performed and informative in The Spaces Beyond, and the makers’ concept of ‘sonic elongation’ will become standard. I sympathise with the reflection on the politics and potential of constraint-based videographic work around minute 21:00. But what I will take from this video essay is the treatment of on-screen text in the first and final minutes. The formatting is at once crude and sophisticated, with banal sans-serif fonts in regular or bold framed in text boxes, unfurled, or floated and superimposed on other text and images and, of course, sound. The whole thing goes powerfully rogue from 22:15.

Maria’s Marias by Maria Hofmann

The title of this video essay, which contrasts German (Die Trapp-Familie, 1956) and Hollywood (The Sound of Music, 1965) adaptations of the memoir by Maria von Trapp, is ambiguous. Does the possessive belong to von Trapp, or to the author of the video essay? Both, of course: in fact, Hofmann sings Edelweiss (‘not,’ it turns out, ‘an Austrian song’) on the soundtrack, but hers is just one of many voices that form the video essay’s dialogic chorus. It’s the complex interaction of split-screen (borrowed from kogonada’s What Is Neorealism?) and fugue of voices that I will take from this video.

Can Everyone See My Screen? The Desktop as Videographic Canvas and Professional Profile by Juan Llamas Rodriguez

Videographic events, like the ‘Videography: Art and Academia’ symposium in Hanover this November, have increasingly featured performative presentations, where points are made as much through the form as in the content of the ‘talks’. Can Everyone See my Screen? was recorded rather than performed live at Hanover, but it featured its maker mimicking the tics and hesitations of speakers on the videotelephony platforms with which we have become so familiar. Rodriguez’s video-presentation showed how the ‘illustrated lecture’ can be an ironic and reflexive mode, and it challenged us to deploy the clumsiness and glitchiness of Zoom (etc) for epistemic ends.

Nest by Hlynur Pálmason

I’m going to call Nest an essay film, though it’s unclear if it’s that, or a documentary, or something else again (it credits a stunt coordinator, which is a relief if you’re a parent who’s watched the film). The film follows the construction of a treehouse in a wild corner of Iceland over several seasons from the perspective of a single static camera. The lesson is that a radically constrained approach to (essay) filmmaking can generate spectacular results: beauty, in the patient record of landscape and weather, and incident, in the observation of animals and the filmmaker’s own (exploited?) children.

Founder/director, Prismatic Ground; co-director of programming, Maysles Documentary Center

Proof of Self by Maya Daisy Hawke

Created for a Masterclass presentation, Hawke’s precis on editing folds her experience working on the feature documentary Navalny into a fully considered reflection on self, work, and art.

I Am the World  by Che Applewhaite

“Imagine, the first time you hear someone say…must have been in the image you just saw.”

Animal Spirits by Hito Steyerl

This year at Locarno Kevin B. Lee highlighted Hito Steyerl in the filmic context as ‘The Future of Cinema’ at Locarno. Steyerl also featured alongside Lee’s work, and that of Tracy Cox-Stanton, Coco Fusco, Chloé Galibert-Laîné, Charlie Shackleton, and Marina Trigueros, in a video essay exhibit at Michigan State University’s Broad Museum.

Vecino Vecino by Camila Galaz

A deft consideration of family, politics, time, and cinema. An attempt to forge past and present by recreating the image.

Subliminal desire in a cinema under duress.

True Places by Gloria Chung

Chung’s mediated relationship to landscape evokes a terrain of memory and distant sensation.

Four/Three Songs Without Z. by Karthik Pandian, Andros Zins-Browne, Zakaria Almoutlak

Note: Released in a single-channel version this year as Three Songs Without Z.

As Mine Exactly by Charlie Shackleton

An ‘anti- VR piece narrated live by its author, seated directly across from his headset-strapped audience of one, Shackleton’s desktop reflection on his mother’s epilepsy was one of the most moving artistic experiences to be had this year, and another fine notch in the filmmaker’s lengthy conceptual belt. 

Assistant professor, Leiden University; co-organiser MoMA Doc Fortnight 2023

Moune Ô by Maxime Jean-Baptiste

Constant by Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner

Private Footage by Janaína Nagata

The Revolution Will Not Be Air-conditioned by Bo Wang

Heat Waves by Kent Chan

Desistfilm co-director, MUTA Audiovisual Appropriation Festival (programmer, curator)

The Stairwell: Memories and Mirages of Film Noir by Stephen Broomer

Colligare herbarium et insecta by Nicolás Onischuk, Agustina Arrarás

Richard Kerr: Field Trips by Stephen Broomer

Itinéraire pour une terre rare – De la pomme de terre au coltan en passant par des écrans by Seumboy Vrainom

Remix/Remaster by Cristina Álvarez López, Adrian Martin

Itinéraire d’un homme fragile sur Mozilla Firefox by Seumboy Vrainom

Line Goes Up – The Problem with NFT s by Dan Olson — Folding Ideas

Not film related. But undoubtedly, the best video essay made in 2022.

Audio-visual PhD student at the University of Birmingham 

life and death of the image by Ella Victoria Wright

This extraordinary piece is both affecting and unsettling, utilising AI technology to reanimate prisoner photographs from Auschwitz-Birkenau. It is one of the most moving videographic works I’ve ever watched, and poses important ethical questions about how essayists engage with sensitive archival material.

I love the collaborative nature of the Once upon a Screen project. The very conscious integration of personal subjectivities creates unique resonances for every viewer, which is perhaps why, having become a parent last year, Cormac Donnelly’s video particularly stood out to me.

A wonderful example of how a short and simple concept can convey clear and impactful argumentation. In just 30 seconds, the sound choices made in this study have completely changed the way in which I look at subtitles and consider what they convey to those who are unable to listen simultaneously.

Video Venn: Documentaries, Essays and the Pedagogy In-Between by Richard Langley

Having studied an earlier iteration of the documentary module discussed here 12 years ago, this pedagogic exploration of the subject matter using its very material encapsulates, for me, the fluidity and constant evolution of both teaching and film.

The combination of one of my favourite films (The Sound of Music) with one of my favourite ways of working (multiscreen composition) was probably always going to appeal, and it was intriguing to finally see some clips from Die Trapp-Familie. However, it is the clever weaving of both films with archival audio that really engaged me in Maria’s Marias, providing new perspectives on a much-loved story and its telling.

169 Seconds: Parasite – Props at the Periphery of Perception by Mathias Bonde Korsgaard

Delightfully alliterative title aside, this short study brilliantly spotlights the level of detail in Parasite, making me want to watch it all over again.

Freelance critic

Listed simply in order of posting date:

Fear of Cold by Jacob Geller

The Super 8 Years by Annie Ernaux, David Ernaux-Briot et al.

Intimate Tresholds by Desiree Garcia

action button reviews boku no natsuyasumi by Tim Rogers

Embodied Diegetic Sound by Allison Cooper

The People You’re Paying to Be in Shorts by Jon Bois, Alex Rubenstein, Seth Rosenthal, Kofie Yeboah et al

Conforme by Johanna Vaude

Film archivist and critic, leading The Queue over at Film School Rejects

Realism and Fantastic Cinema by APL attanzi

It’s difficult to make a case for non-invisible visual effects these days without tripping over a dozen or so discourse landmines. And I appreciate how emphatically this video essay makes a case for effects that read as effects in a way that invites would-be detractors to the table. I think the way this essayist presents their argument respects those it’s trying to convert, and that makes the overall rhetorical effect that much stronger.

The Secret Ingredient That Makes Raimi’s SPIDER - MAN So Great by Patrick (H) Willems and Siddhant Adlakha

There’s a sub-set of younger millennials who were just the right age for the Sam Raimi Spider-Man trilogy … and just a little too old to be truly swept up the MCU madness that we’re still very much dealing with. I’ve always had a hard time articulating why these newer MCU movies feel so different from Raimi’s trilogy (outside of the obvious). But Willems and Adlakha have definitively cracked the code here, I think. Thorough, well-argued, and radiating with truthiness, this is easily one of my favourite watches of the year.

Nothing but Trouble Is a Very Weird Movie by Zane Whitener (In Praise of Shadows)

I’m a sucker for detailed eulogies of famously chaotic film curios. And they don’t come much more chaotic (or curious) than the 1991 horror-comedy Nothing but Trouble, which pretty much singlehandedly robbed us of Dan Aykroyd, director. Whitener does a heroic job performing this sarcastically in-depth autopsy, which will, I hope, keep the legend-like aura surrounding this film alive.

The Catharsis of Body Horror by Yhara zayd

If there were an Olympic medal for teasing the YouTube censorship algorithm, it would go to this video essay. In all seriousness, this is one of the more lucid and well-argued articulations I’ve ever seen of why something as carnal and goopy as body horror might feel meditative, academically fulfilling, and even spiritual. This essay also offers a thoroughly compelling taxonomic analysis (ruin, release, and rebirth) to a sub-genre often dismissed as unworthy of such analysis.

How Nope Tricks Your Ears by Thomas Flight

Flight’s style – which has always prioritised variations of scene analysis – is allowed to fully flex in this captivating and insightful breakdown of how use of sound design in Jordan Peele’s Nope can teach us about the difference between horror and terror. I adore the way that Flight invites us to see (or rather /hear/) Peele’s decisions for ourselves. It’s as effective “show don’t tell” pedagogy as you’re liable to find.

The Visual Effects Crisis by Andrew Saladino (The Royal Ocean Film Society)

As always, Saladino brings a level of graphical finesse and polish that remains unmatched by any of his peers. This video essay is a spectacular reminder that the antagonism between CGI people and practical effects people is a red herring. The real villain isn’t the false dichotomy of tangible vs digital. The real villain is capitalism.

Twin Peaks Explained ; Twin Peaks The Return & the Golden Age of TV   by Maggie Mae Fish

I am cheating, I’m sure, by including a two-parter. But frankly, them’s the breaks. Maggie Mae Fish keeps the Socratic Method alive by engaging with fictional interlocutors in a valiant and self-effacing attempt to divine an answer to the question “why is Twin Peaks like that?” Not only do these two essays sarcastically mock the always mockable dude-bro-explains-media-to-you genre, Fish successfully collates various strings of knowledge and insight into a genuinely compelling thesis.

Video essayist at StrucciMovies

Disney Channel’s Theme: A History Mystery by Defunctland

Watching this YouTube video essay by someone who seems to harbour shame about making YouTube videos (or at least performed shame for thematic connectivity and impact) is fascinating. This video tells a gripping story, taking unexpected twists and showcasing slick visuals and admirable depth of research, while simultaneously calling into question its own worth and validity. It’s a strange and compelling balance that made me question my own assumptions about creating for the internet, which in 2022 seems preferable to traditional outlets. After all, this video is more compelling than any ‘legitimate’ feature documentary I’ve seen in quite some time.

Disney Channel’s Theme: A History Mystery by Kevin Perjurer

I could watch history lessons about arcane theme park history all day and Perjurer’s the best in the biz.

The New Silent Cinema by Yacov Freedman

Yacov looking into a new trend that has personal significance. A way to find something deeper in the mainstream.

Johannes’ series continues to beguile. You can’t go wrong with his work, a first rate mind close by. 

Georges Franju and the moving frame by Johannes Binotto

A beautiful detour into a beloved figure’s working method

A Dress to Bring Out the Devil in You by Chris O’Neill

Available on Arrow’s Blu-ray of I’m Dangerous Tonight. 

Chris, a kindred spirit, looking into the genius of my beloved Tobe Hooper.

Film Thought 3. Godard Is Dead by Will DiGravio

Will’s honesty and curiosity are beautiful things.

Riotsville, USA by Sierra Pettengill

A recontextualisation of American police practice and the image of America that it goes to great length to keep secret. 

Honourable mention: Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Adventure , about American TV , another reflection of the American identity.

Independent scholar

Terra Femme by Courtney Stephens

I can’t choose between Bianca Stigter’s Three Minutes: A Lengthening and Courtney Stephens’s Terra Femme. Thankfully, I don’t have to. It was a happy serendipity that 2022 saw the wide release of both: they’re both feature-length theatrically released film essays, both just over an hour long, and both take amateur footage as their subject. And after that, they feel like inversions of one another that somehow arrive at the same place. For its part, Terra Femme unearths private globe-hopping travelogues shot by a handful of women with a variety of stories, reasons, and aesthetics.

Meanwhile, Three Minutes: A Lengthening painstakingly reworks the tiny fragment of time described by the title: barely a glimpse of a Jewish village in Poland in 1938. But both films crack their images open to reveal presence and absence, time and space, archive and database, memory and mystery, and more. By the end of Stephens’s film, I imagined millions of other images, shot and unshot, by an endless caravan of other journeyers. By the end of Stigter’s, I couldn’t help but believe that the entire world somehow refracted through those infinite three minutes.

How to Explain Your Mental Illness to Stanley Kubrick by Philip Brubaker

After years of insightful and witty video essays that regularly graced this list, @lensitself went soul-baringly personal here and, appropriately for the subject matter, threw every form of essayism he could think of at the screen. The embrace of this film is staggering – a kaleidoscope of approaches to mental illness as well as to videographic criticism including montages and supercuts and experimental deformations and re-enactments and explainers and personal documentary. But they all work together so totally because they all come from a place of needing us to un-see something familiar, so we can see it again for the first time.

The End of History by Scout Tafoya and Tucker Johnson

A ten-part series on Ridley and Tony Scott. It’s sprawling and digressive, with a daunting running time, but by episode five I never wanted it to end. What a forgotten pleasure it is to see clips play long, for the time to think with and against the essayist, and for theses to emerge, full of thorniness, from a space of lifelong consideration and contradiction. A successor to the classic auteurist texts on Ford and Hawks, yes, moreover a cortege, draped in sweat and intestines, for both American cinema and some of the illusions I once had about it.

Breath of the Wild fixed stamina, it’s perfect now, we did it by Afterthoughts

This is everything a YouTube video essay can and should be. Breathlessly paced, thoroughly witty, perfectly cut, light to the touch, every idea illustrated with an image. If you’ve ever taught any kind of visual design philosophy (or ever assigned any Edward Tufte) and wish you had something specific and engaging on video game UX / UI , slide this into a reading list and become a hero to your students. Or, you know, just watch it for fun, because it’s so so much fun. It sets a standard for demonstrating how something small can make a huge difference.

Film-with-live-orchestra Concerts: A New Hope by Sureshkumar Sekar

My favourite peer-reviewed video essay of the year. The scope is remarkable, encompassing formal analysis, film history, personal memoir, cognitive neuroscience, and a bit of comedy to offer interdisciplinary insights into how our brains are newly wired in the 21st century. And all from the unlikeliest place: film-with-live-orchestra concerts. I didn’t think there was anything to this topic either, but I was wrong, too. Turns out, the screen is part of our mind now. Our old ways of being won’t survive without the screen, but when the screen meets them, that new experience can blow us away.

Queer Relativity by Aranock

What starts as a nice time-hopping reference to Dr Manhattan’s experience of time in Watchmen turns into a structural argument: we are always all of ourselves at once. Identity encompasses every aspect of that transformation. And thus what seems merely an examination of temporality and queer subtexts in Star Trek, Blade Runner, and the like, turns into a powerful and compellingly personal portrait of how meaning in art, and therefore identity more broadly, are formed through community and connection. A powerful statement in how examining one’s life, through essay and through art, across time, helps make it worth living.

Freelance film critic, lecturer in film studies, UNATC  Bucharest

This is a film best watched twice. Depending on your expectations, you will see, in subjective order, a sensuous, immersive arthouse film and an extensive study on Iranian cinema analysing how filmmaking restrictions – in showing actors touch, depicting women’s gazes – are persistently and creatively subverted in both popular and arthouse cinema. The text on screen is bilingual, and to me as a foreigner the lines in Farsi are both beautiful calligraphy and markers of insurmountable distance. I will perhaps never access Forough Farrokhzad’s poems, as I hope to have more directly seen the films of Panahi, Samira Makhmalbaf and Mehrjui.

Mirrors of Digital Landscapes by Jáchym Šidlák/Film a doba

Keeping an audiovisual creation coherent in following a broad theoretical argument is no easy task, and it should be even more challenging when Bill Morrison, gameplay architecture and post-apocalyptic films (with or without live-action plots) are all thrown into the mix. Following Jennifer Fay’s exploration of Cinema in the Time of Anthropocene, Jáchym Šidlák’s video makes you gradually feel totally trapped in contemporary visual culture, a trap that only its material decay might help you escape.

The Depp-Heard Trial Is an Ugly, Scary Trial by Social Media by The Take (eds. Susannah McCullough and Debra Minoff)

Leaving pop culture behind, if you afford it, is certainly liberating, though the 2022 Depp-Heard trial was a reminder that no reality exists apart from pop culture and social media: a click-count success that few people with jobs could follow entirely and a catalyst for gendered prejudice in ways that were both obvious and hard to unpack. You can dislike Heard and be shocked at the misogyny of the trial’s most vocal commentators. In this high-strung environment, to use a cliché when it feels justified, the Take’s prolific, perseverant and rigorous cultural criticism is what we need right now.

Hanging Portraits: Obsession and Resurrection in Laura by Stephen Broomer / Art &  Trash

The age-old distinction between the didactic and the poetic in videographic criticism might leave the impression that any commentary must choose between the two, though Hanging Portraits is clearly an exception. Heady like Preminger’s missing-leading-lady romance and lucid in navigating its connection to noir tropes, Stephen Broomer’s video essay will leave you with the impression that you’ve already seen the film five times and you’re just dying to watch it again soon.

I would pause my life for any Max Ophüls lecture, and plenty of videographic research on the author’s films (by Tag Gallagher and Mark Rappaport, to only cite classics) has made me happy that I stayed. Gibbs and Pye engage in a very complex game of identifying perspectives in Le Plaisir – whether it’s Maupassant’s, Ophüls’, the multilingual ‘Maupassant’ voiceovers’ or the multiple main and transient characters’, in this very subtly narrated film.

An additional, cheeky text-on-screen voice frequently contradicts the two critics’ statements, inadvertently reminding us that precision was never the highest goal of cinephile commentary.

Deconstructing the Construction: The Female Images in Chinese Detective Films, 2010-2020 by Ying-Hsiu Chou/Tecmerin

Noir has the contradictory legacy of eschewing wholesome, conventional female protagonists and replacing them with a different male fantasy. Eight decades after its so-called classical stage, in the age of big-budget spectacle and global circulation of genres, China/Hong Kong-produced detective films have accumulated to a parallel canon to the US /French ‘patient zero’, one that tells a not-so-different story. The video alternates supercuts of recurring unimaginative moments and in-depth looks at behind-the-scenes footage and actresses’ testimonies on the exigencies of their role. Tl; dr: it’s still sexist; but the often surprising details collected here are worth your full attention.

Footsteps by Evenlyn Kreutzer

I first became fascinated by videographic criticism seeing how closely and minutely it can analyse creative decisions behind great cinema. This potentiality hasn’t yet been exhausted even for canonical authors, and Evelyn Kreutzer proved herself particularly brilliant in recognising great work when she hears it. Hitchcock’s characters are often in motion and their footsteps are an important part of the tale they tell – because they make audible what is temporarily not visible, or maybe because they’re silent like a ghost’s.

Creator, collector, and curator of video essays under the nom de video Filmscalpel

Over the past years, videographic strategies have increasingly been applied to other visual regimes than those of movies and television shows alone. Video games in particular have been the subject of great video essays. Interestingly, those essays were made by very diverse practitioners: from academics over avid gamers to modders . That is why I chose three fine examples of video essays about games for this year’s poll. 

NPC s or Non-Playable Characters are the digital extras of video games. They are bit players in the truest sense of the term: they populate the background but have no agency or narrative importance. Hardly Working puts four such NPC s from the successful game Red Dead Redemption 2 in the spotlight. The collective Total Refusal questions capitalist work regimes in this fine piece of machinima. The detached and mockingly objective tone of the voice over commentary references that of nature documentaries and describes NPC s as capitalism’s ideal workforce: unquestioning, without autonomy, unbothered by boredom. 

Elden Ring —  PS1 Trailer Demake by Hoolopee

This year’s action role-playing game Elden Ring boasts impressive and cutting-edge visuals. But in this cheeky video 3D VFX artist Hoolopee “demakes” the hit game’s trailer to how it would have looked if it had been made for a 1995 PlayStation system. Videographic appropriation and video game nostalgia blend in his backdated trailer. The result is a charming little piece of performative criticism that questions games studios’ single-minded pursuit of photographic realism.

There have been attempts at interactive videographic criticism before, but most of those were gimmicky and didn’t use the viewer’s input in any meaningful way. The Platformer Toolkit however is interactive video essaying at its finest. This impressive tool by Mark Brown of Game Maker’s Toolkit lets you play around with the controls of a basic platform game’s protagonist. It demonstrates how design decisions shape the gaming experience and how aesthetic aspects and the enjoyment of gameplay are closely intertwined. Oh, and the toolkit also introduces you to intriguing game design terminology such as “coyote time” and “adding juice”.

Film critic (www.apaladewalsh.com) and film programmer (Serralves Foundation, IndieLisboa IFF )

ragtag by Giuseppe Boccassini

Zig-zag editing of noir films, between Martin Arnold and a broken record. A looping effect turns into a hypnotic journey through recurring tropes, gestures and glances. Film history in a table tennis match with itself.

Filme particular by Janaína Nagata

Desktop cinema turns into forensic archival investigation, bringing together different media in search of context. A whodunit video essay in which the killer is our collective forgetfulness.

The latest video by Chloé Galibert-Laîné is a playful exercise on playfulness, as her previous works were a thrilling exercise on thrillers, and a self-reflective exercise on self-representation. The brilliant art of the meta video essay.

Nadine Nortier by Gillian Garcia

Not in any way a ‘video’-essay, but a short film that uses all the tropes of video-essayistic technique: repetition, modification, singling out gestures, recontextualisation, etc. A film that elevates the particularities of Robert Bresson cinema to its essence.

Glass Life by Sara Cwynar

Sara Cwynar’s work has been working around the notion of torrential thinking in the age of the torrential production of images. Her latest piece turns the ‘internet’ into an analogue web of layered still and moving images, navigating aimlessly in between them as a sign of their ephemerality.

Professor and director of the film studies programme at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, https://vimeo.com/barbarazecchi 

Men Shouting: A History in 7 Episodes by Alan O’L eary

This is, in my opinion, the most stunning example to date of a deformative approach to videographic criticism, a field in which Alan O’L eary is by all means the most prominent voice and practitioner.

Superbly structured, expertly paced, and uncanningly hypnotic, this piece is evidence that what ‘makes the original work strange’ (to borrow Jason Mittell’s well-known definition of deformative criticism) can indeed be a masterpiece.

Practices of Viewing: Dubbing  by Johannes Binotto

It is an impossible – and an unfair – task to choose just one work by Johannes Binotto. Since his first video essay, Facing Film, which already revealed his uncommon talent, each and every one that followed is equally unique, unrepeatable, powerful, surprising, and so tremendously beautiful. 

For this poll I chose Dubbing just because it is the closest to me and to my research. Dubbing achieves the perfect balance between scholarly discourse and creativity, between objectivity and the personal, between the critical and the artistic, between the academic and the intimate, and talks loudly to me about inclusion, defamiliarisation and love.

Once upon a Screen Vol. 2 by Evelyn Kreutzer and Ariel Avissar

Without a doubt, Once upon a Screen Vol. 2 has been the major video graphic project of the year.

Ariel Avissar and Evelyn Kreutzer had already demonstrated their enormous talents and spirit of initiative with their TV Dictionary and Moving Poems respectively, projects that have strengthened a community of video essayists.

With Once upon a Screen Vol. 2, they brought the multi-authorship experiments even further in a project that had fostered human bonding, and intellectual exchange. A brilliant idea executed to perfection.

Skilfully produced (superb storytelling and rhythm), this video essay takes full advantage of the form’s possibilities by centring in a simple perceptive observation. Brilliant piece by a brilliant video essayist.

The Curse of the Gimmick: Star Wipe by Veronika Hanáková and Jiří Anger

Rarely does a video essay say so much about its authors: their skilful editing, their passion for the archive, their sense of humour, their sophisticated knowledge, and their great originality. A stylish, dynamic and cuttingly insightful video essay from two stars in the field.

Mi sueño es representar la belleza de la mujer de mi estado by Jeffrey Middents

A powerful statement about female to-be-looked-at-ness in cinema, this video essay is to date the best work on Latin American women’s reification and dispossession, intersected with issues of sexuality, class, race, and age. Through defamiliarising repetitions, and hypnotic rhythm, this superbly crafted video essay represents a great example of the perfect combination of artistic work with thorough and serious scholarly research.

Eye-Camera-Ninagawa by Colleen Laird

This is a stunning debut video essay that speaks loudly of Colleen Laird’s great visual sensibility and talent. Beautifully paced, and jaw-droppingly composed (a multi screen of 146 shots), this video essay establishes a scholarly evocative and convincing comparison between two films that seemingly have nothing in common. A real gem from a promising newcomer in the field.

Emerging voices

Delphine Jeanneret mentions Fox Maxy and Pauline Julier as ‘Emerging voices’:

“Fox Maxy is a filmmaker whose work has screened at MoMA, LACMA , Rotterdam, and BlackStar Film Festival among other places. In 2020, COUSIN Collective supported the director with her first grant. In 2022, Fox was named as Sundance Institute’s Merata Mita Fellow. She’s also a Vera List Center Borderlands Fellow. Currently Fox is working on a film about mental health.

“Pauline Julier is an artist and filmmaker who explores the links that humans create with their environment through stories, rituals, knowledge and images. Her films and installations are composed of elements of diverse origins (documentary, theoretical, fictional) to restitute the complexity of our relationship to the world. Her installations and films have been screened in contemporary art centres, institutions and festivals around the world, including the Center Pompidou (Paris), Loop (Barcelona), Visions du Réel (Nyon), Tokyo Wonder Site (Tokyo), Museum of Modern Art in Tanzania, Geneva Art Center, Palazzo Grassi (Venice), New York, Madrid, Berlin, Zagreb, Cinémathèque de Toronto and the Pera Museum in Istanbul. Julier had a solo exhibition at the Centre Culturel Suisse in Paris ( CCS ) in 2017. She completed a year-long residency in Rome in 2020 at the Istituto Svizzero, and her film Naturales Historiae has been shown online on Vdrome.org.”

Meg Shields nominated APL attanzi and Niche Nonsense :

“It is a fantastic and baffling crime that many of APL attanzi ’ s videos only have a hundred or so views. Their work is varied and well-produced, covering everything from how backlight animation works to musical continuities in the original Lost in Space TV show. I always learn something new when watching their stuff and I would love to see more eyes on their channel, which currently has just over 3500 subscribers as of writing this.

“With a YouTube channel only founded within the last calendar year, Niche Nonsense really does feel like a solid candidate for a noteworthy up-and-comer. Their film-focused video essays (including their examination of the sound design of ‘Swiss Army Man’ and their case for why Gen Z needs more slacker movies) are polished and edu-taining. While their interests seem interdisciplinary, I hope they continue to cover film-based content.”

Catherine Grant nominated Anne Rutherford :

“Anne Rutherford is a longstanding and world-leading film studies scholar whose work has been foundational in the fields of cinematic affect and embodiment, and materiality. Her first ever video essay – Ripple, Rustle, Shimmer and Shake: The Cinematic Rapture of Grass – was published in the Spring 2022 issue of [in]Transition  and in it she found the perfect medium and form for her kind of cinema studies. I loved this work and I really hope she goes on to make more brilliant and beautiful videographic work.”

Adrian Martin mentions Occitane Lacurie :

“Occitane Lacurie is part of the French group that produces the Débordements website, devoted to ‘criticism and research’. Their work finds a path between academia and popular journalism. Lacurie’s audiovisual essays look into the histories of criticism; in her 2021 Sur trois rencontres tardives (On Three Belated Encounters), she excavates, among other things, the life and work of the largely overlooked Michèle Firk.”

Will Webb mentions Dennis Gallagher and especially his Wallace and Gromit video essay.

“With infrequent uploads and a wide range of subject matter (come for British short animation, stay for a dissection of Japandroids albums), not much unites Dennis Gallagher’s body of work except the level of detail that goes into each individual video. There *is* a consistent difference of view, or maybe tone of voice, that makes his essays fascinating. My favourite this year is his analysis of Uncle Rico’s trauma in Napoleon Dynamite , which claims him as the central character of a tragedy, then argues that via an 80s manga and an episode of The Twilight Zone.”

Tomas Genevičius mentions Marlen Schmid and her video essay Crossing Borders, about Agnès Varda .

Max Tohline nominated  max teeth and  Emily Jaworski :

“Rather than praise max teeth’s channel as a whole, I want to focus on one video: Cadet Kelly Has a Gay Agenda . As someone who was entering adulthood when 9/11 happened, I’ll inevitably be relitigating its legacy the rest of my life. And this essay, which weaves a thoughtmap connecting American imperialism, Disney channel originals, the red scare, gay rights, romantic comedies, and more, showed me a side to 9/11 I never noticed before. It deserves to become a staple ‘reading’ in any course traversing these topics. By demonstrating just how insidiously a hundred different struggles hegemonically interlink, it not only provides a primer on intersectional thought, but also a cautionary tale on how ideology is everywhere, and there are more fronts to any struggle than you ever suspect.

“The Sex Robot Show is a serialised adaptation of the Emily Jaworski’s thesis project. As you might guess, its content got it almost immediately banned from YouTube, but it’s a vital project that intersects discourses on gender, bodies, ableism, cybersecurity, identity, and, in the most recent episode, the bottomless rabbit-hole of horrors that is AI -generated pornography. It doesn’t happen very often that a series reveals that something I had no earthly knowledge of is somehow at the nexus of a slew of vital contemporary conversations. But this is that show. It’s astonishing work and I can’t wait to see more of it. Or anything else Emily wants to do!”

Barbara Zecchi nominated Rodrigo Campos Castello Branco :

“Não veio dos céus nem das mãos de Isabel is a beautiful piece made for The Videography Mentorship Program, part of the Videography: Art and Academia – Epistemological, Political and Pedagogical Potentials of Audiovisual Practices symposium in Hanover, Germany. It shows incredible talent, sensibility and political awareness. I hope Rodrigo will continue in this field.”

Multiple nominees

Some ‘emerging voice’ nominees have their works acknowledged in the ‘best video essays’ poll:  Cormac Donnelly (named by Alan O’Leary), Jiří Anger and Veronika Hanáková (named by Adrian Martin), Sureshkumar P. Sekar (mentioned by Catherine Grant),  Eva Hagemam (distinguished by Barbara Zecchi), Afterthoughts (mentioned by Queline Meadows) and  The Nukes/Joshua Geist  (nominated by Will Webb). We leave the unedited descriptions below:

It’s notable (and a cause of envy) that some of the most exciting innovators in the videographic form are still working on their PhDs! Ariel Avissar is one, and Cormac Donnelly another. The quality of Donnelly’s video essays has been recognised in this poll before, but I want to point to his Deformative Sound Lab, which draws from investigations by makers like Allison de Fren, Jason Mittell and Kevin Ferguson to generate fascinating experiments in film analysis.

Jiří Anger and Veronika Hanáková are two researchers based in Prague who delve into video montage in order to elaborate their arguments and findings in new and different ways. Their work The Clown, the Tree, the Shadows is an exciting crossbreeding of popular horror and an avant-garde archive.

Sureshkumar Sekar is a PhD candidate at the Royal College of Music, London, where he is investigating audience, audiovisual culture, liveness, aLiveness, film music, and orchestral music. He is producing some very interesting and highly engaging and original academic work in videographic format, including an award-winning work of his we published this year at [in]Transition. I look forward very much to seeing where his work goes next.

Eva Hageman is already an accomplished scholar in television, media production, and popular culture. She produced an early version of Shiplap for the Middlebury College workshop in videographic criticism. This new version – recently published in [in]Transition – is evidence of Eva’s enormous ability, intelligence and talent, and I hope it is only the first video essay of many to come.

Afterthoughts makes video essays on a range of topics from storytelling techniques to game design. Her writing and editing is outstanding; she always finds the perfect balance between entertaining humour and sharp insights. Anyone who manages to make an 18-minute video about Breath of the Wild’s stamina meter  consistently engaging is someone to keep an eye on.

An English professor in his day job, Joshua Geist brings a ‘close reading’ analysis to (mostly) children’s media on his channel (which he shares with wife Megan and, implicitly, is informed by their family viewing habits).

There are plenty of channels on Breadtube which purport to do the same, but the wide-ranging analysis and formal playfulness of The Nukes marks it out as a channel to watch.

In Rabbit, Candide, and a World Gone to Hell , Disney’s animated adaptations of Winnie the Pooh provide a jumping-off point for an analysis of Voltaire, absurdism, and some wild structural choices (enjoy Josh rapping, if you can). Josh also led the Exquisite Relay essay collaboration carried out through the Essay Library discord, a fascinating experiment in essay structure where multiple creators made an ‘exquisite corpse’ essay, both forward and back. (Full disclosure: I participated in the Exquisite Relay and on other collabs with Josh – Will Webb) 

Collective nominations

Not uncharacteristically for the videographic community, some distinctions are collective. Jiří Anger named the Film a doba collaborators:

“A collective of students from Charles University in Prague has been creating video essays for the online platform of Film a doba, one of the oldest Czech (and East-Central European) journals. The ‘Audiovisual Essays’ section offers two videos a month listed under specific themes (Desktop, Tarkovsky, Nostalgia, Feminism, etc). The students’ focus on experiments with digital as well as analogue materiality brings something that most contemporary videographic criticism lacks, moving the video essays closer to experimental found footage filmmaking. Even though the accompanying texts are in Czech, most videos are available in English. So if you want to know what is happening with videographic criticism in East-Central Europe, give the essays a shot.”

Similarly, Will DiGravio draws our attention to the following collections:

“Rather than highlight individuals, I’d like to mention a few collected works of emerging video essayists: the Middlebury Videographic Cohort , the Cinema Rediscovered film critics workshop video essay commissions and The Contemporary World Cinema Project .”

The new issue of Sight and Sound

Hamaguchi Ryūsuke: insights on and from the Japanese auteur Plus: Mica Levi on their innovative score for The Zone of Interest – Víctor Erice interviewed about his masterful return to feature filmmaking, Close Your Eyes – a festival report from a politically charged Berlinale

Other things to explore

The best video essays of 2023.

By Queline Meadows

The best films of 2023 – all the votes

Martin scorsese on winning sight and sound’s best films of 2023 poll with killers of the flower moon.

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Essay Paper UPSC 2022 (Mains): Question Paper and Analysis

Last updated on September 16, 2022 by ClearIAS Team

The Essay Paper in UPSC CSE 2022 was easy compared to previous years. Please find the questions in the Essay Paper of the UPSC 2022 Civil Services Mains Examination (written).

UPSC conducted the Essay Paper , as part of the Civil Services Main Exam 2022 on 16-09-2022. The question paper was not as shocking as last year.

There were 8 Essay topics, out of which candidates were asked to write on two topics in 3 hours.

Candidates were supposed to answer about 1000 words for each essay (about 10-12 pages).

Table of Contents

Essay Paper UPSC 2022 Instructions

• Total Marks: 250 marks, Time duration: 3 hours.
• The essay must be written in the medium authorized in the admission certificate which must be stated clearly on the cover of this question-cum-answer (QCA) booklet in the space provided.
• No marks will be given for answers written in a medium other than the authorized one.
• Word limit, as specified, should be adhered to.
• Any page or portion of the page left blank, must be struck off clearly.

Essay Question Paper – UPSC Civil Services Main Exam (Written) 2022

Write two essays, choosing one topic from each of the following Sections A and B, in about 1000-1200 words each:

• Forests are the best case studies for economic excellence.
• Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
• History is a series of victories won by the scientific man over the romantic man.
• A ship in the harbour is safe but that is not what a ship is for.
• The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.
• You cannot step twice in the same river.
• Smile is the chosen vehicle for all ambiguities.
• Just because you have a choice, it does not mean that any of them has to be right.

UPSC , as always, has ensured that the essay topics were much different from the GS questions.

A philosophical theme is clearly evident in most of the essay topics in Section A as well as Section B. This was the case in 2020 and 2021 as well. It is a clue about what UPSC expects from the essay paper.

Rather than asking candidates to write on topics most aspirants are familiar with or trained with, UPSC is now evaluating the essay writing skills of aspirants by providing them with abstract or philosophical topics. 

This year, most of the topics were either proverbs or famous quotes.

All 8 topics presented this year will test the spontaneous thinking, comprehension, writing skills, and time management of aspirants.

Thinkers, Philosophers, and their Quotes

Let’s analyse the source of some of the question topics.

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POETS ARE THE UNACKNOWLEDGED LEGISLATORS OF THE WORLD 

This essay topic is one of the best-known and most frequently quoted lines from the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822).

Shelley thinks that poets can institute laws and create new materials for knowledge, determining the role of poets as legislators. 

Shelley’s account of poetic language seeks to find an order to the chaos, which, possibly, Shelley sees in human society: the mess that only poets can fathom. 

Therefore, he thinks, the poets’ enhanced poetic language can re-institute order in human society. 

A SHIP IN HARBOUR IS SAFE BUT THAT IS NOT WHAT A SHIP IS FOR 

This essay topic is connected with John A Shedd , an author and professor, who is attributed to this quote. Reference: his book Salt from My Attic , a collection of quotes and sayings (1928).

This phrase means, that getting out of your comfort zone is key to experiencing new things and broadening your horizons.

Only taking risks helps us grow as people—to either achieve our goals or do the things we’ve always wanted to do.

THE TIME  TO REPAIR THE ROOF IS WHEN THE SUN IS SHINING 

This essay topic was connected with John F. Kennedy. In his 1962 State of the Union Address, John F. Kennedy declared, “The best time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining”.

The primary message of the quote is fixing a leak is best done when the weather is good, rather than when it is not.

Ideally, you should begin the work of fixing the roof as soon after the leak was found. The first sunny day would be ideal. It is not easy to fix a roof when it is raining.

This statement is being used to remind us to do the right things at the right time. It also points us to take the advantage of favourable time.

YOU CAN NOT STEP TWICE IN THE SAME RIVER 

This essay topic was quoted by Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher born in 544 b.c.

This means that you cannot step into the same river twice because the flow of the river will change each second. You will also change each second.

It is not possible to repeat past experiences, as time changes all things. You won’t get the exact experience twice. You need to live in the present and enjoy each moment.

A SMILE IS A CHOSEN VEHICLE FOR ALL AMBIGUITIES 

This essay topic was quoted by Herman Melville, an American novelist.

JUST BECAUSE YOU HAVE A CHOICE DOES NOT MEAN THAT ANY OF THEM HAS TO BE RIGHT 

This essay topic was quoted by Norton Juster, an American academic, architect, and writer in his book The Phantom Tollbooth

What should aspirants preparing for next year do for an essay paper?

First of all, you should take the essay paper seriously.

Unless properly trained, it is not easy to write 10-12 pages on an abstract or philosophical topic.

You need to polish your comprehension and analytical skills.

Read different kinds of essays – particularly philosophical essays.

Give stress to the thoughts of philosophers like Immanuel Kant, Thomas Aquinas, John Locke, Friedrich Niche, Karl Marx etc. Start writing essays on famous quotes.

Also, be prepared to write essays touching on other areas like society, politics, economy, or technology. UPSC is known for surprises.

Remember that there is nothing like a constant trend with respect to UPSC questions.

What you get by analysing the previous year’s question papers are clues. And only those are what you need from UPSC questions!

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Seamus O'Malley, "Irish Culture and 'The People': Populism and Its Discontents" (Oxford UP, 2022‪)‬ New Books in Literary Studies

Seamus O’Malley is an associate professor at Yeshiva University. His first book was Making History New: Modernism and Historical Narrative (Oxford University Press, 2015). He has co-edited three volumes, one of essays on Ford Madox Ford and America (Rodopi, 2010), a research companion to Ford (Routledge, 2018) and a volume of essays on the cartoonists Julie Doucet and Gabrielle Bell (Mississippi, 2018). He is the chair of the Ford Madox Ford Society and co-chair of the Columbia University Seminar for Irish Studies. In this interview he discusses his new book, Irish Culture and "The People": Populism and Its Discontents (Oxford UP, 2022), a study of the rhetoric of populism and uses of the seemingly simple concept “The People” in Irish political and literary discourse. Irish Culture and ‘The People’ argues that populism has been a shaping force in Irish literary culture. Populist moments and movements have compelled authors to reject established forms and invent new ones. Sometimes, as in the middle period of W.B. Yeats's work, populism forces a writer into impossible stances, spurring ever greater rhetorical and poetic creativity. At other times, as in the critiques of Anna Parnell or Myles na gCopaleen, authors penetrate the rhetoric fog of populist discourse and expose the hollowness of its claims. Yet in both politics and culture, populism can be a generative force.  Daniel O'Connell, and later the Land League, utilized populist discourse to advance Irish political freedom and expand rights. The most powerful works of Lady Gregory and Ernie O'Malley are their portraits of The People that borrows from the populist vocabulary. While we must be critical of populist discourse, we dismiss it at our loss. This study synthesizes existing scholarship on populism to explore how Irish texts have evoked "The People"--a crucial rhetorical move for populist discourse--and how some writers have critiqued, adopted, and adapted the languages of Irish populisms. Aidan Beatty is a lecturer in the history department at Carnegie Mellon University Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

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Grad Neuro 2 Module 3 Essays 2022

What is the difference between a solar eclipse and a lunar eclipse?

It almost time! Millions of Americans across the country Monday are preparing to witness the once-in-a-lifetime total solar eclipse as it passes over portions of Mexico, the United States and Canada.

It's a sight to behold and people have now long been eagerly awaiting what will be their only chance until 2044 to witness totality, whereby the moon will completely block the sun's disc, ushering in uncharacteristic darkness.

That being said, many are curious on what makes the solar eclipse special and how is it different from a lunar eclipse.

The total solar eclipse is today: Get the latest forecast and everything you need to know

What is an eclipse?

An eclipse occurs when any celestial object like a moon or a planet passes between two other bodies, obscuring the view of objects like the sun, according to NASA .

What is a solar eclipse?

A total solar eclipse occurs when the moon comes in between the Earth and the sun, blocking its light from reaching our planet, leading to a period of darkness lasting several minutes. The resulting "totality," whereby observers can see the outermost layer of the sun's atmosphere, known as the corona, presents a spectacular sight for viewers and confuses animals – causing nocturnal creatures to stir and bird and insects to fall silent.

Partial eclipses, when some part of the sun remains visible, are the most common, making total eclipses a rare sight.

What is a lunar eclipse?

A total lunar eclipse occurs when the moon and the sun are on exact opposite sides of Earth. When this happens, Earth blocks the sunlight that normally reaches the moon. Instead of that sunlight hitting the moon’s surface, Earth's shadow falls on it.

Lunar eclipses are often also referred to the "blood moon" because when the Earth's shadow covers the moon, it often produces a red color. The coloration happens because a bit of reddish sunlight still reaches the moon's surface, even though it's in Earth's shadow.

Difference between lunar eclipse and solar eclipse

The major difference between the two eclipses is in the positioning of the sun, the moon and the Earth and the longevity of the phenomenon, according to NASA.

A lunar eclipse can last for a few hours, while a solar eclipse lasts only a few minutes. Solar eclipses also rarely occur, while lunar eclipses are comparatively more frequent. While at least two partial lunar eclipses happen every year, total lunar eclipses are still rare, says NASA.

Another major difference between the two is that for lunar eclipses, no special glasses or gizmos are needed to view the spectacle and one can directly stare at the moon. However, for solar eclipses, it is pertinent to wear proper viewing glasses and take the necessary safety precautions because the powerful rays of the sun can burn and damage your retinas.

Contributing: Eric Lagatta, Doyle Rice, USA TODAY