And the boys are the worst, or so argued an essay in The Wall Street Journal this past weekend by Kay Hymowitz, usually a shrewd and lucid observer of the relations between the sexes.

CNN: Who cares about the young and jobless?

Just as a skilled conversationalist brings alive the least promising interlocutor, so Berlin could conjure a fascinating essay from the most forbidding pages of Fichte, or Vico, or De Maistre.

ECONOMIST: And what it says about the role of public intellectuals

So, I give you his deeply philosophical and important essay: Missions and Metrics.

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For her part, Cathy Harbaugh, whom we'll also hear from in this essay, says she doesn't deserve so much credit.

NPR: Being the Mother to a Family of Soldiers

Warren Buffet thinks that women are a major reason why America will do so well, as he stated last week in a somewhat Sandberg-esque essay on women in leadership.

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What makes Andreas so compelling is that once per month, the creator pours out in an essay on the site, his thoughts about living and working in the high-tech startup world.

FORBES: Opportunity Knocking

The more recent contributions in Peter Krass's collection include an essay by Warren Buffett, the famed Sage of Omaha whose investment approach, so-called focus investing, offers a third way between the indexers and active traders, and is the subject of a whole book by Robert Hagstrom.

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Bush's essay was written more than 15 years before scientists patented the first integrated circuits, so the device he envisioned stored content on "improved microfilm" and allowed for direct data entry using a dry photography system.

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To understand what a real essay is, we have to reach back into history again, though this time not so far.

FORBES: Why I Write

So we note with great satisfaction that Jackie Chan, who made his literary debut with a charming autobiographical essay in TIME's 1997 special issue on Hong Kong, has found fame in the movie business.

CNN: ASIANOW - TIME Asia

"Due to their small size, toylike appearance and their abundance of character, microcars tended not to be scrapped so much as put away, " writes Peter Svilans, the museum's former curator, in the catalog essay.

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