Best of 2020-2021: Favorite Online Articles & Essays

Starting off our series of “Best of 2020-2021” lists curated by the entire Entropy community, we present some of our favorite selections as nominated by the diverse staff and team here at Entropy, as well as thousands of nominations from our readers. The lists this year are especially meaningful as they mark the final time we’ll be doing them, and some of the last content that will be going up on the website. (Read the farewell post from our founder here.)

This list brings together some of our favorite articles and essays published online in 2020 and 2021.

(For last year’s list, click here.)

In no particular order…

1. “I, Coronavirus. Mother. Monster. Activist.” by Bayo Akomolafe (May 2020)

2. “Let’s Meet at the Crossroads” (Commencement Keynote Address to Pacifica Graduate Institute) (May 2021)

3. “On Autotheory and Autofiction: Staking Genre” by Teresa Carmody (Los Angeles Review of Books, September 2021)

4. “Unnamed Dead” by Madhu H. Kaza (Los Angeles of Books, September 2021)

5. “How Does Garth Greenwell Make Such Wonderful Sentences?” by Christian Kiefer (LitHub, January 2020)

6. “Greed Does Not Have to Define Our Relationship to Land” by Robin Wall Kimmerer (LitHub, June 2020)

7. “Holding it Together, Falling Apart” by Matthew Salesses (LitHub, September 2020)

8. “Twelve Minutes and a Life” by Mitchell S. Jackson (Runner’s World, June 2020)

9. “Opinion: I Don’t Want to Be the Strong Female Lead” by Brit Marling (New York Times, February 2020)

10. “My Family’s Shrouded History Is Also a National for Korea” by Alexander Chee (New York Times, August 2020)

11. “Why the Filet-O-Fish Is My Gold Standard for Fast Foot” by Jane Hu (New York Times, April 2021)

12. “Molly” by Blake Butler (The Volta, December 2020)

13. “What Slime Knows” by Lacy M. Johnson (Orion, August 2021)

14. “Tree Time” by Sumana Roy (The Paris Review, August 2021)

15. “The Ghosts of Sittwe” by Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint (The Paris Review, August 2021)

16. “My Korean Mother and I Speak to the Dead” by Alex Sujong Laughlin (Harper’s Bazaar, May 2021)

17. “It’s Time to Reckon with the History of Asian Women in America” by Durba Mitra, Sara Kang, Genevieve Clutario (Harper’s Bazaar, March 2021

18. “Therapy in the Time of the Apocalypse” by Natashia Deón (Harper’s Bazaar, November 2021)

19. “Why Does Everything Look Like a High School Burn Book?” by Melissa Lozada-Olivia (Harper’s Bazaar, June 2021)

20. “My friend left this world – and I learned to let him go” by Terese Marie Mailhot (The Guardian, October 2020)

21. “Impossible Word: Toward a Poetics of Aphasia” by Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes (Poetry Foundation, October 2020)

22. “Erasure in Three Acts: An Essay” by Muriel Leung (Poetry Foundation, November 2021)

23. “’Power to the people’s mimeo machines!’ or the Politicization of Small Press Aesthetics” by Matvei Yankelevich (Poetry Foundation, February 2020)

24. “My Mommies and Me” by Alexandra Tanner (Jewish Currents, December 2020)

25. “The Nakba Demands Justice” by Kaleem Hawa (Jewish Currents, May 2021)

26. “The Black Catatonic Scream” by Harmony Holiday (Triple Canopy, August 2020

27. “Black Children Were Jailed for a Crime That Doesn’t Exist. Almost Nothing Happened to the Adults in Charge.” by Meribah Knight, Ken Armstrong (ProPublica, October 2021)

28. “Shark’s Eye”by Rebecca Flowers (Guernica, November 2021)

29. “Gettysburg” by Kirtan Nautiyal (Guernica, October 2021)

30. “For a Good Time, Call” by Natalie Lima (Guernica, September 2020)

31. “Girls on the Playground” by Ruth Madievsky (Guernica, February 2021)

32. “Since I Became Symptomatic” by Leslie Jamison (The New York Review, March 2020)

33. “Women of Nanjing” by May-lee Chai (New England Review, November 2020)

34. “On Worldbuilding and the Question of Resistance” by Matthew Salesses (Catapult, January 2021)

35. “Learning to Write My Truth as a Deaf Queer Writer” by Ross Showalter (Catapult, April 2021)

36. “Finding a Way to My Father Through ‘Peppermint Candy’” by Hannah Bae (Catapult, May 2021)

37. “Beverly Cleary Taught Me How to Share My Divorce Story” by Pooja Mahkijani (Catapult, August 2021)

38. “Why Don’t American Schools Value Creativity?” by Erin Crosby-Eckstine (Catapult, November 2021) 

39. “Mudang and Revolution: Korean Shamanism and the Role of Culture in the Struggle for Reunification” by Sunik Kim (Soap Ear, April 2020)

40. “Climate Crisis is here; so is climate fiction. Don’t you dare call it a genre” by Lydia Millet (Los Angeles Times, July 2021)

41. “To My 11-Year-Old Father in the Camp” by Tamiko Nimura (Off Assignment, September 2021)

42. “Witness and Repair” by Jesmyn Ward (Vanity Fair, September 2020)

43. “Against Genocide: An Introduction” by Zoé Samudzi (The Funambulist, August 2021)

44. “For Those Of Us Who Cannot Leave or Stay” by Eunsong Kim (Asia Art Archive, June 2021)

45. “Eddie Kingston Got No Business F***ing Being Here” by Eddie Kingston (The Players’ Tribune, November 2021)

46. “The Theory That Explains How Senate Republicans Justify Acquitting Trump” by Dahlia Lithwick (Slate, February 2021)

47. “Strangers in Our Own Homes: The pandemic’s xenophobic discourse” by Divya Victor (The Yale Review, September, 2021)

48. “Picturing Catastrophe: The visual politics of racial reckoning” by Rizvana Bradley (The Yale Review, May 2021):

49. “Chase Scene” by Dodie Bellamy (Granta, August, 2021)

50. “Black Phenomena: On Afropessimism & Camp” by Hafizah Geter (BOMB, September 2021)

51. “Who Is R. A. Lafferty? And Is He the Best Sci-Fi Writer Ever?” by Jason Kehe (Wired, March 2021

52. “Teaching is a Woman: Why I Closed My Classroom Door” by Ari Christine (August 2021)

53. “In That Slowdown: On the Southern Cassowary and Fireflies” by Aimee Nezhukumatathil (TriQuarterly, July 2020)

54. “Not So Minor Feelings” by Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt (Entropy, July 2020)

55. “What’s in the Wok” by Ysa Quiballo (Entropy, August 2020)

56. “My Biggest Fear? Living Single & Solo Amidst a Pandemic” by Kimberly Gomes (Entropy, November 2020)

57. “Woven: No Inciting Incident: Memory As Blank Space” by Danielle DeTiberus (Entropy, April 2020)

58. “Woven: Leaving Shambhala” by Rebecca Jamieson (Entropy, June 2020)

59. “Woven: Holes in the Body” by Aekta Khubchandani (Entropy, September 2021)

60. “Woven: The Investigation is Still Ongoing” by Lalini Shanela Ranaraja (Entropy, September 2021)

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