Each week, the Sunday Post highlights a few articles we enjoyed this week, good for consumption over a cup of coffee (or tea, if that's your pleasure). Settle in for a while; we saved you a seat. You can also look through the archives.

Free Indirect Suicide: An Unfinished Fugue in H Minor

Any excerpt I pull from this stunning, humbling essay by Seo-Young Chu will mislead you. So it's a question of which wrong direction to lead you in, hoping you'll follow it to the whole. The emotional force of this piece is crazy intense; the formal imagination is crazy good.

[No, I truly can't pick an excerpt that will do this justice. Just read it. Go!]

On Flooding: Drowning the Culture in Sameness

Soraya Roberts has so many good points in this article about the sameness of the media we consume (ugh! I mean: the words we read, the television and movies we watch, the art we look at). Somewhere in the muddle between "content creation" and "content curation" and algorithms that choose our preferences for us, we're losing the voices we'd most like to hear.

Now what?

The irony of the web is that even though everyone can have a voice, the ones that we project are projected over and over and over again. This isn’t quality, or real diversity; it’s familiarity. We model ourselves on fandom, where there is no sense of proportionality — there is everything, there is nothing, and there is little else — and the space between now and the future, the space in which critics used to sit, increasingly ceases to exist.

Wading Through the Sludge

What's the cost of paperwork? Maybe the right to vote. Maybe access to an education. Maybe the ability to feed your children or keep them housed. Cass R. Sunstein on the burden of red tape, and who carries the real weight of it.

For paperwork burdens, the University of Chicago economist and Nobel laureate Richard Thaler has coined a good term: “sludge.” You might want to sign your child up for free school meals, but wading through the sludge might defeat you. To get financial aid for college, students have to fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). It’s long and complicated; many students give up and fail to apply to college at all. The right to vote may be the most fundamental right of all, but if the registration process is full of sludge, a lot of people might end up disenfranchised.

Wading Through the Sludge

What's the cost of paperwork? Maybe the right to vote. Maybe access to an education. Maybe the ability to feed your children or keep them housed. Cass R. Sunstein on the burden of red tape, and who carries the real weight of it.

For paperwork burdens, the University of Chicago economist and Nobel laureate Richard Thaler has coined a good term: “sludge.” You might want to sign your child up for free school meals, but wading through the sludge might defeat you. To get financial aid for college, students have to fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). It’s long and complicated; many students give up and fail to apply to college at all. The right to vote may be the most fundamental right of all, but if the registration process is full of sludge, a lot of people might end up disenfranchised.

The Chinese Burner

What happens when China's tech elite attend Burning Man? Science fiction writer Chen Qiufan's observations from the desert in Utah. The tidbits about his experience at the event are interesting, but even more so is the insight into the tech giants of a dramatically different culture.

In the past twenty years, the Chinese tech industry has experienced explosive growth. Terms like _langxing_ (“wolf instinct,” as in _The Wolf of Wall Street_), _yeman shengzhang_ (“savage growth,” as in, “That was savage, man!”) and _jiangwei gongji_ (meaning a blow so powerful that it flattens your opponent from three dimensions to two dimensions, from the famous sci-fi novel _The Three-Body Problem_) have become popular among Chinese tech entrepreneurs. They act as the first generation of pioneers journeying into the virtual New World. They imagine themselves as packs of wolves in the Mongolian plains who can only survive and emerge victorious through bloody combat, incessantly stalking new territory and prey.