Each week, the Sunday Post highlights just a few things we loved reading and want to share with you. Settle in with a cup of coffee, or tea, if that's your pleasure — we saved you a seat! Read an essay or an article online that you loved? Let us know at submissions@seattlereviewofbooks.com. Need more browse? You can also look through the archives.

The end of farming?

We are living in a nostaligic’s paradise. To pay attention to the world is to be transfixed with grief, anger, fear, defiance — and, for those with a certain sort of upbringing, a terrific anxiety about overdramatizing the situation. We yank our personal gaslights up and down, wondering: is the world burning? Or is it just the sun in our eyes?

There are a privileged few who can act on their anxiety in larger ways than piling their recycling full and buying extra bottled water. The rich boys of the tech industry buy islands and build rocket ships. The rich boys of Britain are returning their island to a time out of memory, before they ploughed their wild land into submission and made “bucolic” a national identity.

In August 2003, Burrell invited local farmers to Knepp with the aim of converting them to the project. As he laid out his vision of fields and hedges devolving into scrub and wetland, his audience erupted with anger. “It wasn’t simply that our neighbours (including some other members of the family) thought this wasn’t right for them,” Tree wrote. “It was more visceral … an affront to the efforts of every self-respecting farmer, an immoral waste of land, an assault on Britishness itself.”

Replaying my shame

A very young Emily Gould worked at Gawker, and was publicly shamed for it by a television star with immense social power. Not content to confront her one on one, the star invited three other people with power of various kinds (an expert panel of “middle-aged white men”) to assist. The resulting video clip has gone viral repeatedly, punctuating Gould’s career with humiliation and used as a weapon against her by other angry men.

Here’s a gift from #MeToo: it’s impossible to watch the video clip today and see anything but what it is: four men, established in their career and the power of their race, gender, and affluence, mercilessly and publicly bullying a young woman who has no reason to expect it. Shame _is _a tool of control, and the powerful are always best placed to wield it.

When I watch the clip — me and Jimmy Kimmel, in split screen — it’s possible to see the exact moment when I realize what’s going on, that what I’d thought was a joke is in fact serious. It’s when one of the experts tells me that it’s only a matter of time before the map gets a celebrity murdered, and I’m shaking my head in disbelief, causing my stylist-fluffed barrel curls to wag from side to side. Something flips then, and you can see in my widened eyes that I know I’m completely fucked; I’ve been talking about media and they are talking about murder, seemingly meaning it. Objectively, this is the moment to laugh at me. It is funny to watch someone be humiliated. We all think, Wow, thank God it’s not me.

I am being unmade

Paraic O’Donnell, holy cats. This is one of those rare essays that keeps me in the longform-reading game — entirely original, entirely surprising. Entire.

Eve knew something else, deep down. She knew what all gardeners know: that trees bear fruit because fruit carry seeds; that trees bear fruit because they’re dying. She knew that this whole thing was a setup, right from the start.

September, this must have been. That’s when it starts, always. When you first figure it out. It’s when fruit ripens, when all that beauty starts getting its affairs in order. It’s when you realise how this ends.