essay about an utopian society

Essays About Utopia: Top 6 Examples and 9 Prompts

Struggling to write essays about utopia? Our essay examples about utopia plus prompts will be useful in your writing journey. 

Utopia refers to an imaginary world where perfect societies are created. Translated as “no place” in Greek, the term was coined by English Statesman Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book “Utopia.” In More’s Utopia, a political satire, people share the same ways of life and live in harmony.

Utopia in various contexts has been used to define a perfect society that has served as the foundation of several ideologies. However, it has also been slammed for propelling people to strive for the impossible and dismiss realities on the ground. Various schools of thought have risen to improve on the utopian concept.

6 Helpful Essay Examples

1. utopian thinking: the easy way to eradicate poverty by rutger bregman, 2. the schools of utopia by john dewey, 3. metaverse: utopia for virtual business opportunities right now by noah rue, 4. saudi’s neom is dystopia portrayed as utopia by edwin heathcote, 5. streaming utopia: imagining digital music’s perfect world by marc hogan, 6. what’s the difference between utopia, eutopia, and protopia by hanzi freinacht, 1. describe your utopia, 2. my utopian vacation, 3. what is utopian literature, 4. utopia vs. dystopia in movies, 5. plato on utopia, 6. utopia of feminists, 7. dangers of utopian thinking, 8. utopia in capitalism, 9. your utopia for education.

“The time for small thoughts and little nudges is past. The time has come for new, radical ideas. If this sounds utopian to you, then remember that every milestone of civilisation – the end of slavery, democracy, equal rights for men and women – was once a utopian fantasy too.”

The article brings to light a utopian vision for eradicating poverty. This vision involves providing annual income to the poor. While such a scheme has drawn criticism over the possibility of dampening beneficiaries’ inclination to work. The essay cites the success of a Canadian field experiment that provided the entire town of Dauphin a monthly income for four years and helped ease poor living conditions. You might also be interested in these essays about Beowulf .

“The most Utopian thing in Utopia is that there are no schools at all. Education is carried on without anything of the nature of schools, or, if this idea is so extreme that we cannot conceive of it as educational at all, then we may say nothing of the sort at present we know as schools.”

John Dewey , an American philosopher, and education reformist, contested the old ways of schooling where rows of students recite and memorize lessons. In this speech, he illuminates the need for education to be a lived experience rather than confined within the four corners of a classroom. Check out these essays about freedom .

“The metaverse looks like a good business opportunity right now, but emerging markets are always volatile, and changing laws or regulations could turn the metaverse from a profitable utopia into a cash-guzzling dystopia for business.”

Businesses of all sizes are beginning to enter the metaverse. As with all pursuits, early movers are gaining the biggest advantage in carving out their niche in the utopian digital world. But despite the blazing popularity of the metaverse, a degree of caution must still be exercised as the virtual space is uncharted territory for sustainable business profitability. 

“The inside is, of course, rendered as a bucolic techno-utopia, a valley of trees and foliage, the new Babylon. This is the great contemporary cliché. No matter how huge the building, how hideous the ethics, everything can be concealed by a bit of greenery.”

Saudi and humanity’s biggest ambition for a future eco-city is a trillion-dollar city in the middle of a desert. But the ways to attain this utopian city might not live up to the rhetoric it has been selling, as its gigantic promises of free-flowing energy and technology haven’t accounted for their resulting environmental costs. 

“Many were happy with their current digital tools… and just wished for slight improvements, though they frequently expressed concern that artists should be getting a bigger cut of the profits.”

The essay interviews a handful of music nerds and junkies and asks them to describe their utopia in the music streaming world. Some were as ambitious as seeing an integration of music libraries and having all their music collections for free fit into their phones. 

“The Utopian believes in progress. The Eutopian believes in critique and a rediscovery of simpler wisdoms and relationships. The Protopian believes that progress can be enacted by understanding how the many critiques and rediscoveries of wisdom are interconnected into a larger whole.”

A political philosopher, Freinacht dissects the differences between utopia, eutopia, and protopia in modern and post-modern contexts. He concludes that protopia is the best way to go as it centers on the reality of daily progress and the beauty of listening to the diversity of human experiences.

9 Interesting Prompts To Begin Your Essays About Utopia

Describe your idea of a perfect world. You could start your essay with the common question of what you think would make the world a better place. Then, provide an ambitious answer, such as a world without poverty or violence. Next, explain why this is the one evil you would like to weed out from the world. Finally, provide background showing the gravity of the situation and why it needs urgent resolution.

For this essay, try to describe your ideal vacation as detailed and colorful as possible to the point that your readers feel they are pulled into your utopia. Pump out your creative juices by adding as many elements that can effectively and strikingly describe your ultimate paradise.

More’s Utopia was a great success among the elites of its time. The groundbreaking book gave way to a new genre: utopian literature. For this writing prompt, describe utopian literature and analyze what new perspectives such genre could offer. Cite famous examples such as More’s Utopia and describe the lessons which could be mused from these utopian novels. 

Dystopia is the opposite of utopia. In your essay, explain the differences od dystopia and utopia, then provide a brief historical summary of how each came about. Cite film examples for each genre and try to answer which of the two is the more popular today. Finally, investigate to understand why there is greater leaning toward this genre and how this genre feeds into the fantasies of today’s audience.

While Plato never used the word “utopia” since he lived long before its conception, Plato is credited for creating the first utopian literary work, The Republic . Summarize the utopia as described by Plato and analyze how his ideals figure in the modern world.  

Interview at least three feminists and ask them to describe what a utopia for feminists would look like and why this is their ideal world. How is society expected to behave in their ideal world? Then, consolidate their answers to build the backbone of your essay. You may also search for feminist utopia novels and compare the concepts of these novels to the answers of the feminists you interviewed.

Genocides made to forward extreme ideologies have been linked to utopian thinking. Identify the dangers of aiming for the perfect society and cite past incidents where groups committed heinous crimes to achieve their utopia. To conclude, offer viable solutions, including the proper mindset, realistic setting of boundaries, and actions that groups should carry out when striving to create change.

Greedy capitalism is blamed for a slew of problems facing today: environmental abuse, labor exploitation, and a gaping divide in income equality that is stoking dissatisfaction among many workers and compelling calls to tax the rich. For your essay, enumerate the problems of capitalism and the remedies being sought to direct the capitalist endeavors to more sustainable projects.

Beyond Dewey’s utopia for the educational system, write your wishlist for how learning should be built at schools. Your utopian school could implement any policy, from having minimal assignments to more educational field trips and challenging activities every day. Finally, explain how this could elevate the educational experience among students, back up your utopian goals with research that also recommends this setup for schools. When editing for grammar, we also recommend improving the readability score of a piece of writing before publishing or submitting. For more guidance, read our explainer on grammar and syntax .

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Essay Samples on Utopia

Writing an informative essay about a utopia.

Writing an informative essay about a utopia requires delving into the realm of imagination and exploring the intricacies of an ideal society. Utopias have long fascinated thinkers and writers, as they provide a canvas for envisioning a world free from the limitations and challenges of...

Utopian Characters In The Island And The Truman Show

Michael Bay the director of The Island and Peter Weir whom is the director of The Truman Show both have created films in a utopian theme. The comparison of the two selected films suggest that they each have false relationships connected to family and friends....

• The Truman Show

Utopian Society in Walden Two by B.F. Skinner

Walden Two is a book by B.F. Skinner, originally published by Hackett Publishing Company, INC. in 1948. This book is about two men who return from World War Two and go to visit a new society being built by a man named Frazier. The men...

The Dichotomy of Dystopian and Utopian Societies in "The Giver"

Lois Lowry's novel "The Giver" explores the concept of a society that strives for perfection, leading to both a utopian and dystopian reality. In the novel, the protagonist, Jonas, lives in a seemingly perfect world, where everyone is content and there is no suffering or...

Utopia by Thomas More: Dystopia Inside Utopia

A perfect society or a utopian society is a made-up community where political and social ideas are available in the way that there is peace amongst the people. Many people have different perspectives on their own personal Utopia. Thomas More had his own vision of...

• Thomas More

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The Idea of Reaching an Utopian Society, the Perfect World

According to Marianne Moyaert (2011), the concept of Utopia has been defined with the idea of a fantasized society and the desire for a better life, caused by feelings of unhappiness towards the society one lives in the present (p. 99). Where alternate visions of...

• Slave Trade

The Illusion of The Utopia in Zootopia Movie

A Utopia is an imagined place or state of things in which everything is perfect and that is what the city Zootopia is or at least it's what the directors want you to think. Although it appears that all of the animals get along that...

Thomas More's Utopia: The Birth of Literary Genre

In fact, this chapter is divided into two sections; a first one dealing with More’s Utopia, it aims at introducing More’s narrative as the founding text of the utopian discourse as it is known today. It has also as a purpose the attempt to define...

Utopian Society in "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" and "The Ones Who Stay and Fight"

Utopia is an imaginary world of ideal perfection ('Utopia Definition'). This definition portrays the societies created by the two authors Ursula Le Guin and N.K Jemisin in 'The ones Who Walk Away from Omelas' and 'The Ones Who Stay and Fight' respectively. Le Guin portrays...

• The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas

Analysis Of The Film Utopia By John Pilger

In his return to outback Australia, John Pilger has little good news about the current status of the First Australians. The truth he paints is eviscerating. The Aboriginals are still disproportionally poor and politically disenfranchised. The film makes you sit up and listen. The facts...

• Film Analysis

Best topics on Utopia

1. Writing an Informative Essay About a Utopia

2. Utopian Characters In The Island And The Truman Show

3. Utopian Society in Walden Two by B.F. Skinner

4. The Dichotomy of Dystopian and Utopian Societies in “The Giver”

5. Utopia by Thomas More: Dystopia Inside Utopia

6. The Idea of Reaching an Utopian Society, the Perfect World

7. The Illusion of The Utopia in Zootopia Movie

8. Thomas More’s Utopia: The Birth of Literary Genre

9. Utopian Society in “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” and “The Ones Who Stay and Fight”

10. Analysis Of The Film Utopia By John Pilger

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The Utopian Society Concept Research Paper

The main purpose of this paper is to understand the basic concept behind a utopian society. It shows how assumptions are made in order for such a society to thrive. Additionally, it explores the weaknesses, which may arise due to the ideologies attributed to utopia.

Utopia is a term used to depict a community or a society that exudes a perfect communal, opinionated and legal system. Utopia is a Greek word that was conjured by Sir Thomas More to explain an invented island in the Atlantic Ocean in his “1516 book titled Utopia’. He derived this name from two Greek words; Eutopia, which describes a good place and Outopia, which describes a non-existence, place (More and Bacon 87).

Therefore, the term alludes to a double meaning; “good place and no place”. The use of these words further shows us that such a society is not achievable. He intentionally wanted to explore the irony such a word would create in his novel, Utopia. Utopia depicts an ideal society where the opinionated, communal and financial structures are perfect.

The initial utopian suggestion was that of the republic as stated by Plato. It suggests a categorization of citizens into a strict class structure of “golden, silver, bronze and iron socioeconomic classes” (More and Bacon 87). The golden citizens are a group of individuals that have undergone a fifty-year-old education program like oligarchs. These oligarchs are the philosopher kings. These rulers focus on reducing deficiency and distributing resources within their territories.

In these republics, the citizens are ready to defend themselves from any external military invasion and compete for resources in any strategies probable including the utilization of forces. They focussed on a society that would not look for reasons to engage in wars. These republics have very few laws; furthermore, they lacked evidence of the existence of lawyers, and barely take its citizens to war. Most of these republics employed the services of mercenaries to counter any war (Rowlands).

These republics tolerate the various religious diversities present in their republics. People could employ their religious ideologies without inequity; furthermore, no religion was favoured. There also viewed a society with diminished territorial boundaries thus the entire world would become a society with one just and sincere ruler. Some scholars have decided to use this concept as an ideal blueprint through which republics should be governed.

Ecological utopian describes the various ways through which people can relate peacefully with the environment. It opposes the modern way of living that encourages the destruction of nature thus encouraging the traditional way of living that was in harmony with nature. Most of them focussed on the Stone Age period where man and nature were in perfect harmony. Furthermore, each one of them was dependent to enhance existence and survival.

Economical utopian describes a situation whereby the financial system and the marketplace are in a state that favours all participants. These societies addressed the atrocities caused by the capitalist societies. In capitalist societies, individuals worked for the rulers, sometimes it even involved hard and strenuous work in unfavourable working conditions to the benefit of the rulers.

Everything had a monetary value on it and the market always favoured the selfish interests of these rulers. Some of the recommendations included the abolishment of money as an intermediate of substitution, equal allocation of merchandise and services, the ability of people to do work that they enjoyed. This should be for the mutual good of the society thus shunning the individual selfish interest of the rulers (Engels 36).

This theory sees gender as a creation of the society. It foresees a society whereby gender neutrality will be tenable and that social responsibilities are not subject to the gender of an individual. With this gender notion in mind, it is noteworthy that two types of scholars proposed how a gender free society ought to be. They were the feminist and the masculine scholars.

Most feminist writers were advocating an all female society where the male species would be eradicated either by introduction of diseases that only targeted the male or by technology that did not favour the male species. These scholars were reacting to a period whereby females were submissive to the male. Their mannish counterparts focussed on a society with one sex that is all the sexes responsive thus conjured as one; furthermore, there is no discrimination whatsoever based on the gender of an individual (More and Bacon 87).

By illustrating how societies would turn out when individuals strictly follow the socialist ethic, utopian socialism has three possible effects. First, it inspires the oppressed to fight thus attaining a better future. Secondly, it clearly gives the true meaning of the facets of socialism as evident in its support for livelihoods.

The problem with this theory is that the scholars did not provide a clear path for the implementation of the ideologies. It only left the reasoning of the scholars and subsequently those of the society to guide the implementation of the theory.

Works Cited

Engels, Friedrich. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. New York, NY: Mondial, 2006. Print.

More, Neville. & Bacon, Francis. Three Early Utopias: Utopia, New Atlantis and the Isle of Pines. New York, Oxford University Press, 1997. Print.

Rowlands, Joseph. Utopianism. Rebirth of Reason. ND. Web.

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IvyPanda. (2019, May 7). The Utopian Society Concept. https://ivypanda.com/essays/utopia-2/

"The Utopian Society Concept." IvyPanda , 7 May 2019, ivypanda.com/essays/utopia-2/.

IvyPanda . (2019) 'The Utopian Society Concept'. 7 May.

IvyPanda . 2019. "The Utopian Society Concept." May 7, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/utopia-2/.

1. IvyPanda . "The Utopian Society Concept." May 7, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/utopia-2/.

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A Fresh Look at More’s “Utopia”: a Vision of Social Harmony

This essay about Thomas More’s “Utopia” examines the work’s exploration of social and political philosophy through its critique of 16th-century European society and the presentation of an ideal, egalitarian society. It highlights More’s vision of a society where communal welfare surpasses individual gain, challenging the social injustices of his time by proposing a world of shared resources and harmony. The text also addresses the complexities and contradictions inherent in striving for a utopian society, questioning the balance between communal well-being and personal freedom. Furthermore, it reflects on the relevance of More’s ideas in contemporary discussions on social justice and the pursuit of an ideal society, emphasizing “Utopia” as a source of inspiration for imagining and working towards a more equitable world.

How it works

In the annals of literature and political thought, few works have sparked as much fascination and debate as Thomas More’s “Utopia.” Published in 1516, this seminal text presents an imaginative and critical reflection on the society of More’s time, offering a radical vision of an alternative society based on egalitarian principles. Through a detailed narrative, More introduces readers to an island society that embodies his critique of European socio-political conditions, while simultaneously proposing a model for a more equitable and harmonious world.

At its core, “Utopia” delves into themes of social and political philosophy, challenging the status quo of early 16th-century Europe. More’s critique is not merely an indictment of the social injustices of his day, such as the disparity between the rich and the poor, corruption in politics, and the flawed legal system; it is also a profound exploration of human nature, governance, and the possibility of social reform. Through the fictionalized account of Utopia, More articulates a society where private property does not exist, and the community’s welfare takes precedence over individual gain. This radical reimagining of societal organization seeks to address the root causes of inequality and injustice, proposing a world where resources are shared, and people live in harmony with one another and the environment.

More’s Utopia is often read as a critique of European society’s failings, highlighting the greed, corruption, and inequity that plagued his contemporaries. The detailed description of Utopian society – with its communal living, absence of private property, and emphasis on education and moral philosophy – stands in stark contrast to the European societies of the time, marked by stark social divisions and widespread poverty. More’s work implicitly questions whether the principles of justice, equality, and common good can ever truly be realized in a society governed by wealth and power disparities. By presenting an idealized alternative, More invites readers to reflect on the societal norms and values that shape their lives and to consider the possibility of a different way of organizing human affairs.

Yet, the vision of Utopia is not without its complexities and contradictions. While it offers a compelling critique of contemporary society and a hopeful vision of human potential, More’s work also engages with the limitations of utopian thinking. The very perfection of Utopian society raises questions about the nature of human freedom, individuality, and diversity. The elimination of private property and the uniformity of Utopian life prompt readers to ponder the balance between communal well-being and personal autonomy. Furthermore, More’s use of a fictional narrative to present his ideas serves as a reminder of the tension between utopian ideals and the practical realities of human society. The fictional Utopia, with its orderly and rational social structure, invites us to dream of what might be possible, even as it underscores the challenges of translating such visions into reality.

“Utopia” remains a profoundly influential text, not only in the fields of literature and philosophy but also in shaping modern discussions about social justice, governance, and the pursuit of an ideal society. More’s imaginative leap into the realm of the possible continues to inspire those who seek to challenge the injustices of their own times and to envision a world where equity, compassion, and communal well-being are not just ideals but lived realities. As we grapple with contemporary global challenges – from inequality and environmental degradation to political polarization – More’s vision of Utopia offers a timeless reflection on the possibilities and pitfalls of human social organization.

In the end, Thomas More’s “Utopia” serves not as a blueprint for a perfect society but as a mirror reflecting the complexities, contradictions, and aspirations of human nature. It challenges us to think critically about our societal structures, to question the status quo, and to imagine how we might build a more equitable and just world. The enduring relevance of “Utopia” lies in its ability to provoke thought and inspire change, reminding us that the journey towards a better society is an ongoing process that requires imagination, courage, and collective action.

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• Literature Notes
• What Are Utopias and Dystopias?
• Book Summary
• About The Giver
• Character List
• Summary and Analysis
• Chapters 1-2
• Chapters 3-5
• Chapters 6-8
• Chapters 9-10
• Chapters 11-12
• Chapters 13-15
• Chapters 16-17
• Chapters 18-20
• Chapters 21-23
• Lois Lowry Biography
• Critical Essays
• Major Themes in The Giver
• Style and Language in The Giver
• A Note about Infanticide and Euthanasia
• Full Glossary for The Giver
• Essay Questions
• Cite this Literature Note

Critical Essays What Are Utopias and Dystopias?

The word utopia comes from the Greek words ou , meaning "no" or "not," and topos , meaning "place." Since its original conception, utopia has come to mean a place that we can only dream about, a true paradise. Dystopia , which is the direct opposite of utopia, is a term used to describe a utopian society in which things have gone wrong. Both utopias and dystopias share characteristics of science fiction and fantasy, and both are usually set in a future in which technology has been used to create perfect living conditions. However, once the setting of a utopian or dystopian novel has been established, the focus of the novel is usually not on the technology itself but rather on the psychology and emotions of the characters who live under such conditions.

Although the word utopia was coined in 1516 by Sir Thomas More when he wrote Utopia , writers have written about utopias for centuries, including the biblical Garden of Eden in Genesis and Plato's Republic , about a perfect state ruled by philosopher-kings. More's Utopia protested contemporary English life by describing an ideal political state in a land called Utopia, or Nowhere Land. Other early fictional utopias include various exotic communities in Jonathan Swift's famous Gulliver's Travels (1726).

The idea of utopias continued to be popular during the nineteenth century. For example, English author Samuel Butler wrote Erewhon (1872) ("nowhere" spelled backward) and Erewhon Revisited (1901), and William Morris wrote News From Nowhere (1891). In the United States, people have attempted to create real-life utopias. A few of the places where utopian communities were started include Fruitlands, Massachusetts; Harmony, Pennsylvania; Corning, Iowa; Oneida, New York; and Brook Farm, Massachusetts, founded in 1841 by American transcendentalists. Although the founders of these utopian communities had good intentions, none of the communities flourished as their creators had hoped.

Dystopias are a way in which authors share their concerns about society and humanity. They also serve to warn members of a society to pay attention to the society in which they live and to be aware of how things can go from bad to worse without anyone realizing what has happened. Examples of fictional dystopias include Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), Ray Bradbury's

Fahrenheit 451 (1953), and George Orwell's Animal Farm (1944) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).

Lois Lowry chose to write The Giver as a dystopian novel because it was the most effective means to communicate her dissatisfaction with the lack of awareness that human beings have about their interdependence with each other, their environment, and their world. She uses the irony of utopian appearances but dystopian realities to provoke her readers to question and value their own freedoms and individual identities.

Jonas' community appears to be a utopia, but, in reality, it is a dystopia. The people seem perfectly content to live in an oli-garchy — a government run by a select few — in which a Community of Elders enforces the rules. In Jonas' community, there is no poverty, starvation, unemployment, lack of housing, or prejudice; everything is perfectly planned to eliminate any problems. However, as the novel progresses and Jonas gains insight into what the people have willingly given up — their freedoms and individual-ities — for the so-called common good of the community, it becomes more and more evident that the community is a bad place in which to live. Readers can relate to the disbelief and horror that Jonas feels when he realizes that his community is a hypocrisy, a society based on false ideals of goodness and conformity. As Jonas comes to understand the importance of memory, freedom, individuality, and even color, he can no longer stand by and watch the people in his community continue to live under such fraudulent pretenses.

Previous Style and Language in The Giver

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Utopia — The Ideal World for Me: My Utopia

The Ideal World for Me: My Utopia

• Categories: Society Utopia

About this sample

Words: 542 |

Published: Nov 8, 2019

Words: 542 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

Works Cited:

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• Hall, E. T. (1976). Beyond culture. Anchor Books.
• Hofstede, G. (2001). Culture's consequences: Comparing values, behaviors, institutions and organizations across nations. Sage Publications.
• Kim, Y. Y. (2016). Communication and cross-cultural adaptation: An integrative theory. Routledge.
• Nasr, M. (2016). Developing intercultural communication skills: An exploration of potential barriers to successful intercultural communication. Journal of International Education Research, 12(1), 25-36.
• Neuliep, J. W. (2017). Intercultural communication: A contextual approach (7th ed.). Sage Publications.
• Piller, I. (2016). Intercultural communication: A critical introduction. Edinburgh University Press.
• Samovar, L. A., Porter, R. E., McDaniel, E. R., & Roy, C. S. (2017). Intercultural communication: A reader (15th ed.). Cengage Learning.
• Ting-Toomey, S. (2017). Identity negotiation theory: Cross-cultural adaptation within intercultural communication competence. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication. Oxford University Press.

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April 18, 2024

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Stifled Rage

April 18, 2024 issue

Louisa May Alcott; illustration by Maya Chessman

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A Strange Life: Selected Essays of Louisa May Alcott

“I write for myself and strangers,” Gertrude Stein once announced. So, too, Louisa May Alcott, who wrote for herself as well as the strangers who have been reading Little Women since 1868, when it first appeared. For more than a century and a half, Little Women has inspired playwrights, composers, filmmakers, scholars, novelists, and of course countless young girls. Jane Smiley salutes those young girls—she was one of them—in her warmly appreciative preface to A Strange Life , Liz Rosenberg’s slim new collection of Alcott’s essays.

When she first encountered Little Women , Smiley realized that a book about girls was actually famous and that every library had it. Later it even seemed that the book had to be about Alcott’s own life. And since many others have felt the same way—with good reason—it’s not surprising that new biographies come down the pike every few years, intent on changing the negative view of Alcott best expressed by Henry James, who belittled her as “the Thackeray, the Trollope, of the nursery and the school-room.”

Martha Saxton’s feminist Louisa May: A Modern Biography (1977) and, more recently, biographies by Harriet Reisen, Susan Cheever, and Eve LaPlante, and by scholars such as John Matteson, have demonstrated that Alcott was much more than the author of what she self-deprecatingly called “moral pap for the young.” Rather, as a woman of imagination with considerable stylistic range, Alcott composed gothic tales, short stories, satires, fantasies, adult novels, poetry, memoirs, and essays in which she wrote of female independence and its costs in a restrictive domestic circle. She was also a prolific letter writer who converted into a tart prose style much of her anguish—and anger—at the circumstances in which she found herself, as a woman, as a dutiful daughter, as a second-class citizen, and, ironically, as a best-selling author who worked hard to maintain her popularity.

Rosenberg, the author of Scribbles, Sorrows, and Russet Leather Boots: The Life of Louisa May Alcott (2021), aimed at young readers, is thus not the first person to suggest that Alcott, and in particular her nonfiction, are worthy of serious attention. There’s also Elaine Showalter’s excellent selection of Alcott’s prose in Alternative Alcott (1988); there’s the Portable Louisa May Alcott (2000), edited by Elizabeth Lennox Keyser, and The Sketches of Louisa May Alcott (2001), collected by the Alcott specialist Gregory Eiselein, not to mention the superb selection of her nonfiction in one of the Alcott volumes published by the Library of America.

In A Strange Life , Rosenberg wisely includes Alcott’s best-known prose works—the excellent, slightly fictionalized memoir “Transcendental Wild Oats” and the exceptional (abridged) Hospital Sketches —and sets them alongside excerpts from her semiautobiographical nonfiction to show that her prose, as she explains in her introduction, “canters along; she covers great distances in the fewest words; there is no dilly-dallying.” Maybe so; what’s also true is that Alcott can write with unmistakable acerbity.

Rosenberg provides some biographical information on Alcott as well but unfortunately doesn’t explain why she chose certain pieces and not others, or why she arranged them in the order she did. Presumably the essay “Happy Women” (1868), her penultimate selection, is meant to present Alcott at her feminist best. True, it was written as a buck-me-up advice column for the unmarried woman, counseling her not to fear becoming an “old maid” since “the loss of liberty, happiness, and self respect is poorly repaid by the barren honor of being called ‘Mrs.’” In stock terms, Alcott advises, “Be true to yourselves; cherish whatever talent you possess, and in using it faithfully for the good of others, you will most assuredly find happiness for yourself.” But pieces that Rosenberg didn’t include, such as “Unofficial Incidents Overlooked by the Reporters” (1875), Alcott’s account of the centennial celebration in Concord, Massachusetts, have far more bite:

We had no place in the procession, but such women as wished to hear the oration were directed to meet in the Town Hall at half-past nine, and wait there until certain persons, detailed for the service, should come to lead them to the tent, where a limited number of seats had been reserved for the weaker vessels.

Rosenberg also reprints short excerpts from Alcott’s travel book, Shawl-Straps : An Account of a Trip to Europe (1872), but these selections—from the essays “Women of Brittany,” “The Flood in Rome,” and “Visit from a King”—are flat and predictable. And while she includes Alcott’s autobiographical sketch “My Boys,” a forgettable group of portraits intended mainly for young people and originally published in Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag (1872), Rosenberg fails to note that this was the first in a series of six Scrap-Bag books ( Shawl-Straps being the first), and that in them Alcott cleverly assumed the voice of Jo March Bhaer, from the best-selling Little Women —presumably to make money.

Despite the thinness of these sketches, they could be enriched if the reader knew the books from which they’re taken or more of the circumstances under which they were written. For Alcott worked obsessively to become a successful writer and, not coincidentally, her impoverished family’s breadwinner. Her father, Amos Bronson Alcott, was eccentric and impecunious—and lovable, as long as you weren’t related to him. A self-taught Connecticut peddler turned educator, Bronson for a time ran the progressive Temple School in Boston. But after he published Conversations with Children on the Gospels (1836–1837), in which he included allusions to sex and birth, scandalized Bostonians withdrew their children from the school, forcing it to close. His next venture was short-lived; he admitted a Black child to a new school and even his die-hard supporters bolted.

Then in 1843, when Louisa was ten, Bronson marched his family off to the town of Harvard, Massachusetts, about fourteen miles from Concord, where the Alcotts had been living. At a farm inappropriately dubbed Fruitlands, Bronson believed that they and a small band of cohorts could create a new Garden of Eden by living off the fruit of the land. “Insane, well-meaning egotists,” the antislavery writer Lydia Maria Child called them.

At Fruitlands, Abigail May Alcott, Louisa’s mother, was tasked with the cleaning, the washing of clothes, and the cooking, though there was little of that since utopia mandated a diet of mostly raw vegetables. (Rosenberg calls Bronson “a prescient and intelligent vegetarian pre-hippie.”) She was miserable, and the children almost starved. The model for the beloved Marmee, the mother of the brood in Little Women , Abigail was the youngest child in a family of prominent Boston Brahmin liberals; her brother was the passionate Unitarian abolitionist and women’s rights advocate Samuel Joseph May. She studied French, Latin, and chemistry privately in Duxbury, Massachusetts, and later helped form the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society. In 1830 she married the self-involved Bronson, who confessed in his journal, “I love her because she loves me.” In Little Women , Marmee understandably declares, “I am angry nearly every day of my life.”

In “Transcendental Wild Oats” (1873), Alcott changes the names of the Fruitlanders and, Rosenberg argues, “alternates broad comedy with tragedy.” As she puts it, “Alcott never lingers on the psychological devastation” that she likely experienced but rather

focuses on the characters around her and records the homely details of daily life (“unleavened bread, porridge, and water for breakfast; bread, vegetables, and water for dinner; bread, fruit, and water for supper”), leaving little room for disbelief.

Yet Alcott’s details are telling. Her irony is unmistakable, and her voice devastating in its affectlessness. As she observes, these “modern pilgrims,” most notably her father, possessed “the firm belief that plenteous orchards were soon to be evoked from their inner consciousness.” Once in their prospective Eden, she acidly continues, “no teapot profaned that sacred stove, no gory steak cried aloud for vengeance from her chaste gridiron; and only a brave woman’s taste, time, and temper were sacrificed on that domestic altar.” Fortunately the sojourn in paradise lasted only seven months.

The Alcotts eventually resettled in Concord, where Louisa grew up near Emerson, Thoreau, and later Hawthorne. But since “money is never plentiful in a philosopher’s house,” as she later recollected, the family temporarily moved to a basement apartment in Boston. After her mother formed what was basically a female employment agency, Louisa volunteered to take a position as a lady’s live-in companion in Dedham, Massachusetts. It turned out to be a degrading experience that she partly fictionalized in the essay “How I Went Out to Service” (1874), with which Rosenberg opens her volume, claiming it’s yet another example of Alcott’s ability to “strike the intersecting point between tragedy and comedy.” It’s a fine essay but not particularly comic: it’s a chilly story of exploitation and sexual harassment despite the moralizing conclusion about how the experience taught her many lessons.

Doubtless it did, but it also seems that Alcott wrote more for strangers than herself, often muzzling the intensity of her response to those who underestimated, harassed, or took advantage of her. She had begun to sell stories to help support her family, and though she’d already published two in the prestigious Atlantic Monthly , she also tried her hand at teaching again, despite her hatred of it. The publisher of The Atlantic , James Fields, loaned her forty dollars to help outfit her classroom, but when she came to him with another story—according to Rosenberg, “How I Went Out to Service”—he told her bluntly, “Stick to your teaching.” Rosenberg omits what happened later: after the success of Little Women , Alcott paid back the loan, telling Fields she’d found that writing paid far better than teaching, so she’d stick to her pen. “He laughed,” she said, “& owned that he made a mistake.”

She never forgot the insult. Like Marmee, who said she was angry nearly every day of her life, Alcott added, “I have learned not to show it.” Instead she found ways to stifle her rage, distancing herself from her feelings and retreating into the safety of platitudes, which often deaden her prose. For instance, at the conclusion of “How I Went Out to Service,” she tacks on a lesson about “making a companion, not a servant, of those whose aid I need, and helping to gild their honest wages with the sympathy and justice which can sweeten the humblest and lighten the hardest task.” It’s not clear if she’s counseling the reader or herself.

That’s far less true, though, in Hospital Sketches (1863), Alcott’s first successful book, in which she combined her recollections with material from the letters she wrote home while serving as an army nurse at the Union Hotel Hospital in Washington, D.C. Having “corked up” her tears, she nonetheless writes with feeling about “the barren honors” that these soldiers, cut to pieces at Fredericksburg, had won. She washed their bodies with brown soap, dressed their wounds, sang them lullabies, mopped their brows, and scribbled letters to the mothers and sweethearts of the nameless men, some without arms or legs, who lay in excruciating pain in the hotel’s ballroom. Such “seeming carelessness of the value of life, the sanctity of death” astonished Alcott, who wanted to believe that none of them had been sacrificed in vain.

She lasted only six weeks before she fell ill with typhoid pneumonia and had to be taken home to Concord by her father. The physicians who treated her shaved her hair and dosed her with calomel, a mercury compound that ultimately ruined her health. Alcott, encouraged by a friend to publish her experience, wrote of the desperate conditions that had made her, like many others, so sick: the fetid water and poor ventilation and scant or inedible food. And she wrote not just of the clammy foreheads and agonized deaths, and the insouciance of doctors who made a young woman tell a desperate man that he was dying, but also of the inescapable racism even of her fellow nurses:

I expected to have to defend myself from accusations of prejudice against color; but was surprised to find things just the other way, and daily shocked some neighbor by treating the blacks as I did the whites. The men would swear at the “darkies,” would put two g s into negro, and scoff at the idea of any good coming from such trash. The nurses were willing to be served by the colored people, but seldom thanked them, never praised, and scarcely recognized them in the street.

When she voluntarily touched a small Black child, she was labeled a fanatic. Alcott then offers a typical homily:

Though a hospital is a rough school, its lessons are both stern and salutary; and the humblest of pupils there, in proportion to his faithfulness, learns a deeper faith in God and in himself.

These homilies, like her detachment, may have been a marketing strategy, since she worried always about hanging on to her audience. Yet she did still write for herself after all. “Darkness made visible,” as she called it, was what she also sought, anticipating, in her way, what the witty Emily Dickinson surmised: “Success in Circuit lies.”

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NPR Editor Speaks Out: How National Public Radio Lost Americans' Trust Honestly with Bari Weiss

• Society & Culture

Uri Berliner is a senior business editor at NPR. In his 25 years with NPR, his work has been recognized with a Peabody Award, a Gerald Loeb Award, an Edward R. Murrow Award, and a Society of Professional Journalists New America Award, among others. Today, we published in The Free Press his firsthand account of the transformation he has witnessed at National Public Radio. Or, as Uri puts it, how it went from an organization that had an “open-minded, curious culture” with a “liberal bent” to one that is “knee-jerk, activist, scolding,” and “rigidly progressive.”  Uri describes a newsroom that aimed less to cover Donald Trump but instead veered towards efforts to topple him; a newsroom that reported the Russia collusion story without enough skepticism or fairness, and then later largely ignored the fact that the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion; a newsroom that purposefully ignored the Hunter Biden laptop story—in fact, one of his fellow NPR journalists approved of ignoring the laptop story because “covering it could help Trump.” A newsroom that put political ideology before journalism in its coverage of Covid-19. And, he describes a newsroom where race and identity became paramount in every aspect of the workplace and diversity became its north star.  In other words, NPR is not considering all things anymore.  On today’s episode: How did NPR lose its way? Why did it change? And why does this lone journalist feel obligated to speak out? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Jessica Grose

Get tech out of the classroom before it’s too late.

By Jessica Grose

Opinion Writer

Jaime Lewis noticed that her eighth-grade son’s grades were slipping several months ago. She suspected it was because he was watching YouTube during class on his school-issued laptop, and her suspicions were validated. “I heard this from two of his teachers and confirmed with my son: Yes, he watches YouTube during class, and no, he doesn’t think he can stop. In fact, he opted out of retaking a math test he’d failed, just so he could watch YouTube,” she said.

She decided to do something about it. Lewis told me that she got together with other parents who were concerned about the unfettered use of school-sanctioned technology in San Luis Coastal Unified School District, their district in San Luis Obispo, Calif. Because they knew that it wasn’t realistic to ask for the removal of the laptops entirely, they went for what they saw as an achievable win: blocking YouTube from students’ devices. A few weeks ago, they had a meeting with the district superintendent and several other administrators, including the tech director.

To bolster their case, Lewis and her allies put together a video compilation of clips that elementary and middle school children had gotten past the district’s content filters.

Their video opens on images of nooses being fitted around the necks of the terrified women in the TV adaptation of “The Handmaid’s Tale.” It ends with the notoriously violent “Singin’ in the Rain” sequence from “A Clockwork Orange.” (Several versions of this scene are available on YouTube. The one she pointed me to included “rape scene” in the title.) Their video was part of a PowerPoint presentation filled with statements from other parents and school staff members, including one from a middle school assistant principal, who said, “I don’t know how often teachers are using YouTube in their curriculum.”

That acknowledgment gets to the heart of the problem with screens in schools. I heard from many parents who said that even when they asked district leaders how much time kids were spending on their screens, they couldn’t get straight answers; no one seemed to know, and no one seemed to be keeping track.

Eric Prater, the superintendent of the San Luis Coastal Unified School District, told me that he didn’t realize how much was getting through the schools’ content filters until Lewis and her fellow parents raised concerns. “Our tech department, as I found out from the meeting, spends quite a lot of time blocking certain websites,” he said. “It’s a quite time-consuming situation that I personally was not aware of.” He added that he’s grateful this was brought to his attention.

I don’t think educators are the bad guys here. Neither does Lewis. In general, educators want the best for students. The bad guys, as I see it, are tech companies.

One way or another, we’ve allowed Big Tech’s tentacles into absolutely every aspect of our children’s education, with very little oversight and no real proof that their devices or programs improve educational outcomes. Last year Collin Binkley at The Associated Press analyzed public records and found that “many of the largest school systems spent tens of millions of dollars in pandemic money on software and services from tech companies, including licenses for apps, games and tutoring websites.” However, he continued, schools “have little or no evidence the programs helped students.”

It’s not just waste, very likely, of taxpayer money that’s at issue. After reading many of the over 900 responses from parents and educators to my questionnaire about tech in schools and from the many conversations I had over the past few weeks with readers, I’m convinced that the downsides of tech in schools far outweigh the benefits.

Though tech’s incursion into America’s public schools — particularly our overreliance on devices — hyperaccelerated in 2020, it started well before the Covid-19 pandemic. Google, which provides the operating system for lower-cost Chromebooks and is owned by the same parent company as YouTube, is a big player in the school laptop space, though I also heard from many parents and teachers whose schools supply students with other types and brands of devices.

As my newsroom colleague Natasha Singer reported in 2017 (by which point “half the nation’s primary- and secondary-school students” were, according to Google, using its education apps), “Google makes $30 per device by selling management services for the millions of Chromebooks that ship to schools. But by habituating students to its offerings at a young age, Google obtains something much more valuable”: potential lifetime customers.

The issue goes beyond access to age-inappropriate clips or general distraction during school hours. Several parents related stories of even kindergartners reading almost exclusively on iPads because their school districts had phased out hard-copy books and writing materials after shifting to digital-only curriculums. There’s evidence that this is harmful: A 2019 analysis of the literature concluded that “readers may be more efficient and aware of their performance when reading from paper compared to screens.”

“It seems to be a constant battle between fighting for the students’ active attention (because their brains are now hard-wired for the instant gratification of TikTok and YouTube videos) and making sure they aren’t going to sites outside of the dozens they should be,” Nicole Post, who teaches at a public elementary school in Missouri, wrote to me. “It took months for students to listen to me tell a story or engage in a read-aloud. I’m distressed at the level of technology we’ve socialized them to believe is normal. I would give anything for a math or social studies textbook.”

I’ve heard about kids disregarding teachers who tried to limit tech use, fine motor skills atrophying because students rarely used pencils and children whose learning was ultimately stymied by the tech that initially helped them — for example, students learning English as a second language becoming too reliant on translation apps rather than becoming fluent.

Some teachers said they have programs that block certain sites and games, but those programs can be cumbersome. Some said they have software, like GoGuardian, that allows them to see the screens of all the students in their classes at once. But classroom time is zero sum: Teachers are either teaching or acting like prison wardens; they can’t do both at the same time.

Resources are finite. Software costs money . Replacing defunct or outdated laptops costs money . When it comes to I.T., many schools are understaffed . More of the money being spent on tech and the maintenance and training around the use of that tech could be spent on other things, like actual books. And badly monitored and used tech has the most potential for harm.

I’ve considered the counterarguments: Kids who’d be distracted by tech would find something else to distract them; K-12 students need to gain familiarity with tech to instill some vague work force readiness.

But on the first point, I think other forms of distraction — like talking to friends, doodling and daydreaming — are better than playing video games or watching YouTube because they at least involve children engaging with other children or their own minds. And there’s research that suggests laptops are uniquely distracting . One 2013 study found that even being next to a student who is multitasking on a computer can hurt a student’s test scores.

On the second point, you can have designated classes to teach children how to keyboard, code or use software that don’t require them to have laptops in their hands throughout the school day. And considering that various tech companies are developing artificial intelligence that, we’re meant to understand, will upend work as we know it , whatever tech skills we’re currently teaching will probably be obsolete by the time students enter the work force anyway. By then, it’ll be too late to claw back the brain space of our nation’s children that we’ve already ceded. And for what? So today’s grade schoolers can be really, really good at making PowerPoint presentations like the ones they might one day make as white-collar adults?

That’s the part that I can’t shake: We’ve let tech companies and their products set the terms of the argument about what education should be, and too many people, myself included, didn’t initially realize it. Companies never had to prove that devices or software, broadly speaking, helped students learn before those devices had wormed their way into America’s public schools. And now the onus is on parents to marshal arguments about the detriments of tech in schools.

Holly Coleman, a parent of two who lives in Kansas and is a substitute teacher in her district, describes what students are losing:

They can type quickly but struggle to write legibly. They can find info about any topic on the internet but can’t discuss that topic using recall, creativity or critical thinking. They can make a beautiful PowerPoint or Keynote in 20 minutes but can’t write a three-page paper or hand-make a poster board. Their textbooks are all online, which is great for the seams on their backpack, but tangible pages under your fingers literally connect you to the material you’re reading and learning. These kids do not know how to move through their day without a device in their hand and under their fingertips. They never even get the chance to disconnect from their tech and reconnect with one another through eye contact and conversation.

Jonathan Haidt’s new book, “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness,” prescribes phone-free schools as a way to remedy some of the challenges facing America’s children. I agree that there’s no place for smartphones on a K-12 campus. But if you take away the phones and the kids still have near-constant internet connectivity on devices they have with them in every class, the problem won’t go away.

When Covid hit and screens became the only way for millions of kids to “attend” school, not having a personal device became an equity issue. But we’re getting to a point where the opposite may be true. According to the responses to my questionnaire, during the remote-school era, private schools seemed to rely far less on screens than public schools, and many educators said that they deliberately chose lower-tech school environments for their own children — much the same way that some tech workers intentionally send their kids to screen-free schools.

We need to reframe the entire conversation around tech in schools because it’s far from clear that we’re getting the results we want as a society and because parents are in a defensive crouch, afraid to appear anti-progress or unwilling to prepare the next generation for the future. “I feel like a baby boomer attacking like this,” said Lewis.

But the drawbacks of constant screen time in schools go beyond data privacy, job security and whether a specific app increases math performance by a standard deviation. As Lewis put it, using tech in the classroom makes students “so passive, and it requires so little agency and initiative.” She added, “I’m very concerned about the species’ ability to survive and the ability to think critically and the importance of critical thinking outside of getting a job.”

If we don’t hit pause now and try to roll back some of the excesses, we’ll be doing our children — and society — a profound disservice.

The good news is that sometimes when the stakes become clear, educators respond: In May, Dr. Prater said, “we’re going to remove access to YouTube from our district devices for students.” He added that teachers will still be able to get access to YouTube if they want to show instructional videos. The district is also rethinking its phone policy to cut down on personal device use in the classroom. “For me,” he said, “it’s all about how do you find the common-sense approach, going forward, and match that up with good old-fashioned hands-on learning?” He knows technology can cause “a great deal of harm if we’re not careful.”

Jessica Grose is an Opinion writer for The Times, covering family, religion, education, culture and the way we live now.

Environmental Science: Water Research & Technology

2023 outstanding papers published in the environmental science journals of the royal society of chemistry.

a Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong, China

b Carnegie Mellon University Department of Chemistry, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

c Department of Civil and Resource Engineering, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

d Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University, UK

e Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Portugal

f Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Science, Harvard University, Cambridge, USA

g Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia, USA

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Z. Cai, N. Donahue, G. Gagnon, K. C. Jones, C. Manaia, E. Sunderland and P. J. Vikesland, Environ. Sci.: Water Res. Technol. , 2024, Advance Article , DOI: 10.1039/D4EW90011A

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