The Best Essays Of 2005 - Page 2

3. Wired's "10 Years That Changed the World": In his new book "The Next Global Stage", Kenichi Ohmae says the world changed in 1985. Thomas Friedman expresses similar thoughts in "The World Is Flat". Wired Magazine took a look at the years since 1985, when Netscape went public, a time they term "A Decade of Genius And Madness". A host of interviews with the icons of the new Pantheon. Kevin Kelly notes,

Why aren't we more amazed by this fullness? Kings of old would have gone to war to win such abilities. Only small children would have dreamed such a magic window could be real. I have reviewed the expectations of waking adults and wise experts, and I can affirm that this comprehensive wealth of material, available on demand and free of charge, was not in anyone's scenario. Ten years ago, anyone silly enough to trumpet the above list as a vision of the near future would have been confronted by the evidence: There wasn't enough money in all the investment firms in the entire world to fund such a cornucopia. The success of the Web at this scale was impossible.

But if we have learned anything in the past decade, it is the plausibility of the impossible.

4. Salman Rushdie's "The Right Time for An Islamic Reformation"(Washington Post): The author with the mostest lays down the gauntlet to the traditionalists and literalists with a call for reform of laws and concepts out of sync with the time, before they are swept away.

The traditionalists' refusal of history plays right into the hands of the literalist Islamofascists, allowing them to imprison Islam in their iron certainties and unchanging absolutes. If, however, the Koran were seen as a historical document, then it would be legitimate to reinterpret it to suit the new conditions of successive new ages. Laws made in the seventh century could finally give way to the needs of the 21st. The Islamic Reformation has to begin here, with an acceptance of the concept that all ideas, even sacred ones, must adapt to altered realities.

5. Kurt Vonnegut's "A Man Without A Country": Breaking my own rule about essays, I must select the entire collection of essays by Mr Vonnegut only because it is so difficult to select an individual piece from a writer still in form and very much in touch with the 'Evening Land'. The black humor is strong, as is the acerbic view of society. He even admits his long-windedness.

"No matter how corrupt, greedy, and heartless our government, our corporations, media, and our religious and charitable institutions may become, the music will still be wonderful.

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Article Author: Aaman Lamba

Aaman Lamba is a Blogcritics editor, as well as the Publisher of Desicritics.org, a Blogcritics network site covering media, politics, culture, sports and more with a global South Asian focus

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