In “When the Culture War Comes for the Kids,” in The Atlantic, George Packer describes what happens when the ferociously competitive meritocratic culture of the New York educated class collides with the ferocious social justice warrioring of the New York educated class. Packer traces his own family’s perilous adventure through a few Brooklyn schools and writes a piece that captures the zeitgeist of our age.

His son’s public school coerced parents into opting out of standardized tests and made the bathrooms gender neutral, leading female students to hold their bladder all day rather than go to the bathroom with boys. It taught the oppression of every out-group but never the history of the American founding. It’s not the school’s decisions themselves that are so remarkable but the atmosphere of P.C. religious zealotry that surrounds them, and the anguish of progressive parents who have to send their precious children into the maw of ideological re-education camps that in theory they agree with.

In “The Unthinkable Has Happened,” in Vulture, Jayson Greene describes what happened when a brick fell from an eighth-floor windowsill and hit his daughter in the head. It’s a father’s wrenching and beautiful minute-by-minute account of the next few days. At one point he and his wife are in the hospital absorbing the doctor’s prognosis: “We know Greta is going to die, all of us, although we haven’t allowed the thought into our conscious minds yet. None of us is ready for it to maraud through our subconscious, killing and burning everything it sees. But we hear banging at the gates. We glance around us, realizing this is the last we’ll ever see of the world as we’ve known it. Whatever comes next will raze everything to the ground.” You will read it and cry and hug your children tighter.

I’ve always given Sidneys to individual essays, but this year it seems right to give one to an entire issue of a magazine, the December issue of The Atlantic, titled “How to Stop a Civil War.” That issue felt like a civic act. I’d particularly recommend Yoni Appelbaum’s essay, “How America Ends,” which captures the political moment we are in. America is undergoing a demographic revolution, with the dominant white majority becoming a minority. We’re also at a moment when hyperpartisans fear that losing an election will be more catastrophic than losing our democracy. Such people are willing to destroy democratic norms to stay in power (look around you). Appelbaum also argues that the key to the country’s future is building a healthy center-right. As someone who’s worked on this problem for 25 years, I say good luck with that.

I’d also recommend Caitlin Flanagan’s “The Dishonesty of the Abortion Debate” from that issue. Flanagan does something that should be more common: She takes the most vivid arguments from each side of a controversy and she jams them into one essay. The most vivid argument of the pro-choice side is the back-alley and other dangerous abortions that result when you make the procedure illegal and the women who die as a result. Flanagan takes you there.