"On the Pleasure of Hating" and "An Apology for Idlers"

The essays we're looking at yesterday and today--Hazlitt's "On the Pleasure of Hating" and Stevenson's "An Apology for Idlers"--are both examples of a particular mode or subset of the opinion essay, in which the essay is present as a "defense" of or "apology" (or justification) for some abstract concept. Other examples include Sir Philip Sidney's "Defence of Poesy" and Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Defense of Poetry"; Bertrand Russell's "In Praise of Idleness"; Susan Sontag's "Against Interpretation"; and longer philosophical essays like Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason or Mary Wollstonecraft's "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman."

For today's in-class writing (10 minutes):

Choose a claim from either Hazlitt's "On the Pleasure of Hating" or Stevenson's "An Apology for Idlers" and write three paragraphs agreeing and expanding on it (and/or updating it for the twenty-first century) OR disagreeing with and disproving it (and/or suggesting why it isn't relevant in the twenty-first century).