Necessary Contexts: Essays for our Times by Rosario A. Garcellano is a collection of her writings spanning thirty years. Previously published in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, the subjects of her essays range from the follies and sense of past and present regimes, the extrajudicial murders and harassment of political and social activists and the drug-related killings under the Duterte government, to the lies its spokespersons and bureaucrats spin daily, to the assaults on press freedom and on those citizens who have tried to assuage the sufferings of their fellow human beings.