Abandoned village in Shengshan
The Door Ajar - Serge de Vries
Dutch,b.1968-
Oil on panel , 19 x 16 in.
Grimoire, an amazing clothing and antique shop in Tokyo. Or, what the inside of my brain looks like.
Essays
Here’s a (non-exhaustive) list of essays I like/find interesting/are food for thought; I’ve tried to sort them as much as possible. The starred (*) ones are those I especially love
also quick note: some of these links, especially the ones that are from books/anthologies redirect you to libgen or scihub, and if that doesn’t work for you, do message me; I’d be happy to send them across!
Literature + Writing
- Godot Comes to Sarajevo - Susan Sontag
- The Strangeness of Grief - V. S. Naipaul *
- Memories of V. S. Naipaul - Paul Theroux *
- A Rainy Day with Ruskin Bond - Mayank Austen Soofi
- How Albert Camus Faced History - Adam Gopnik
- Listen, Bro - Jo Livingstone
- Rachel Cusk Gut-Renovates the Novel - Judith Thurman
- Lost in Translation: What the First Line of “The Stranger” Should Be - Ryan Bloom
- The Duke in His Domain - Truman Capote *
- The Cult of Donna Tartt: Themes and Strategies in The Secret History - Ana Rita Catalão Guedes
- Never Do That to a Book - Anne Fadiman *
- Affecting Anger: Ideologies of Community Mobilisation in Early Hindi Novel - Rohan Chauhan *
- Why I Write - George Orwell *
- Rimbaud and Patti Smith: Style as Social Deviance - Carrie Jaurès Noland *
Art + Photography (+ Aesthetics)
- Looking at War - Susan Sontag *
- Love, sex, art, and death - Nan Goldin, David Wojnarowicz
- Lyons, Szarkowski, and the Perception of Photography - Anne Wilkes Tucker
- The Feminist Critique of Art History - Thalia Gouma-Peterson, Patricia Mathews
- In Plato’s Cave - Susan Sontag *
- On reproduction of art (Chapter 1, Ways of Seeing) - John Berger *
- On nudity and women in art (Chapter 3, Ways of Seeing) - John Berger *
- Kalighat Paintings - Sharmishtha Chaudhuri
- Daydreams and Fragments: On How We Retrieve Images From the Past - Maël Renouard
- Arthur Rimbaud: the Aesthetics of Intoxication - Enid Rhodes Peschel
Cities
- Tragic Fable of Mumbai Mills - Gyan Prakash
- Whose Bandra is it? - Dustin Silgardo *
- Timur’s Registan: noblest public square in the world? - Srinath Perur
- The first Starbucks coffee shop, Seattle - Colin Marshall *
- Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, Mumbai’s iconic railway station - Srinath Perur
- From London to Mumbai and Back Again: Gentrification and Public Policy in Comparative Perspective - Andrew Harris
- The Limits of “White Town” in Colonial Calcutta - Swati Chattopadhyay
- The Metropolis and Mental Life - Georg Simmel
- Colonial Policy and the Culture of Immigration: Citing the Social History of Varanasi - Vinod Kumar, Shiv Narayan
- A Caribbean Creole Capital: Kingston, Jamaica - Coln G. Clarke (from Colonial Cities by Robert Ross, Gerard J. Telkamp
- The Colonial City and the Post-Colonial World - G. A. de Bruijne
- The Nowhere City - Amos Elon *
- The Vertical Flâneur: Narratorial Tradecraft in the Colonial Metropolis - Paul K. Saint-Amour
Philosophy
- The trolley problem problem - James Wilson
- A Brief History of Death - Nir Baram
- Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical - John Rawls *
- Should Marxists be Interested in Exploitation? - John E. Roemer
- The Discomfort You’re Feeling is Grief - Scott Berinato *
- The Pandemic and the Crisis of Faith - Makarand Paranjape
- If God Is Dead, Your Time is Everything - James Wood
- Giving Up on God - Ronald Inglehart
- The Limits of Consensual Decision - Douglas Rae *
- The Science of “Muddling Through” - Charles Lindblom *
History
- The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine - Maria Dolan
- The History of Loneliness - Jill Lepore *
- The Anti-Che - Jay Nordlinger
- From Tuskegee to Togo: the Problem of Freedom in the Empire of Cotton - Sven Beckert *
- Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism - E. P. Thompson *
- All By Myself - Martha Bailey *
- The Geographical Pivot of History - H. J. Mackinder
The sea/ocean
- Rim of Life - Manu Pillai
- Exploring the Indian Ocean as a rich archive of history – above and below the water line - Isabel Hofmeyr, Charne Lavery
- ‘Piracy’, connectivity and seaborne power in the Middle Ages - Nikolas Jaspert (from The Sea in History) *
- The Vikings and their age - Nils Blomkvist (from The Sea in History) *
- Mercantile Networks, Port Cities, and “Pirate” States - Roxani Eleni Margariti
- Phantom Peril in the Arctic - Robert David English, Morgan Grant Gardner*
Assorted ones on India
- A departure from history: Kashmiri Pandits, 1990-2001 - Alexander Evans *
- Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World - Gyan Prakash
- Empire: How Colonial India Made Modern Britain - Aditya Mukherjee
- Feminism and Nationalism in India, 1917-1947 - Aparna Basu
- The Epic Riddle of Dating Ramayana, Mahabharata - Sunaina Kumar *
- Caste and Politics: Identity Over System - Dipankar Gupta
- Our worldview is Delhi based *
Sports (you’ll have to excuse the fact that it’s only cricket but what can i say, i’m indian)
- ‘Massa Day Done:’ Cricket as a Catalyst for West Indian Independence: 1950-1962 - John Newman *
- Playing for power? rugby, Afrikaner nationalism and masculinity in South Africa, c.1900–70 - Albert Grundlingh
- When Cricket Was a Symbol, Not Just a Sport - Baz Dreisinger
- Cricket, caste, community, colonialism: the politics of a great game - Ramachandra Guha *
- Cricket and Politics in Colonial India - Ramchandra Guha
- MS Dhoni: A quiet radical who did it his way *
Music
- Brega: Music and Conflict in Urban Brazil - Samuel M. Araújo
- Color, Music and Conflict: A Study of Aggression in Trinidad with Reference to the Role of Traditional Music - J. D. Elder
- The 1975 - ‘Notes On a Conditional Form’ review - Dan Stubbs *
- Life Without Live - Rob Sheffield *
- How Britney Spears Changed Pop - Rob Sheffield
- Concert for Bangladesh
- From “Help!” to “Helping out a Friend”: Imagining South Asia through the Beatles and the Concert for Bangladesh - Samantha Christiansen
Gender
- Clothing Behaviour as Non-verbal Resistance - Diana Crane
- The Normalisation of Queer Theory - David M. Halperin
- Menstruation and the Holocaust - Jo-Ann Owusu *
- Women’s Suffrage the Democratic Peace - Allan Dafoe
- Pink and Blue: Coloring Inside the Lines of Gender - Catherine Zuckerman *
- Women’s health concerns are dismissed more, studied less - Zoanne Clack
Food
- How Food-Obsessed Millennials Shape the Future of Food - Rachel A. Becker (as a non-food obsessed somewhat-millennial, this was interesting)
- Colonialism’s effect on how and what we eat - Coral Lee
- Tracing Europe’s influence on India’s culinary heritage - Ruth Dsouza Prabhu
- Chicken Kiev: the world’s most contested ready-meal *
- From Russia with mayo: the story of a Soviet super-salad *
- The Politics of Pancakes - Taylor Aucoin *
- How Doughnuts Fuelled the American Dream *
- Pav from the Nau
- A Short History of the Vada Pav - Saira Menezes
Fantasy (mostly just harry potter and lord of the rings)
- Purebloods and Mudbloods: Race, Species, and Power (from The Politics of Harry Potter)
- Azkaban: Discipline, Punishment, and Human Rights (from The Politics of Harry Potter) *
- Good and Evil in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lengendarium - Jyrki Korpua
- The Fairy Story: J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis - Colin Duriez (from Tree of Tales) *
- Tolkien’s Augustinian Understanding of Good and Evil: Why The Lord of the Rings Is Not Manichean - Ralph Wood (from Tree of Tales) *
Travel
- The Hidden Cost of Wildlife Tourism
- Chronicles of a Writer’s 1950s Road Trip Across France - Kathleen Phelan
- On the Early Women Pioneers of Trail Hiking - Gwenyth Loose
- On the Mythologies of the Himalaya Mountains - Ed Douglas *
More random assorted ones
- The cosmos from the wheelchair (The Economist obituaries) *
- In El Salvador - Joan Didion
- Scientists are unravelling the mystery of pain - Yudhijit Banerjee
- Notes on Nationalism - George Orwell
- Politics and the English Language - George Orwell *
- What Do the Humanities Do in a Crisis? - Agnes Callard *
- The Politics of Joker - Kyle Smith
- Sushant Singh Rajput: The outsider - Uday Bhatia *
- Credibility and Mystery - John Berger
happy reading :)
