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To Find Yourself, Think For Yourself
- Socrates
The foundation of every state is the education of its youth - Diogenes Laertius
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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 :)
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babygirl you look like you have prion diseases
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technically, Minecraft is an ice age invention
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(not a meme)
sefaria is the largest, most accessible online library of jewish texts in the history of the internet—it's also undoubtedly the best resource for putting together shiurim and source sheets.
it's also 100% free to use, as well as a 501(c)(3) organization (i.e., donations are tax deductible).
sefaria is trying to raise $70,000 USD by purim to fund continued translation of millenia of jewish texts and growth of jewish learning. (as of 2/2/21 they're at $32,824.)
with purim coming up, i thought i'd share. as one of the >300,000 people participating in this cycle of daf yomi (a huge jump from last cycle's ~90,000), sefaria has been my #1 best resource—on an even more personal note, it's been incredibly helpful for my studies on gender diversity in jewish thought and jewish history (i highly recommend abby stein's source sheets).
an early chag sameach!
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Unrealistic polymath genius: has six PhDs.
Realistic polymath genius: just has the one set of degrees, but their bachelor’s, their master’s, and their doctorate are each in a different field, and they’d be happy to explain – at great length – how the three relate to one another.
#oh my goodness this is fascinating#education#science#philosophy#epidemiology#medical#head trauma#essay
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Hey did you know I keep a google drive folder with linguistics and language books that I try to update regularly
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you’re thinking about your girl, i’m thinking about conquering russia and then being beaten, not by russia itself, but by the winter. i am multiple instances throughout history
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I’ve just discovered my new favorite painter, Vittorio Reggianini - those smarter than myself probably already know of him as an Italian painter from the 1800s who made satin look even satiny-er than satin. I just cannot get over how much he loved painting women who were NOT. HAVING. A. MAN’S. SHIT.
But there was one hottie that everyone seemed to like, and I can’t blame them…
Vittorio knows what the ladies like.
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Ok this wikipedia article is pissing me off so much
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Inventing new prion diseases by the way please don't tell the CDC
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500-Year-Old Body of Man Wearing Thigh-High Boots Found in London Sewer Construction
During the construction of London’s massive “super sewer,” archaeologists discovered something unusual in the mud: a 500-year-old skeleton of a man still wearing his thigh-high leather boots.
The Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA) announced this week that the skeleton was unearthed on the shores of the Thames, near a bend in the river downstream from the Tower of London.
“By studying the boots, we’ve been able to gain a fascinating glimpse into the daily life of a man who lived as many as 500 years ago,” said Beth Richardson, a finds specialist who analyzes artifacts at MOLA Headland, a consortium of archaeologists. “They have helped us to better understand how he may have made his living in hazardous and difficult conditions, but also how he may have died. It has been a privilege to be able to study something so rare and so personal.” Read more.
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Am I the only one whose internet addiction started with my parents not letting me fucking go anywhere
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titillating
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Iron Tiaras
Iron jewelry, also called Berlin Ironwork jewelry because it was primarily made in Berlin, was popular in the early 1800s. It came to prominence during the Napoleonic Wars when the Prussian Royal Family asked citizens to donate their gold and silver to fund the war effort. People would turn in their gold jewelry and receive iron jewelry in return which would typically be inscribed with Gold gab ich für Eisen/I Gave Gold for Iron or Für das Wohl des Vaterlands/For the Good of the Fatherland. Since it was black in color from the linseed oil or lacquer coating it could be used for mourning but was more frequently used as a way for people to show their patriotism and resistance to Napoleon. The designs followed other jewelry trends at the time like cameos and naturalistic elements. The style spread to other countries and remained popular until the mid-1800s. Because of the brittle, rust prone nature of iron few examples survive today.
Iron Cameo & Leaf Tiara, circa 1810, Albion Art Institute
Iron Cameo Tiara, Faerber Collection
Iron Cameo Tiara, circa 1820, Rheinische Eisenkunstguss-Museum
Iron Tiara, Nordiska Museet
Gothic Window Iron Tiara, circa 1825, Hunt Museum
Iron Cameo Tiara, circa 1830, Kunstmuseum Den Haag
Iron Cameo Tiara, circa 1830, Berlin Museum
Iron Tiara, Tekniska Museet
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An absolute badass
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