Recced by @possiblygandalf: 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
• A Rainy Day with Ruskin Bond , Mayank Austen Soofi
• How Albert Camus Faced History , Adam Gopnik
• Listen Bro , Jo Livingston
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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)
• Mercantile Networks, Port Cities, and “Pirate” States , Roxani Eleni Margariti
• Phantom Peril in the Arctic , Robert David English, Morgan Grant Gardner

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
• Credibility and Mystery , John Berger