I Believe In Free Education, One That’s Available To Everyone; No Matter Their Race, Gender, Age, Wealth,

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*

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 :)

Nadja Auermann and a friendly skeleton photographed by Richard Avedon for The New Yorker, November 6th 1995.

Short Films by George Méliès

Le Manoir du Diable (1896) (considered the first horror film in history) Une nuit terrible (1896) Le Chateau Hanté (1897) Le Diable Au Couvent (1899) Évocation Spirite (1899) Le diable géant ou Le miracle de la madonne (1901) Le chaudron infernal (1903) Le cake-walk infernal (1903) Le monstre (1903) Le diable noir (1905) Les quatre cents farces du diable (1906)

Other Short Films

The Sealed Room (1909) Frankenstein (1910) Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1913) The Fall of the House of Usher (1928)

Famous Classic Horror Films 

Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari (1920) Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920) Nosferatu (1922) Häxan (1922) Orlacs Hände (1924) The Phantom of the Opera (1925) Vampyr (1932) House on Haunted Hill (1959) Plan 9 from Outer Space (1956) The Bat (1959) The Last Man on Earth (1964) Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Other Films

10s-30s

Der Golem (1915) // Der Golem - Wie er in die Welt Kam (1920) // Genuine (1920) // Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (1922) // The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) // Wolf Blood (1925) // The Cat and the Canary (1927) // Svengali (1931) // White Zombie (1932) // The Monster Walks (1933) // The Most Dangerous Game (1933) // Ghoul (1933) // The Vampire Bat (1933) // Maniac (1934) // The House of Mystery (1934) // The Beast of Borneo (1934) // The Ghost Walks (1934) // Phantom Ship (1935) // Revolt of the Zombies (1935) // Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1936) // The Man Who Changed His Mind (1936) // The Rogues’ Tavern (1936) // 夜半歌聲 (Ye Ban Ge Sheng) (1937) // The Riders of the Whistling Skull (1937) // The Devil’s Daughter (1939) // The Face at the Window (1939) // Torture Ship (1939)

40s-50s

The Mummy’s Hand (1940) // The Devil Bat (1940) // The Ape (1940) // Doomed to Die (1940) // King of the Zombies (1940) // Invisible Ghost (1940) // Spooks Run Wild (1941) // The Ghost Train (1941) // The Mad Monster (1942) // Bowery at Midnight (1942) // The Corpse Vanishes (1942) // The Living Ghost (1942) // The Ape Man (1943) // Dead Men Walk (1943) // The Ghost and the Guest (1943) // The Monster Maker (1944) // Voodoo Man (1944) // One Body Too Many (1944) // The Flying Serpent (1946) // Devil Monster (1946) // Mesa of Lost Women (1953) // The Snow Creature (1954) // The Phantom from 10,000 Leagues (1955) // Dementia (1955) // Indestructible Man (1956) // La maldición de la momia azteca (1957) // 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957) // Frankenstein’s Daughter (1958) // La momia azteca contra el robot humano (1958) // Night of the Blood Beast (1958) // The Screaming Skull (1958) // I Bury the Living (1958) // The Devil’s Partner (1958) // Attack of the Giant Leeches (1959) // A Bucket of Blood (1959) // Beast from Haunted Cave (1959) // The Killer Shrews (1959) // The Wasp Woman (1959) // The Manster (1959) // Terror is a Man (1959)

60s - 70s

Teenage Zombies (1960) // Horror Hotel (1960) // The Little Shop of Horrors (1960) // Atom Age Vampire (1960) // Ein Toter hing im Netz (1960) // 13 Ghosts (1960) // Tormented (1960) // Last Woman on Earth (1960) // The Naked Witch (1961) // The Beast of Yucca Flats (1961) // Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961) // Werewolf in a Girls’ Dormitory (1961) // Night Tide (1961) // The Devil’s Messenger (1961) // Bloodlust! (1961) // Eegah (1962) // Carnival Of Souls (1962) // The Brain that Wouldn’t Die (1962) // The Devil’s Hand (1961) // Hands of a Stranger (1962) // The Dungeon of Harrow (1962) // Trauma (1962) // El barón del terror (1962) // Ring of Terror (1962) // Terror of the Bloodhunters (1962) // The Terror (1963) // Dementia 13 (1963) // Monstrosity: The Atomic Brain (1963) // À Meia-Noite Levarei Sua Alma (1964) // Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964) // The Strangler (1964) // The Faceless Monster (1965) // Il boia scarlatto (1965) // Creature of the Walking Dead (1965) // The Beach Girls and the Monster (1965) // The Eye Creatures (1965) // The She Beast (1966) // Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter (1966) // Manos - The Hands of Fate (1966) // Curse of the Swamp Creature (1966) // Night Fright (1967) // Creature of Destruction (1967) // Spider Baby or The Maddest Story Ever Told (1967) // In the Year 2889 (1967) // The Ghosts of Hanley House (1968) // It’s Alive! (1969) // How Awful About Allan (1970) // La figlia di Frankenstein (1971) // Blood Thirst (1971) // Snake People (1971) // Horror Express (1972) // Frankenstein ‘80 (1972)

Click here for more

Here’s a list with almost 200 public domain horror movies

i’ve been trying to hold back but. i gotta see what bill and ted fanfic is like. i gotta do it

Godzilla Valentines

another interesting dream i had last night.

Why art belongs in STEM / STEAM

the bedrooms of our friends

Some behind the scenes pictures of Guillermo del Toro’s upcoming Frankenstein adaptation