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99% of queer discourse stops right before they define the true difference between bisexual and pansexual!

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did i tell u guys i got into an argument on twitter bc i said foxes are dogs and someone tried to bring up their actual fuckin. classification or whatever and i just said “foxes are dogs cause they are fluffye” and they kept arguing with me. the entire time i was like “you will not survive the immigration to tumblr you are lucky we are not there right now”

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bro we're so fucked they just integrated a ticking clock into the background music

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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*

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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easily one of my favourite tweets of all time

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I remember meeting a guy at a bar a year or so ago who told me he worked at the international consortium that does the porn parodies of all the top-grossing film releases. He said that the whole Barbenheimer situation presented his combine with some spectacular highs and lows. Because he said that with Barbie, right, the thing about Barbie is that there's already kind of a three-way ideatic, structural parallel between the curated artificiality of Barbie as a children's toy, the curated artificiality of Barbie as a mass market film, and the curated artificiality of pornography as a genre. Add on top of that that Barbie as a film is already feeling this tension, right where it's trying to be about a character graduating from the platonic sexlessness of a children's franchise to the functional-and-frank sexuality of being a living human woman, but it's also being bogged down in the "Everyone-is-beautiful-no-one-is-horny" aesthetic restrictions of any contemporary big-budget mass-market film so the two states end up looking pretty similar, he said. I mean the film itself is very aware of that tension, right, with that joke about how "casting Margot Robbie is the wrong move if you want to make that point," all that jazz. So, all that in mind, Barbie-themed pornography, he said, is in a weird way actually kind of complementary to the extant project, gesturing at unaddressed tensions and ideas, a dark mirror, the shadow self it wants to deny but can't, there's a lot of room to play in the space. He used the adjective "Lynchian" a couple of times, he seemed super stoked, he was talking with his hands. Oppenheimer, on the other hand. Oppenheimer he said presented a problem. Because obviously you can eroticize the detonation of an atomic bomb, we're all probably three mutuals removed from someone on this site who does exactly that, but obviously that's a niche market, and moreover it's a market that has a ton of overlap with high-minded thinkers who treat the historical use of atomic weapons against Japan with the level of gravity that atrocity demands. So they were stuck. They were really stuck. He told me that they'd been pulling their hair out for months trying to square the circle and all they had to show for it was a big whiteboard with the phrase "Grope-nheimer" written on it

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makes you imagine the sound of a bowling ball striking pins

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Sometimes the rats in my brain come together and start yelling “YEARNING” and in trying to appease them I ask “FOR WHAT” but they are too small so all they can say is “YEARNING” which is a very big word for such a tiny creature, even collectively

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completely lirious and ranged. absolutely lusional. not only mented but fective, too. engaging in praved behavior. a real generate

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i’m so genuinely lucky to be dumb as hammers. the simplest things bring me joy. i’ve had several fits of passionate laughing out loud today because i can’t stop thinking of the phrase “one william dollars”

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what if i told you there was one user on the russian social network/ video sharing website odnoklassniki/oднокла́ссники that has uploaded nearly every movie ever from 1896 to the current day, mostly with subtitles. and including that has uploaded every criterion collection film in full hd with subtitles. for free. all hail ok.ru user fleurinna guta

they keep their films in unlisted folders so you cant just see them all on their profile unfortunately but ill provide links. also don't ask me why this user separates their films in this way, i don't know and frankly it confuses me too.

EUROPEAN FILMS (sometimes includes west asian films?)

JAPANESE FILMS

CLASSIC FILMS (aka american and British films)

"MISC FILMS" (aka films from everywhere that isn't the usa, europe, japan. sometimes films from the GDR are in here which is confusing again because communist germany was still part of europe)

this is a much better alternative to stuff like 123movies or bflix because there are no hot singles in your area or games that you wont last 5 minutes playing. hope u enjoy and let us all praise and embrace user fleurinna guta

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my watery friend... are you too brushed with the pattern of the dappled light...?

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I know vampirism is often used as a metaphor for the drain of the aristocracy but I think it would be fun to have more vampire characters who were just some guy before they got turned. You seek out the most ancient vampire in existence and find out he was a 40 year old wheat farmer in ancient Mesopotamia when he was turned 7,000 years ago and he hasn’t been doing much since then.

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Life hacks