In The Likely Event That This Might Be Helpful To Students Around The World - So We Know That Most Scholarly

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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Learning to read in your target language !

Learning to read in any language is difficult!  There’s nothing more frustrating than picking up a book you’ve read in your mother tongue and not understanding a word in your target language. Luckily, it’s a matter of vocabulary ! 

You won’t understand everything

 Even in your native language, you still don’t understand EVERY WORD, you use context to try to figure out something you don’t know. But you’ll find that if you keep at it, you will get visibly better.

I read Harry Potter as my first long text in French and I high lighted every single word that I didn’t know. Looking back, about 35% of the words on the first page are high lighted vs. about 5% on the last page.

To get the most our of language learning, you should start trying to read as soon as possible !

You get so much passive input out of reading comprehension. It’s easy to subconsciously pick up commonly used phrases and putting grammar points and vocabulary into application.

So, what methods can I use to get the most out my reading?

A.) Read a paragraph through and look up the words and their definitions, then read it again and really try to find the meaning of each sentence. This might be the most taxing method and easy to lose focus or motivation, but honestly it’s the best for learning. 

B.) Stop at every word you don’t know and look up the meaning. I personally don’t like this method. I find myself looking more for words I don’t know than the meaning behind the whole sentence. I also don’t like stopping and starting and stopping and starting. 

C.) Skim the paragraph or page for words you don’t know, highlight them, define them first, THEN read the whole piece of text. This is my favorite method. I like looking back at the beginning of the book and seeing all the words I didn’t know then but I know now.

D.) Try to gather context of sentence without looking up any words. This is what native speakers do, and it is, of course, the best method but it requires a deeper meaning of the context that most A1/A2 learners have yet to understand.

You might be struggling learning through textbooks because the vocab lists prioritize subjects like “body parts” and “animals” over giving you basic tools to describe things. It’s great to know words like “knee” and “candle” but how often do those really come up in conversation? Instead of finding random lists that might be useful one day, I suggest creating a list of vocab based on your reading content! When you see a word that has come up a few times and you still can’t gather from context what it means, look it up, then every time you see it in the text from now on, it’ll enforce that knowledge in your brain.

If you aren’t sure what kind of texts you should be reading or want more information and tips, check out my other post.

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👏🏾Education 👏🏾is 👏🏾a 👏🏾right,👏🏾 not👏🏾 a👏🏾 service 👏🏾

Pass along and use the shit out of them

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Vocab List/Grammar from My Blog Masterpost

if only i actually knew all these words

Keep reading

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French Prepositions

and how else they can be used

I don’t know about y’all, but prepositions are the WORST. They hardly ever directly translate between languages and when they do, there are so many exceptions it doesn’t even matter. So, I’ve done some research and I’ll try to make the list as comprehensive as possible :) 

OKAY ! So here is the most basic “to and from” list. 

But as you know, French is not that easy. You will also see de and à frequently interspersed between verbs and even used as adverbs and adjectives. Below I have listed a few verbs that take these prepositions. 

Verbs that require the preposition à

Aider (quelqu'un) à (to help someone to)

S’amuser à (to amuse oneself)

Avoir à (to have to)

Apprendre à (to learn how to)

Avoir de la peine à (to have difficulty)

Commencer à

Continuer à

The preposition à can also be used to indicate place, time, manner or possession

À droite (on the right)

À loisir (at leisure)

À la compagne (in the mountains)

À la française ([in] the french way)

Cette voiture est à toi? (This car is yours?)

Verbs that require the preposition de

S’arreter de

Cesser de

Choisir de

Décider de

Se dépêcher de (to be in a hurry

Essayer de

Finir de

Oublier de

Refuser de

Verbs that can be followed by both

Conseiller à (quelqu’un) de (faire quelque chose)

Défendre à… de

Demander à…de

Dire à… de

Offrir à … de

Permettre à… de

Promettre à… de

Proposer à… de

Suggérer à…de

Hope this helps !!

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how to get the most out of duolingo

duolingo is a great app/website that you can use to begin learning a foreign language, but unfortunately you most likely won’t be able to fully learn the language if you only use duolingo. so, here are some things that you can do to get the most out of duolingo and to learn your target better.

1. read the lessons - most of the languages (especially if you’re learning in english) have little lessons. however, these are only available on the website, so if you use the app, you might want to occasionally check in online and click on the little lightbulb to read the lessons. they usually aren’t super in-depth, but for beginners it is super helpful and not as heavy as a textbook grammar guide.

2. don’t work too fast and always revise - if you’re knocking out a bunch of lessons a day thinking you’ll learn faster, this could be true, but most likely it’s not. if you work at a steady pace and remember to do it once a day (preferably at the same time – they say this is better for memorization) you will learn it better. if you do one lesson or maybe two a day and you still have time for more, go ahead and revise a little. when i first started french, i did two lessons a day and then always revised to make sure i remembered everything.

3. study the vocabulary - not all of the courses have this, but on the online version some of the courses have a tab on the top that says “words” and this is a great place to find all the vocabulary that you’ve been learning in your courses. go through the list and find all the words you don’t know that well or at all and make some flashcards or a set on quizlet and study them. learn how to spell them, pronounce them, conjugate them, and use them within a sentence. if you do this, you’ll always have a solid base to fall back on. this goes for learning conjugations, as well.

4. start learning your native language in your target language - after you’ve finished all the courses in your target language, feel free to revise daily. you might want to, however, start learning your native language in your target language. this might not be an option for all the languages offered on duolingo. for me, i learned english in french. this was helpful for picking up more phrases and seeing more common ways that french people write. if you’re feeling particularly confident and know your stuff really well, try learning a new language in your target language. for example, i did the spanish course in french, which definitely helped with my french phrasing while translating. 

5. don’t stop after you finish your course - if you’ve done it right, finishing your course on duolingo will give you a really good start to the language you’re learning. after you’ve finished, keep revising, but also go ahead and start learning your target language in different ways. i made a whole in-depth post on how to learn a language online here. some ideas are reading children books, watching youtube videos and movies, and talking to natives all in your target language. never give up because it will be worth it. 

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french person: 80

me, an intellectual: blaze it

can you please make a list of really popular french songs? like, the type of songs that if you play them at a party in france almost everybody knows all the words and can dance to them.

Hi, this has been taking root in my asks for a while and I’m sorry but this is a hard question; people born in Nice in the 60s and in Trappes in the 90s will have extremely different references. And the dancing criteria makes it worse.

What people are likely to know, regardless of social context: the most famous songs of Piaf (La vie en rose, Mon manège à moi, maybe Milord), Aznavour (La bohème, Hier encore, Emmenez-moi), Brel (La chanson des vieux amants, Ne me quitte pas, Quand on a que l’amour), Gainsbourg (La javanaise, Je suis venu te dire que je m’en vais, Le poinçonneur des lilas),  Brassens (La mauvaise réputation, Les copains d’abord, Gare au gorille), etc.

Stuff a bit less old (to not say younger, as I’m talking 80s): Michel Berger (Le paradis blanc, La groupie du pianiste), Indochine (L’aventurier, J’ai demandé à la lune, Trois nuits par semaine), France Gall (Ella Elle l’a, Il jouait du piano debout, Poupée de cire), Daniel Balavoine (Le chanteur, L’aziza, Mon fils ma bataille), Joe Dassin (Et si tu n’existais pas, A toi, Pour un flirt avec toi), etc.

Then: Jean-Jacques Goldman (Je te donne, Là-bas, Quand la musique est bonne, Au bout de mes rêves), Mylène Farmer (Désenchantée, Libertine, Sans contrefaçon), Garou (Seul, Sous le vent, Belle), Céline Dion (Pour que tu m’aimes encore, On ne change pas, S’il suffisait d’aimer), Florent Pagny (Savoir aimer, Ma liberté de penser, Là où je t’emmènerai), etc.

2000s: BB brunes’ Dis-moi, Kyo’s Dernière danse, L5′s Toutes les femmes de ta vie, Larusso’s Tu m’oublieras, Matt Pokora’s Elle me contrôle, Renan Luce’s La lettre, Superbus’ Lola, Tragédie’s Hey ho, Diam’s La boulette, Fatal Bazooka’s Mauvaise foi nocturne, Rose’s La liste, etc.

2010s: Sexion d’assaut’s Avant qu’elle parte and Désolé, Colonel Reyel’s Celui and Aurélie, Mika’s Elle me dit, Stromaé’s Alors on danse and Papaoutai, Kendji Girac’s Andalouse and Bella, Louane’s Jour un and Avenir, etc.

Currently are huge: Aya Nakamura’s Jolie nana, Hatik’s Angela, Bosh’s Djomb, Vitaa and Slimane’s Versus, Jul’s La machine, Maes’ Les derniers salopards, Gambi’s La vie est belle.

Now-

I was born in 1992. There’s a lot of stuff I’ve never heard of because I’m not that interested in current stuff - I’ve never listened to Jul, for example. Had you asked your question to a 14-year-old, they would probably mention him very quickly. What I can say is that people my age would destroy everything up to the 2000s at a karaoke session, and then start having issues; whereas my younger sibling, eight years younger than me, would have the exact opposite problem. Why? Because I heard the very old stuff on the radio, before the Internet even happened; nowadays, people don’t listen to the radio anymore, they go on Youtube or Spotify, so they don’t experience that stuff.

So I’m afraid there’s not really *one* answer to that question, except maybe if you want to focus on lame stuff DJs play at parties when people are starting to be bored, like Les démons de minuit ou Partenaire particulier. Those will get everybody on their feet. But that’s probably not what you’re looking for!

Hope this still helps! x

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Routledge Masterpost

Here are all of the Routledge Grammar PDFs that I currently have. I’ll be updating whenever I find more. Let me know if there’s one in particular you want me to look for^^

Last Update: 2017/04/24

Fixed Intermediate Japanese: A Grammar and Workbook link 

Added books for Czech, English, French, French Creoles, Persian, Ukranian

Added more books in Cantonese, Danish, Greek, Polish, Spanish, Swedish

Arabic

Arabic: An Essential Grammar Basic Arabic: A Grammar and Workbook Modern Written Arabic: A Comprehensive Grammar

Cantonese

Basic Cantonese: A Grammar and Workbook Cantonese: A Comprehensive Grammar Intermediate Cantonese: A Grammar and Workbook

Czech

Czech: An Essential Grammar

Danish

Danish: A Comprehensive Grammar Danish: An Essential Grammar

Dutch

Basic Dutch: A Grammar and Workbook Dutch: A Comprehensive Grammar Dutch: An Essential Grammar Intermediate Dutch: A Grammar and Workbook

English

English: An Essential Grammar

Finnish

Finnish: An Essential Grammar

French

Modern French Grammar Workbook

French Creoles

French Creoles: A Comprehensive and Comparative Grammar

German

Basic German: A Grammar and Workbook German: An Essential Grammar Intermediate German: A Grammar and Workbook

Greek

Greek: A Comprehensive Grammar Greek: An Essential Grammar of the Modern Language

Hindi

Hindi: An Essential Grammar

Hebrew

Modern Hebrew: An Essential Grammar

Hungarian

Hungarian: An Essential Grammar

Indonesian

Indonesian: A Comprehensive Grammar

Irish

Basic Irish: A Grammar and Workbook Intermediate Irish: A Grammar and Workbook

Italian

Basic Italian: A Grammar and Workbook

Japanese

Basic Japanese: A Grammar and Workbook Intermediate Japanese: A Grammar and Workbook Japanese: A Comprehensive Grammar

Korean

Basic Korean: A Grammar and Workbook Intermediate Korean: A Grammar and Workbook Korean: A Comprehensive Grammar

Latin

Intensive Basic Latin: A Grammar and Workbook Intensive Intermediate Latin: A Grammar and Workbook

Latvian

Latvian: An Essential Grammar

Mandarin Chinese

Basic Chinese: A Grammar and Workbook Intermediate Chinese: A Grammar and Workbook Chinese: A Comprehensive Grammar Chinese: An Essential Grammar

Norwegian

Norwegian: An Essential Grammar

Persian

Basic Persian: A Grammar and Workbook Intermediate Persian: A Grammar and Workbook

Polish

Basic Polish: A Grammar and Workbook Intermediate Polish: A Grammar and Workbook Polish: A Comprehensive Grammar Polish: An Essential Grammar

Portuguese

Portuguese: An Essential Grammar

Romanian

Romanian: An Essential Grammar

Russian

Basic Russian: A Grammar and Workbook Intermediate Russian: A Grammar and Workbook

Serbian

Serbian: An Essential Grammar

Spanish

Basic Spanish: A Grammar and Workbook Intermediate Spanish: A Grammar and Workbook Spanish: An Essential Grammar

Swahili

Swahili Grammar and Workbook

Swedish

Swedish: A Comprehensive Grammar Swedish: An Essential Grammar

Thai

Thai: An Essential Grammar

Turkish

Turkish: A Comprehensive Grammar

Ukrainian

Ukrainian: A Comprehensive Grammar

Urdu

Urdu: An Essential Grammar

Welsh

Modern Welsh: A Comprehensive Grammar

Yiddish

Basic Yiddish: A Grammar and Textbook

Hope this helps everyone out a bit! Happy studying^^

-koreanbreeze

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