Any topic is good. Don’t care about format or where it’s published as long as I can access it (substack, random PDF, journal, etc). Looking for deep and rare thought, but essay length for a short reading.
EDIT: Also I am particularly looking for stuff not as much in online or nerd culture.
Stanislav Lem wrote really good short stories next to his amazing books.
In my opinion he is the most philosophical, most intelligent and best in physics among all sciencefiction authors. I think his most famous book is Solaris but everything I read of him was actually really interesting - including the short stories.
Be aware that stories of his early career are more funny while later he got really pessimistic about humans in general.
I had one of his books of short stories when I was a teen (The Cyberiad) and loved it…meaning to read more of his work
Read The Egg.
I highly suggest the Umberto Eco book “How to Travel With a Salmon”. It’s a collection of short essays on a variety of topics.
Read this many years ago and enjoyed. Great recommendation in the spirit of this thread (for anyone who has not read it)
I enjoyed reading Ur-Fascism so it’d probably be nice to read something lighter from him.
Foucault’s Pendulum is amazing.
It’s the book that kicked the Davinci Code to death and left it bleeding in a gutter.
It’s the book Dan Brown was “inspired” by.
That’s actually a complicated story…
It goes back to a book called “Holy Blood, Holy Grail” back in 1982.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holy_Blood_and_the_Holy_Grail
Then you have Foucalt’s Pendulum (1988) - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foucault’s_Pendulum
The comic book series “Preacher” 66 monthly issues from 1995 to 2000. - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preacher_(comics)
Da Vinci Code (2003) - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Da_Vinci_Code
There is not a lot “light” about Umberto Eco, but How to Travel With a Salmon is one of them.
If you’re in the mood for nonsensical madness:
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Time_Cube
or
https://pdf-library.org/terrence-howard-math-theory.pdf (Yes, this is the actor that played Rhodes in the first Iron Man movie)
I suppose that OP didn’t state that the ideas presented must be worth any consideration
OP did not!
Upvote for time cube
You beat me to the cube. Wish the original blog was still around
My virus scanner says that last link redirects to a phishing site.
There’s nothing of value there, feel free to look up “Terrance Howard math theory” elsewhere
This one is from 2001 and is about how the pornography trade was getting increasingly violent, interesting to read in a post internet porn world. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/mar/17/society.martinamis1
Exiting the Vampire Castle, by Mark Fisher (2013): https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/exiting-vampire-castle
From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exiting_the_Vampire_Castle):
“Exiting the Vampire Castle” is an essay written by the English theorist Mark Fisher for the online publication The North Star in 2013. It argues for increased leftist solidarity by departing from the phenomenon of online callout culture to instead orient activity around organization of efforts around the accountability of one’s economic class, rather than around traits in identity and culture.
Fisher argues that a largely online style of identity-based leftist discourse grounded in “witch-hunting moralism” halts productive leftist discourse and undermines class politics.[1] In particular, the combination of a primary focus on identity and the policing of others’ speech is deleterious.[2] Fisher saw the turn from class and materialism towards identity as a move from objective outward-facing goals to subjective inward goals that result in fragmentation of the left’s efforts and community.[3]
Fisher defends Russel Brand in the essay, but remember that this was written in 2013, and Fisher died in 2017.
I like this one about tick borne illness a lot. https://www.outsideonline.com/adventure-travel/essays/jungle-wedding/
Could the genetic diathesis in the stress-diathesis model of disease for both psychiatric and medical illness be staring us in the face?
As we may think is an exellent read
What is entropy : https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-is-entropy-a-measure-of-just-how-little-we-really-know-20241213/
The life changing contrast of Japanese clutter : https://aeon.co/essays/the-life-changing-magic-of-japanese-clutter
If not for the edit, I was gonna suggest Time Cube.
Have you ever wished that you were personal friends with a 16th century French petty nobleman and diplomat? His essays are more interesting and more accessible than that sounds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_de_Montaigne
I trusted my drug dealer’s recommendation on that one and was not disappointed, so I’m passing it on.
Also, I will never not recommend Pliny the Younger’s account of his uncle’s death by volcanic eruption (Vesuvius) and his own story of surviving it. PDF versions are widely available.
How about HG Wells talking about mini wargaming in 1912? I think it’s fascinating to see proto-nerds inventing the geek stuff that we take for granted a hundred years later.
Little Wars via Project Gutenberg
And a subtitle that he probably thought was egalitarian and progressive at the time.
Yeah, that’s pretty bad.
I still think it’s an interesting read.
