Writings that have been very important to me, for various reasons.
Disclaimer: I do not endorse all ideas in the writings listed here.
Outline
Articles and Papers
Articles
Don’t Eat Before Reading This, by Anthony Bourdain | The New Yorker, April 1999
All I Really Need to Know, I Learned in Kindergarten, by Robert Fulghum | Penguin Random House, 2003
Fear of Narrative and the Skittery Poem of Our Moment, by Tony Hoagland | Poetry, March 2006
Making the Garden, by Christopher Alexander | First Things, February 2016
Oysters: A Love Story, by Tejal Rao | The New York Times Magazine, August 2017
The Unknown Gifts, by Michael Bull | Bible Matrix, February 2018
Should Artists Shop or Stop Shopping? by Sheila Heti | affidavit, May 2018
I am not always very attached to being alive, by Anna Borges | The Outline, April 2019
The Crane Wife, by CJ Hauser | The Paris Review, July 2019
The Tender Narrator, by Olga Tokarczuk | Nobel Lecture, December 2019
The Kitchen Counter Observatory, by Kieran Healy | Kieran Healy, May 2020
Considering the God Complex in Architecture, by Sean Joyner | Architect Magazine, February 2023
>>> Architecture and the God Problem, by Duo Dickinson | Common Edge, July 2023
Agnes Callard’s Marriage of the Minds, by Rachel Aviv | The New Yorker, March 2023
Issue #248, by Nick Cave | The Red Hand Files, August 2023
Here for the Wrong Reasons, by Charles Broskoski | Are.na Editorial, December 2023
The computational life of things, by Kevin Walker | increasingly unclear, February 2024
There’s a place for everyone, by Adam Mastroianni | Experimental History, August 2024
Breadcrumbs, by Simon Sarris | The Map is Mostly Water, October 2024
Interview with Nobel winner John Hopfield, by Elizabeth Gibney | Nature News, October 2024
Light and Thread, by Han Kang | Nobel Lecture, December 2024
The Deaths—and Lives—of Two Sons, by Yiyun Li | The New Yorker, March 2025
Papers
Quentin Skinner (1969) Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas, History and Theory.
Jon Elster (1981) States that are essentially by-products, Social Science Information.
Michael Holquist (1982) Bakhtin and Rabelais: Theory as Praxis, Boundary 2.
Andrew Abbott (1995) Things of Boundaries, Social Research.
Scott Lash (2001) Technological Forms of Life, Theory Culture and Society.
Garry Kasparov (2010) The Chess Master and The Computer, The New York Review of Books.
Lajos L. Brons (2015) Othering, an analysis, Transcience.
Kieran Healy (2017) Fuck nuance. Sociological Theory.
John Hopfield (2018) Now What? Princeton.
Peter Bearman (2018) Notes for “Heuristics of Discovery,” Sociologica.
Books and Short Stories
Books
Meditations on First Philosophy, by René Descartes, 1641.
How to Look at Architecture, by Bruno Zevi, 1957.
All That is Solid Melts into Air, by Marshall Berman, 1982.
Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino, 1972.
Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality, by Jon Elster, 1983.
História da Arte como História da Cidade, by Giulio Carlo Argan, 1983.
Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity, by Marc Augé, 1992.
Preconceito linguístico: o que é, como se faz, by Marcos Bagno, 1999.
Time Matters: on Theory and Method, by Andrew Abbott, 2001.
Identity and Control: How social formations emerge, by Harrison White, 2008.
The Explanation of Social Action, by John Levi Martin, 2011.
Short Stories
“Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang, 2000.
- Available to read here.
The original title for this page was “Articles, Papers and Books that changed my life” but I thought it was better to tone it down. While some of the writings listed here have definitely been turning points for me, some of them just hold a special place in my heart.
Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash
Corvo Correio | the Raven Post 