Essays to Read - 2026

A curated list of essays

Essays to Read

Psychology/ Human nature/ Self

• On Self-Respect by Joan Didion
• Autobiographical Notes by James Baldwin
• “Total Eclipse” by Annie Dillard
• Some thoughts On the Common Toad by George Orwell
• Notes on “Camp” by Susan Sontag
• Once More to the Lake by E.B. White

Phiosophy of science/ progress/ Ambition

• Degrees of Explanation by FA Hayek
• The Possessed Machines
• The problem with p-values by David Colquhoun
• How Life (and Death) Spring From Disorder
• Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit
• The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin
• The Art of Doing Science and Engineering by Richard Hamming
  • You and Your Research (annotated)
  • Advice for a young investigator by Ramon y Cajal.
  • Letters to a Young Scientist by EO Wilson
• Poetry and Ambition by poets.org

Philosophy / Reasoning

• The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus
• Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theories: An Introduction by Juha Räikkä
• Existentialism Is a Humanism by Jean-Paul Sartre
• Thinking and Moral Considerations by Hanah Arendt
• On the Abolition of All Political Parties by Simone Weil
• Essays of Immanuel Kant

---

Some sites

1. Aeon
2. The electric typewriter
3. The marginalian
4. sketchplanations
5. Electric Lit
6. Roberto Bolaño recommends
7. Paul Graham’s Essays