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What is a nation? It's complicated...
Ramanan Raghavendran

December 2022

Note: I struggled to title this essay, and a shoutout to my friend Alex Brussell for giving me the answer (but see my endnote for an alt title). I have…
Ramanan Raghavendran
Here's the best of what I read in 2022. New feature klaxon: I’m picking a Book of the Year! It is Mazower’s Dark Continent. Mazower’s devastating review…
Ramanan Raghavendran

October 2022

My learning journey at Stanford continued over the summer with an intense course on “the archive”, a highly fetishized subject in the humanities. The…
Ramanan Raghavendran

July 2022

I’ve realized over time that this blog, while implicitly autobiographical, has a small set of essays that are explicitly so. I’ve decided to make this a…
Ramanan Raghavendran
Last week I put out an announcement about a new role I am taking on at my alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania. I thought I’d write a few more…
Ramanan Raghavendran

June 2022

I’ve been using my blog to chronicle, in an episodic way, a learning journey I have been on at Stanford. The adventure continues! *** The second year of…
Ramanan Raghavendran
Some years ago, a picaresque academic named David Graeber wrote an extremely depressing book called “Bullshit Jobs”. His primary target was a range of…
Ramanan Raghavendran

April 2022

There is a great song that captures some of what I want to talk about here: Ray Charles singing “It should have been me”. Uncle Ray was always a few…
Ramanan Raghavendran

March 2022

Did life in your great Utopia really get so boring you needed a war? — Iain M. Banks, Consider Phlebas Recently I wrote about how some of the best…
Ramanan Raghavendran

February 2022

In life — work, home, relationships of all kinds — there are people who “brung ya to the dance.” Sometimes we forget them, and this is a mistake. It is…
Ramanan Raghavendran

January 2022

I’ve always embraced the fact that I read a lot of science fiction and fantasy. Indeed I believe that some of the best writing of the last three decades…
Ramanan Raghavendran
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