notes on the cheese and the worms

Review of Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller

Sep 10 • Adarsh Badri

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notes on spin dictators

review of Sergei Gureiv and Daniel Treisman’s “Spin Dictators”

Sep 6 • Adarsh Badri

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August 2026

notes on hot milk

Review of Deborah Levy’s “Hot Milk”

Aug 31 • Adarsh Badri

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notes on the permanence of polycrisis

we have always been in "polycrisis"— and now we know it!

Aug 24 • Adarsh Badri

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notes on mother mary comes to me

a book by arundhati roy

Aug 17 • Adarsh Badri

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notes on human acts

In one of the chapters of Han Kang’s Human Acts, a character, who had been jailed and tortured, asks: ‘Is it true that human beings are fundamentally…

Aug 10 • Adarsh Badri

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notes on minimum democracy

citizens reduced to demanding a resignation and citizens resigned from demanding

Aug 6 • Adarsh Badri

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notes on the history of islam

In her book Islam: A Short History, Karen Armstrong seeks to untangle the tumultuous history of Islam through time.

Aug 3 • Adarsh Badri

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notes on risk society

Writing against the backdrop of the Chornobyl nuclear disaster, Ulrich Beck first published Risikogesellschaft in Germany in 1986.

Aug 2 • Adarsh Badri

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March 2026

william zinsser's notes on writing well

notes on Zinsser's tips for writing a non-fiction

Mar 28 • Adarsh Badri

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January 2026

paul graham's notes on writing well

notes on Paul Graham’s essays on writing

Jan 16 • Adarsh Badri

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notes on the books I read in 2025

a wrap-up of reading, writing, and PhD

Jan 8 • Adarsh Badri

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