I posted a short piece to this site every Sunday through 2025, and am now half-way through 2026. I don’t seem to be running out of ideas, usually with a few in progress at any one time, though some have run it close to be ready to go out on the day. 

They are not on substack or similar, and are free to read. 

The full listing is here, with a thematic organisation here. A few shorter pieces have been posted mid-week.

As I’ve said before, it’s hard to know how these are being received, since comments are few and I don’t trust WordPress stats. It’s not just about numbers, but that’s one way to see how they might have been read. With the exception of pieces on Foucault, which always seem relatively popular, I’ve given up trying to predict what the fate of each piece might be.

Here are some of the most visited:

Who translated Foucault’s The Order of Things?

Foucault’s 1972 visit to Cornell University

Eugenio Donato and “The Structuralist Controversy” conference – proceedings, recordings, Foucault and Flaubert

The Murder of Ioan Culianu: Eliade, Anton, Eco, Lincoln and the University of Chicago

Thomas Sebeok, Umberto Eco and the Semiotics of Nuclear Waste 

Foucault’s 1972 visit to Attica prison 

And some of the least visited, but which I particularly liked:

Boris Porshnev – from peasant revolts in 17th century France to cryptozoology and the quest for the Soviet Yeti 

Lucien Gerschel, Georges Dumézil, William Shakespeare and the history of Coriolanus 

Huguette Fugier’s study of the vocabulary of the sacred in Latin, and Giorgio Agamben’s other sources for the notion of the homo sacer

Émile Benveniste on auxiliarity – an Acta Linguistica Hafniensia article, Eli Fischer-Jørgensen, a misplaced abstract and a 1965-66 Collège de France course 

Vladimir Nabokov’s original and unpublished translation of The Discourse of Igor’s Campaign; and Roman Jakobson’s enduring wish to complete his English edition 

The French contributors to Herman Hirt’s 1936 Festschrift: Linguistics, Nationalism and Nazism