I think that at a similar sort of length are the lengthier essays in the <i>London Review of Books</i>, <i>New Left Review</i>, etc. Some of them impinge on rather controversial topics (and would of course elicit some disagreement), but they’re perfectly good reads nevertheless (though I suppose that that’s orthogonal to merely pointing out that I, rightly or wrongly, ended up influenced by this sort of thing.)<p>Tom Crewe wrote of ‘The Strange Death of Municipal England’ on 15 June 2016 (<a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v38/n24/tom-crewe/the-strange-death-of-municipal-england" rel="nofollow">https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v38/n24/tom-crewe/the-strang...</a>). I suppose that at the time I was broadly a utilitarian and had very évolué/neoliberal politics. This exposed something of a tension between them and I ended up at a rather different place politically. I suppose that I am rather a slave to, if not passions, pangs of guilt, and so occasionally a day or two will be upended in (often useless) politicking of one sort or another—a moderately important feature of my life. The other article that had some effect was Mahmood Mamdani’s ‘The Invention of the Indigène’ (<a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v33/n02/mahmood-mamdani/the-invention-of-the-indigene" rel="nofollow">https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v33/n02/mahmood-mamdani/the-...</a>).<p>The second effect, I suppose, was to broadly influence my intellectual outlook: first, in a rather uncritically admiring sort of way, and then, beginning with the observation that the book reviews never mentioned the books, more critically: untranslated French is a good reminder that I ought to read French newspapers more often, but when will the historians be reminded e.g. to understand elementary probability? Useless chattering is an excellent pastime however, and the <i>LRB</i> was terribly good fodder.