What I'm reading now, what shaped the essays, and what I recommend when someone asks.
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Not a list of everything I've read — a list of what's been useful. Books that changed how I think about something get a line explaining what changed. The rest are here because someone asked.
Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness — On why the virtues of accuracy and sincerity matter even to people who are sceptical about "truth" in the abstract. The best answer I know to the thought that caring about being right is naïve.
Judith Shklar, Ordinary Vices — Starts from cruelty rather than justice and rebuilds liberalism from there. Slow going, worth it.
Albert Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction — Three argumentative structures that recur across two centuries of reactionary writing. Uncomfortably applicable to arguments I have made.
The essays on this site lean heavily on a small number of sources.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue — Where "a tradition is an argument extended through time" comes from. As good a one-line description of what this paper is trying to do as I have found.
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty — Chapter 2 in particular, which is doing considerably more and stranger work than the marketplace-of-ideas gloss suggests. Behind Against the marketplace of ideas.
Alfred Kahn, "The Tyranny of Small Decisions" — A 1966 paper about railway timetables that turns out to be about everything. Behind The tyranny of small decisions.
George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language" — Wrong in several particulars, right about the thing that matters. Behind Notes on political vocabulary.
Montaigne's essays, in no order and for no reason except that he is the only writer I know who is consistently honest about not having reached a conclusion.