This is what I think.

I don’t want reportage. I have nothing against the genre—I wrote hundreds of them as a reporter—but let’s be honest: reportage is just news with a hangover. We used it when we had nothing else to publish; it was filler. It tells you what happened, where, when, to whom. It recycles the news. That’s fine for news media chasing clicks, but it has no place in The Brussels Review. I’m not interested in polished accounts of events. I’m looking for thought—subtle, difficult, contradictory, possibly unfinished, but always honest and intellectually aggravating to someone.

Between the reportage and the essay is the memoir—a trickier, slipperier genre. I love it when it’s done well, which is why I won’t dismiss it entirely. But I know its place. A memoir tells me what happened and what you remember, as someone who was there. But it’s not an essay.

The essay may borrow from memoir, but only as scaffolding—for a question: why did it happen? It doesn’t wallow in nostalgia or cast the writer as victim or hero. It interrogates and speculates. It may not solve anything, but it proves the writer cared enough to raise a voice. (Now reread that paragraph in present tense.)

So, if you’re writing just to relive the past or reform the present, you’re already halfway to fiction—or better yet, poetry, where vagueness can be a virtue. But please, don’t call it an essay.

An essay must ask a question, offer a hypothesis, or hazard an answer. Those are the rules. No escape. It always begins with doubt. That’s crucial. That’s why I don’t want assertions dressed up as insight. I want writing that shows its intellectual scaffolding—essays unafraid of vulnerability, willing to consider the opposition and even risk undoing their own argument. If you already know what you think and you’re just dressing it up in stylish paragraphs, write a speech. I’ll listen. But don’t call it an essay.

Now for the one that irritates me the most: the recycled-knowledge essay. You know the type—it looks like an essay, sounds like one, but reads like a Google summary with footnotes. All the right gestures, none of the tension. It’s what masturbation is to sex. If the writer isn’t wrestling with the material, the reader won’t either. And if there’s no struggle, why are we even here?

I know I’m picky, but I’m not even interested in real essays about trivial things. Don’t tell me what kind of beer Churchill liked—I couldn’t care less. But show me how his secretary’s thoughts leaked in his speeches and shaped the rhetoric of power, how someone else’s syntax echoed from the podium—and now I’m paying attention. That’s substance.

Finally: have fun. Be funny. Not smug, not snarky, not clever as a form of hiding. Genuinely funny. The best essays are about things already exhausted by experts—and still worth picking apart. If you’re not enjoying the labor of thinking, the reader won’t either. Remember: an essay is intellectual intercourse between you and the reader. And there are no safe words.

Don’t teach. Or if you must—like I’m doing now—own it. Say: this is what I think. Essays aren’t lectures. They’re conversations with dead philosophers and living doubts. You’re not leading the reader out of Plato’s cave—you’re sitting beside them, throwing shadows on the wall, wondering which ones look familiar.

So: this is what I think.
You disagree? Good. Write an essay about it, and I’ll publish it.

My Preferred Subjects

Gender: Identity, sexuality, embodiment, care, domestic life. Emotionally charged, politically urgent—but spare me victimhood posturing and virtue-signalling.
Politics: Citizenship, statelessness, alienation, ideology, public life. Best when grounded in lived or expert experience—not declarations.
Religion: Faith, heresy, ritual, inherited beliefs. Compelling when personal or cross-cultural—especially in rupture, not preaching.
History: Memory, mythologies, generational trauma. Good when personal and subversive but boring when soaked in racial essentialism.
Technology: Surveillance, digital intimacy, identity. I want the body in the machine—not abstractions.
Hidden Figures: Erased voices, anonymous labour, invisible knowledge. But make it about the figures, not just the categories. Race is often overused as a narrative shortcut—be smarter than that.
Future: Speculative nonfiction, ecological vision, generational time. Weird, ambitious, and rooted in the present—yes, please.