Brian Ulrich Informed Comment During the past seven months, the world has seen the significance of the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial chokepoint not only for oil, but natural gas, fertilizer, food for the Gulf states, and other industrial materials. That strait actually takes its name from a city and kingdom which once dominated the… Read More The Strait of Hormuz in World History & the Present Crisis
Tsitsi Bhobo Waging Nonviolence When the shrill of heavy earthmoving machinery crept towards Elias Mlambo’s riverside banana plantations in February, the sudden brownish color of the river alarmed him. The water was laced with used machinery oil, disfiguring the once crystal-clear, wild water of the Haroni River. The river not only sustains the Ndau tribal people of… Read More Inside The Successful Campaign Against Illegal Chinese Mining In Africa
Roger Berkowitz Hannah Arendt’s homeland was populated with friends, most of them men—at least that is what her published correspondence would lead you to believe. The published letters between Arendt and her friends include books with Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Heinrich Blücher, Gershom Scholem, Kurt Blumenfeld, and Joachim Fest. The only woman whose correspondence with… Read More On Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy’s Decades-Long Friendship
How the ancient pharaohs attempted to preserve their legacies for eternity By Susan Tallman Not so long ago, heroic public statuary felt irrelevant—good for locating yourself in traffic circles but otherwise dismissed as a relic of some credulous, great-man-besotted past. The fact that places like Pyongyang and Ashgabat still went in for it just confirmed… Read More The Vanity of Kings
This is no scoffing matter. The accelerating proliferation of advanced nuclear weapons is bringing ‘end times’ closer by the day Simon Tisdall Humankind has fearfully and sometimes joyfully anticipated the end of the world ever since it began. The Bible’s Book of Revelation speaks of “end times”, a period of tribulation, war, famine, plague, floods… Read More Fixated on AI, the world has forgotten what is staring it in the face: nuclear annihilation
We won’t be telling you Mitali Saran Reposting this column, which was published in Business Standard newspaper in 2015, because October 10, 2026 was only the latest symptom of the undeclared ways in which we are not at present a democracy. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard. In command is Captain Fantastic. Exciting new guy, strong,… Read More In the event of an Emergency
A whirlpool of violence has engulfed everywhere from Lebanon to Yemen. Meanwhile, the west has destroyed any political authority it once had Steve Bloomfield There was a world before 7 October, 2023, and now there is a world after. For Gaza, for Israel, for the wider Middle East, and for everyone else too. Not all… Read More In three years, Israel’s war on Gaza hasn’t just changed the Middle East, it’s changed the world
To online partisans of Opposition parties who see the hidden hand of the Aam Aadmi Party or the BJP in the CJP’s successful mobilisations, if the suppression of Jantar Mantar 2.0 doesn’t discredit your conspiratorial daftness, you’re probably immune to lived experience. Mukul Kesavan Jantar Mantar 2.0 will spur pundits to think of the electoral… Read More Help at hand: The struggle against electoral Inquisition will be long and hard
http://www.reporters-collective.in Have you submitted documents during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) process to retain your name on the electoral roll? Well, the Election Commission of India (ECI) has now introduced a new process in Delhi that allows voters to establish their eligibility without submitting any documents. The ECI is forcing booth level officers (BLOs) to… Read More Election Commission forcing BLOs to verify without documents
It’s easier to blame brutes and sadists for extreme violence. But as we see in the documentary, modern genocides are fueled by people who are uncomfortably recognizable Omer Bartov Werner Best, a senior SS official and jurist who helped organize the Nazi death squads that murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews, is also known for… Read More How do human beings rationalize genocide? NAZA provides a chilling look
