First posted May 31, 2016 IT IS THE RESPONSIBILITY of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies. This, at least, may seem enough of a truism to pass over without comment. Not so, however. For the modern intellectual, it is not at all obvious. TWENTY-YEARS AGO, Dwight Macdonald published a series of articles… Read More Noam Chomsky, The Responsibility of Intellectuals (1967)
Simon Tisdall More than ever, Vladimir Putin resembles the captain of the Titanic: steaming full speed ahead towards disaster, deluded by inaccurate assumptions about his ship’s invincibility, and blind to darkly looming hazards. Everything the captain thinks he knows is wrong, the modern-day treasure hunter, Brock Lovett, says in the 1997 movie. And like the Titanic’s lookouts,… Read More Vladimir Putin’s ship of fools is sinking fast. Will he take everyone down with him?
Mukul Kesavan The symmetry of the responses of the Pakistani and Indian high commissions to the recent communal violence in Leicester neatly illustrates the evolution of the Indian State under the Bharatiya Janata Party. This is the first paragraph of the Pakistani statement: “It is with great concern that the High Commission of Pakistan to… Read More Leicester calling
Thousands of young people have staged a coordinated “global climate strike” across Asia, Africa and Europe in a call for reparations for those worst affected by climate breakdown. From New Zealand and Japan to Germany and the Democratic Republic of Congo, activists walked out of schools, universities and jobs to demand rich countries pay for… Read More Thousands call for ‘climate reparations and justice’ in global protests
John Bartlett 100ft alerce has estimated age of 5,484, more than 600 years older than Methuselah in California. In a secluded valley in southern Chile, a lone alerce tree stands above the canopy of an ancient forest. Green shoots sprout from the crevices in its thick, dark trunks, huddled like the pipes of a great cathedral… Read More ‘It’s a miracle’: Gran Abuelo in Chile could be world’s oldest living tree
NB: The citations below have been taken from this Facebook page. I will add to them with my own selection of citations in addition to more taken from the above page. The additions will be at the top after this is posted, so as to make it easier for those who have already seen it.… Read More Philosophical thoughts
JUAN COLE A mere category 1 hurricane dumped so much water on Puerto Rico so quickly that one of its rivers has swollen to 25 feet above normal, even more than it rose during Hurricane Maria in 2017, which was a Category 5 hurricane. The island is beset by flash floods, and is getting 16-30 inches… Read More Climate Crisis and the Age of the Super-Typhoon: Storms batter, flood Puerto Rico, Pakistan, Japan and Shanghai
FARIBA AMINI In the summer of 1993, I went to Iran to visit my parents who at the time were living in Tehran on and off. We had left Iran six months after the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and I had not returned until 1993. I remember the atmosphere at the time, which was quite… Read More Mahsa, a National Iranian Symbol of Resistance
Andy Mukherjee – Bloomberg Gautam Adani’s rise to the No. 2 spot in global wealth rankings, crafted chiefly from shares traded in the local market, deserves to be in the spotlight – as much as a poster child of Narendra Modi’s “Make in India” self-reliance as an opportunity for some much-needed transparency about the tycoon’s… Read More The Publicity-Shy Funds Backing Gautam Adani’s Massive Empire
One of the interesting points that you make is how we in the West think of Solzhenitsyn in terms of his The Gulag Archipelago published in 1973. We think of Solzhenitsyn as a human rights actor. But that’s not the role that he plays where Ukraine is concerned. Your argument is that Solzhenitsyn is, as it were,… Read More Decentralizing the Cold War: an interview
After the truth-shower 