Of Truth, by Francis Bacon In this essay, as associate professor of philosophy Svetozar Minkov points out, Bacon addresses the question of “whether it is worse to lie to others or to oneself–to possess truth (and lie, when necessary, to others) or to think one possesses the truth but be mistaken and hence unintentionally… Read More What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer
First posted November 27, 2014 NB: Here’s the greatest (my humble opinion) short story of the 20th century. Not that I’ve read many. DS From Simon Ley’s translation of The Analects of Confucius; Introduction: Lu Xun (who is rightly considered as the greatest writer of modern China; he died in 1936, and – by the… Read More The True Story of Ah-Q – By Lu Xun
Sirin Kale As I write, I have 101 unread WhatsApp messages, 254 unread iPhone messages and 46,252 unread emails across three separate accounts. For me, Inbox Zero is a faraway goal, as unachievable as mastering the perfect cat’s-eye flick, or learning how to cook. But it is the WhatsApp messages, specifically the WhatsApp group chats, that terrorise me the… Read More Can we escape the tyranny of WhatsApp groups?
First posted July 13, 2017 NB: The Chinese Communist Party should hang its head in shame at this brutal judicial murder of one of China’s gentlest and kindest souls, whose only crime was that he wanted freedom and democracy for the Chinese people and had the temerity to demand a dialogue with the Dalai Lama. In… Read More Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Liu Xiaobo (1955-2017) Dead At 61, After Years Of Imprisonment. ‘Without freedom, China will always remain far from civilized ideals’
Alun Hubbard I’m standing at the edge of the Greenland ice sheet, mesmerized by a mind-blowing scene of natural destruction. A milewide section of glacier front has fractured and is collapsing into the ocean, calving an immense iceberg. Seracs, giant columns of ice the height of three-story houses, are being tossed around like dice. And… Read More The Greenland ice sheet is losing ice faster than forecast and now committed to at least 10 inches of sea level rise
Sophie Boulter Giorgia Meloni could become Italy’s first female prime minister after snap election on 25 September. Her political rise is no isolated case: ‘femonationalism’ is flourishing throughout Europe, disguising extremes as the next socially acceptable, mainstream choice. Recently, Giorgia Meloni, the leader of Italy’s post-fascist Brothers of Italy party, sent out a memo cautioning party members… Read More When fascism is female
One can behold in capitalism a religion, that is to say, capitalism essentially serves to satisfy the same worries, anguish, and disquiet formerly answered by so-called religion. The proof of capitalism’s religious structure – as not only a religiously conditioned construction, as Weber thought, but as an essentially religious phenomenon – still today misleads one… Read More Walter Benjamin: Capitalism as Religion (1921)
Helen Davidson Chinese censors have reportedly been ordered to flood social media with innocuous posts about Xinjiang to drown out mounting complaints of food and medication shortages in a region under lockdown for more than a month. The Ili Kazakh autonomous prefecture, also known as Yili, is home to about 4.5 million people, and is believed to… Read More Xinjiang lockdown: Chinese censors drown out posts about food and medicine shortages
The French newspaper Le Monde described the book as “luminous” if also dense with ideas Angelique Chrisafis in Paris A novel depicting France’s #MeToo movement by the French punk feminist writer Virginie Despentes, irreverently titled Cher Connard – which roughly translates as Dear Arsehole – has become a bestseller, prompting a debate about sexual harassment and… Read More Dear Arsehole
Adam Morton There is no shortage of things to say about what’s going wrong. The extent of damage caused at 1.2C of global heating since pre-industrial levels is proving greater than was forecast by climate scientists not that long ago. As discussed last week, the disastrous toll of the historic flooding in Pakistan and heatwaves and droughts… Read More Reasons for (cautious) optimism: the good news on the climate crisis
After the truth-shower 