First posted December 22, 2018 When Bill Anders took this photograph from the Apollo spacecraft on Christmas Eve in 1968, our relationship with the world changed forever .This photograph is now half a century old. It was taken by the astronaut Bill Anders on Christmas Eve 1968 as the Apollo 8 spacecraft rounded the dark side of… Read More Joe Moran: the story behind our planet’s most famous photo, December 24, 1968
There’s a good chance you know a fact or two about the artefact called the Rosetta Stone – namely that, because it was inscribed with a single message written in three different scripts, its discovery allowed archeologists to decode ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Or you might have heard that the new Grand Egyptian Museum has been… Read More What did the Rosetta Stone’s inscription actually communicate?
Iranian shopkeepers and lorry drivers staged a walkout in nearly 40 cities and towns on Monday after calls for a three-day nationwide general strike from protesters as the government declined to confirm a claim by a senior official that the morality police had been abolished. Iranian newspapers instead reported an increase in patrols, especially in… Read More Iran: mass strike starts amid mixed messages about abolishing morality police
Helena Smith in Athens Thousands of people have joined protests in Athens, Thessaloniki and other Greek cities to commemorate the fatal police shooting of a teenager, hours after violence erupted over a similar incident in the north of the country. Police estimated more than 11,000 protesters had joined protests on Tuesday amid fears of renewed clashes as… Read More Thousands take to streets in Greece in protest over 2008 shooting of teenager
Whenever India’s political or military leaders brandish threats during periods of ‘uneasy peace’, Pakistan Army becomes the main beneficiary. LT GENERAL PRAKASH MENON In 1999, Former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee visited the Minar-e-Pakistan in Lahore. It symbolised the Indian State’s acceptance of Pakistan’s sovereignty. On 1 December 2022, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, writing on… Read More Akhand Bharat shouldn’t enter Indian military gates. Army can’t afford to lose focus
A Manhattan jury has found two Trump Organization companies guilty on multiple charges of criminal tax fraud and falsifying business records connected to a 15-year scheme to defraud tax authorities by failing to report and pay taxes on compensation for top executives. The Trump Corp. and Trump Payroll Corp. were found guilty on all charges they faced.… Read More Trump Organization found guilty on all counts of criminal tax fraud
First posted July 10, 2013 Cracks in the Kremlin matrixPeter Pomerantsev enters the matrix of managed democracy that underpins postmodern dictatorship in Russia. A society of pure spectacle, with fake parties, fake opposition, fake scandals and fake action: this is the political technologists’ project, in which (almost) everything becomes PR. NB – the articles below provide insights… Read More Cracks in the Kremlin matrix. The Stalinist order, the Putinist order; Russia’s culture of bureaucratic corruption
This equaling out of truth and falsehood is both informed by and takes advantage of an all-permeating late post-modernism and relativism, which has trickled down over the past thirty years from academia to the media and then everywhere else. This school of thought has taken Nietzsche’s maxim, there are no facts, only interpretations, to mean… Read More Farewell to reality: Why we’re post-fact
Samuel Earle Faced with a future that presents itself as non-negotiable, the temptation is to turn towards the past First posted November 05, 2016 When Harry Potter discovers the Mirror of Erised in The Philosopher’s Stone—amirror that shows us our deepest dreams—he repeatedly returns to it in secret. Each night in its reflection he lives his… Read More The politics of nostalgia
First posted July 26, 2020 Neuroscience is finding what propaganda has long known: nostalgia doesn’t need real memories – an imagined past works too.. “He was still too young to know that the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of… Read More Felipe De Brigard: Nostalgia reimagined
After the truth-shower 