By Gregory Freidin Great musicians, it is said, do not choose their calling—music chooses them. Reading and rereading Joseph Frank’s writings after his passing, it seems that the spirit of modernity itself chose him to be its voice among literary critics—in the age when brute force remaking the world was matched and animated by a… Read More A Critic, His Life, His Age: A Tribute to Joseph Frank (1918-2013)
The truth never dies but is made to live as a beggar: Yiddish proverb You cannot doubt the existence of hell. you live in it. it is a place without love: From The American GAZA casualties live statistics In 1977, a year before he killed himself, the Austrian writer Jean Améry came across press reports of… Read More Pankaj Mishra: The Shoah after Gaza
Scientists have voted against a proposal to declare a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene to reflect how profoundly human activity has altered the planet. By Katie Hunt, CNN The proposal was rejected by members of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy, which is part of the International Union of Geological Sciences, according to three voting members of the… Read More Proposal on Anthropocene as new chapter in Earth’s history will go no further
Adam Tooze Born and raised in Tokyo, Hiroshi Hamaya is one of the most eminent Japanese documentary photographers of the 20th century. Working as an aeronautical photographer and a freelance contributor to magazines during the 1930s, Hamaya began his career documenting his hometown from the sky and the streets. An assignment in 1939 gave Hamaya the… Read More Hamaya Hiroshi (1915-1999); visual chronicler of 20th century Japan
Our Palestine Question, an explosive new book by Geoffrey Levin, delves into American Jewish McCarthyism from the 1950s through late 1970s GAZA casualties live statistics United Nations Documentation on the Origins and Evolution of the Palestine Problem Debbie Nathan THE ISRAELI GOVERNMENT covertly meddled into American Jewish politics from the 1950s to 1970s, and they did… Read More How Israel quietly crushed early American Jewish dissent on Palestine
Bharat Bhushan In West Bengal last week, Prime Minister Narendra Modi cited allegations of sexual exploitation and land grab in Sandeshkhali to launch a scathing attack on the Trinamool Congress (TMC) and Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee. He sought to convert local anger into votes for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). “Har chot ka jawab vote se dena hai… Read More BJP unable to leverage Sandeshkhali protests
BY JEFFREY ST. CLAIR Around 11:30 on March 16, 1968, Captain Ernest Medina ordered a ceasefire of US troops under his command in the South Vietnamese village of My Lai 4. After nearly four hours of gunfire, there was silence. There was silence, even though the order only applied to American soldiers. There was silence because… Read More The Last Child of My Lai
I believe that the musha’a (community-owned agricultural lands), like similar practices anywhere else in the world, can help us realize a world based on just conditions of mutuality, name it as is your wont: true communism, the cooperative commonwealth, the commons BY PETER LINEBAUGH In 1958 the assistant headmaster did the Bible reading at the morning assembly of the Karachi… Read More Palestine & the Commons: Or, Marx & the Musha’a
There are some who are in darkness / And the others are in lightAnd you see the ones in brightness / Those in darkness drop from sight.(Bertold Brecht, The Threepenny Opera) People in the West seem naïve to us because they don’t suffer like we do, they have a remedy for every little pimple. We’re… Read More Svetlana Alexievich: Secondhand Time
‘People are often in tears during my talks, telling me these images have changed their lives. But all I’ve done is connect them with the landscape – and those who inhabited it before us’ Interview by Amy Fleming I took this picture of Badbury Rings in Dorset before the pandemic, when I was still figuring out how to… Read More The iron age hillfort that makes people cry: David R Abram’s best photograph
After the truth-shower 