In our age of global conflict, István Hont is finally having his moment Danielle Charette and William Selinger In 2001 a dispute over hiring in Harvard’s government department briefly became national news. The faculty had voted unanimously to offer a tenured position to the historian István Hont (1947-2013), a specialist in Enlightenment political thought at King’s College,… Read More The Political Prophet Harvard Didn’t Want
Protesters in Iran have set on fire the ancestral home of the Islamic republic’s founder Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as two months of anti-regime demonstrations show no let up. The house in the city of Khomein in the western Markazi province was shown ablaze late on Thursday with crowds of jubilant protesters marching past, according to images… Read More Iranian protesters set fire to Ayatollah Khomeini’s ancestral home
Michael Wood The Aphorisms of Franz Kafka; edited by Reiner Stach, translated by Shelley Frisch. In September 1917, having just discovered he had tuberculosis, Franz Kafka took a break from his work at an insurance company in Prague and spent eight months with his sister Ottla in the village of Zürau, now called Siřem. He also seemed… Read More Cage in Search of a Bird
Ironically, the late Asma Jahangir’s last public appearance and speech were at a demonstration led by Pashteen in Islamabad, February 2018, against the extrajudicial killing of a Pashtun youth in a ‘police encounter’ in Karachi in January 2018. The protest marked the launch of the PTM. Jahangir passed away just days later at her home in Lahore. Since then,… Read More Struggles for democracy and human rights in South Asia: Taking forward Asma Jahangir’s legacy
Alex Henderson Right-wing libertarians and socially conservative MAGA Republicans disagree about many things, but one thing they do have in common is an affection for cryptocurrencies. It isn’t hard to find people on the right who are unapologetically bullish on cryptocurrencies. But one person who doesn’t share their enthusiasm is liberal economist and New York… Read More Paul Krugman warns of collapse of crypto institutions after FTX debacle
Jeff Sparrow The higher the monkey climbs, the more he exposes his backside. So too with the super rich. Oxfam tells us that a mere 10 people now possess more wealth than the bottom 40% of humanity – and that the richest 20 tycoons collectively own more than the entire GDP of sub-Saharan Africa. You’d think that… Read More The grotesque inequality embodied by Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg is a threat to democracy
Protesters at the funeral of a young boy whose family say was killed by Iranian security forces have chanted anti-regime slogans and ridiculed the official account of his death. Hundreds of mourners flocked to the city of Izeh in south-western Iran for the funeral of Kian Pirfalak, according to footage posted online. His mother said at the funeral ceremony… Read More Iranian protesters chant anti-regime slogans at boy’s funeral
First posted June 28, 2013 NB: Carl von Ossietzky was the first of only two Nobel Peace Prize winners (1935) who was prevented by their government from receiving the prize. The second was Liu Xiaobo. The Chinese Communist Party thereby followed the example of the Nazi regime. What is even more noteworthy is that when… Read More The Nobel Peace Prize For Espionage. Remembering Carl von Ossietzky
A unique species on Socotra in Yemen, famed for its bright red resin and umbrella-shaped crown, has been in decline for years. Now islanders are leading efforts to save it by Jess Craig The dragon’s blood tree is classified as a vulnerable species on the IUCN red list. Photograph: Neil Lucas Just after 4am on the… Read More Saving the dragon’s blood: how an island refused to let a legendary tree die out
Gordon Brown There is no longer such thing as the international community,” a prominent African leader recently complained to me, lamenting that this week’s G20 would, like September’s UN general assembly, October’s IMF-World Bank meetings and this month’s Cop27, fail to combat the world’s food, energy, debt, inflation, currency, pollution and poverty crises. At the very moment… Read More Nationalism is the ideology of our age. No wonder the world is in crisis
After the truth-shower 