First posted October 27, 2011 ‘The essay is a marvellous account of the hundreds of ways in which the Ramayana has been told, complete with examples of this narrative diversity. I can’t imagine that the vice-chancellor, a member of that urbane cohort, the Class of ’75, wanted the essay removed because he agreed with the Akhil Bharatiya… Read More Mukul Kesavan: Delhi University and the purging of Ramanujan
The origin of May Day is to be found in the Woodland Epoch of History. First posted April 30, 2020 Once upon a time, long before Weinberger bombed north Africans, before the Bank of Boston laundered money, or Reagan honored the Nazi war dead, the earth was blanketed by a broad mantle of forests. As… Read More Peter Linebaugh: The incomplete, true, authentic and wonderful history of May Day
One of the strangest things about an American university education is that it bundles a whole lot of different things together. If you want to take a course in high-level mathematics or listen to the lectures of an accomplished historian of Ming China, you must also buy membership in one of the country’s most lavish gyms;… Read More Unbundle the (American) University
An untidy history of AI across four books Reviewed Here by Trevor Quirk Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks From the Stone Age to AI: Yuval Noah Harari The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI: Ray Kurzweil Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope, and the Human Spirit: Henry A. Kissinger, Craig Mundie, and Eric… Read More Perplexity
Perhaps what was behind it all is only that individual human beings did not kill other individual human beings for human reasons, but that an organized attempt was made to eradicate the concept of the human being. Hannah Arendt to Karl Jaspers on the Nazi death camps, December 17, 1946 (Correspondence, p 68) Gaza is… Read More Gaza and the Death of Conscience
The Slave Ship: A Human History, by Marcus Rediker. 2008 Reviewed by by jayspencergreen Interview with Marcus Rediker The cover of my edition of Marcus Rediker’s The Slave Ship features a quotation from the Sunday Telegraph describing it as “A truly magnificent book.” Such is my prejudice that I imagine Telegraph readers coming to Rediker’s work not to be educated about the shaping… Read More The Slave Ship
As a Presidential candidate, Donald Trump made his world view plain: there was “us” and there was “them.” Once he was in the White House, the fear factor would prevail. By David Remnick The young Donald Trump was the Nelson Muntz of Jamaica Estates. (Or was he its Draco Malfoy? Scholars will debate such questions for… Read More The Politics of Fear
By Tora Agarwala in East Khasi hills, Meghalaya Excited chatter and the clattering of steel plates drown out the din of the monsoon rains: it is lunchtime in Laitsohpliah government school in the north-east Indian state of Meghalaya. The food has been cooked on-site and is free for everyone, part of India’s ambitious “midday meal”… Read More Fish mint, Himalayan chives and berry pickle: how wild ingredients are transforming school dinners in India
Genuine, human content is increasingly sidelined by algorithmic prioritization, receiving fewer interactions than the engineered content and AI slop optimized solely for clicks…. The problem is not just the rise of fake material, but the collapse of context and the acceptance that truth no longer matters as long as our cravings for colors and noise… Read More The Last Days Of Social Media
Dear Friends and Colleagues, The Society for the Study of Archives cordially invites you to the launch of its journal ‘Reading the Archive’, a graduate journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences. The event will feature an inaugural lecture by Prof. Madhavan K. Palat on Genocide: Barbarism in Civilization in the Twentieth Century The lecture will be chaired by Prof. Salil Misra, Visiting Faculty, BML Munjal University,… Read More Prof. Madhavan Palat on Genocide: Barbarism in Civilization in the Twentieth Century. September 14, 2025
After the truth-shower 