Nature is a tricky term. It can refer to the quality of things, to what moves things into existence or to the world as a whole. Read and heard, from political debate to food labelling, it is in constant use: back to nature, 100% natural, natural order, unnatural acts, natural ways of living, wisdom of… Read More Adele Dipasquale: Careless mothers, sterile goddesses and ungrateful offspring
This is the twentieth anniversary of the making of Narendra Modi and the Gujarat Model. It was this month twenty years ago that triggered the marinade of horror, hatred and gore that has served up this sizzled nation called New India where it is possible for zealotry to hound a young girl for her choice… Read More Sankarshan Thakur: Splintered vision
One hundred years ago this week, Sylvia Beach, who ran the bookstore Shakespeare and Company on 12 rue de l’Odéon in Paris and nurtured a community of expatriate writers that included Richard Wright, T.S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Thornton Wilder, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, placed in the bookstore’s front window a… Read More Chris Hedges: Heeding James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’
Prime Minister Narendra Modi made a rather controversial comment, while addressing a Hindu religious women’s organization called the `Brahmakumaris’ on January 21. He reminded his listeners: “In the last 75 years, we only kept talking about rights, fighting for rights and wasting our time. The issue of rights may be right to some extent in… Read More Sumanta Banerjee: Rights and Duties in India
NB: India’s rulers have invented several bits of political abuse over the years, including tukde-tukde gang, and urban Naxals. Some years ago during the wave of violent ‘actions’ undertaken by the CPI (Maoist) I was often asked to join TV programs debating the issue. I was invited because having been a Naxalite cadre myself in the first phase… Read More Some uncomfortable thoughts on 'urban naxals'
The appearance within a few months of each other of two books about the same four women is a bit startling, but on reflection the topic is so natural and interesting that one might even wonder why it hasn’t been treated before. Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot (née Bosanquet), Mary Midgley (née Scrutton) and Iris Murdoch all matriculated… Read More Book review: What is rude?
It is tempting to harness Civilization and Its Discontents as a guide to our contemporary political morass, but doing so may obscure its most valuable message. Civilization and Its Discontents; translated by James Strachey and edited by Samuel Moyn Sigmund Freud was an ambivalent man, especially when it came to politics. He often held conflicting… Read More Udi Greenberg: Freud and the Miseries of Politics
It is rare and often uncomfortable to discuss the relationship between race and capitalism. Attributing certain economic systems to race relations and even discrimination are generally seen as reductive and even racist. Yet it is important to recognise that capitalism has a racial origin in the West – which knowingly placed white populations, and in… Read More Chandran Nair: White privilege and global capitalism have roots in private property rights
At the height of the tense second phase of the cold war, a group of Stasi majors, propaganda officers and border guards convened at a heavily fortified compound in socialist east Berlin. From spring 1982 until winter 1989, they gathered once every four weeks, from 4pm until 6pm, at the House of Culture inside the… Read More Philip Oltermann – Red poets’ society: the secret history of the Stasi’s book club for spies
Imagine that several state legislators decide that Yellowstone National Park is too big. Also imagine that, working with federal politicians, they change the law to downsize the park by a million acres, which they sell in a private auction. Outrageous? Yes. Unheard of? No. It happens routinely and with increasing frequency in the Brazilian Amazon. The most… Read More The great Amazon land grab: how Brazil’s government is turning public land private
After the truth-shower 