By Anthony Grafton Reading Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s encyclopedic study of magic is like stumbling into a vast cabinet of curiosities, where toad bones boil water, witches transmit misery through optical darts, and numbers, arranged correctly, can harness the planets’ powers. Anthony Grafton explores the Renaissance polymath’s occult insights into the structure of the universe, discovering a… Read More Marked by Stars: Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy
NB: A great scholar, a deeply humane person and an optimist of the spirit. This is sad news, but one must be grateful that she lived a long and fulfilling life. She and her husband Professor Chandler Davis were committed war resisters and anti-imperialist intellectuals. I salute them both; and offer my deepest condolences to… Read More Natalie Zemon Davis, Historian of the Marginalized, Dies at 94
On 18 October, Brazil proposed a security council resolution calling not even for a ceasefire but merely for “humanitarian pauses” in Israel’s bombing of Gaza. The US, in a sole vote, vetoed it. In the US Congress, over a dozen House Democrats signed on to a ceasefire resolution put forward by Cori Bush, the Missouri congresswoman. The Democratic lawmaker… Read More Is the US about to blindly march into yet another catastrophic war?
At least 3,250 children have been injured, with 1,240 needing specialised medical care, as of last week. Many have extensive burns and shrapnel wounds or have lost limbs. Yet hospitals and clinics that have been damaged or destroyed or are short of medical supplies – due to Israel’s siege – are unable to treat them… Read More What will the children who survive the onslaught of Gaza think of those who let it happen?
Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute – MAS – Year: 2023 Today, MAS issued the first edition of the “Economic Summary of the War on Gaza”, monitoring the comprehensively destructive approach adopted by the Israeli military forces in their war on the Gaza Strip. It focuses on Israeli policies and practices that affect the basics of human… Read More Making Gaza Unliveable: Economic dimensions of the war on the Gaza Strip according to international humanitarian law
Miranda Bryant in Reykjavík Tens of thousands of women and non-binary people across Iceland, including the prime minister, are expected to stop work – both paid and unpaid – on Tuesday in the first strike of its kind in nearly half a century. Organisers hope the women’s strike – whose confirmed participants include fishing industry workers, teachers,… Read More Iceland’s first full-day women’s strike in 48 years aims to close pay gap
By Alaa Elassar, CNN As Rabbi Alissa Wise scrolls through social media, her feed is littered with videos of dead Palestinian children, parents holding their lifeless bodies with screams caught in their throats and eyes sunken with grief. Like millions around the world, she has been haunted by the gruesome scenes flooding out of Gaza, where civilians… Read More ‘Not in our name’: Jewish peace activists across the US call for immediate ceasefire and justice for Palestinians
The confusion has been encouraged over decades by propagandistic journalism…. reporting that refers to the hostility in Israel / Palestine as being between “Jews and Arabs”: a total misnomer… there are “Arab” members of the Jewish faith and Jews who oppose the Zionist project of a “Jewish state” of Israel… Unions should argue for the… Read More Gaza, trades unions, fascism & oppression
There is something about the pro-Palestine anger that isn’t really about Palestine at all, but what the entire state of the Palestinians represents. The protests are increasingly an immersive cathartic state of mourning for all the losses that many have to reconcile themselves with; the weakness and lack of solidarity and compact between a large… Read More As Gaza is bombed and starved, the Arab world watches a relentless injustice
NB: I am not an admirer of the Saudi regime, which I believe to be a brutal pseudo-religious despotism; but I appreciate this statement by their former intelligence chief. I couldn’t agree with him more. On the West’s shameless hypocrisy and double standards; their irredeemable racism and practice of collective vengeance on subjugated peoples; the… Read More Saudi prince slams Hamas, Israel with India praise: ‘Prefer civil disobedience’
After the truth-shower 